[click on title to view abstract of talk (if available)]
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September - December 2012

September 26
James Crippen
Unicode and digital text representation for linguists.
Time: 12:15-1:45
Location: TFS 103
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October 10
Patrick Littell
NACLO Introduction: Composing Problems for High-School Linguistics Olympiads
Time: 12:15-1:45
Location: TFS 103
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October 17
Natalie Weber
Lexical prominence in Blackfoot roots. (Practice talk for the 44th Annual Algonquian Conference)
Time: 12:15-1:45
Location: TFS 103
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November 7
Colleen Fitzgerald (Professor of Linguistics Department of Linguistics & TESOL The University of Texas a Arlington)
Methodologies and Elicitation Techniques for Prosodic Documentation
Time: 12:15-1:15
Location: Buchanan Building D 323
(Note time and place. This talk is part of the First Nations Languages Program Lecture Series on Endangered Language Documentation & Revitalization)
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November 14
Frederick Newmeyer
Parentheticals and the Grammar of Complementation
Time: 12:15-1:45
Location: TFS 103
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November 21
Molly Babel
Undoing what’s been done: Mergers and phonetic accommodation
Time: 12:15-1:45
Location: TFS 103
Abstract: Mergers are a type of sound change that involves the elimination of a contrast between two formerly phonemic distributions. In speech communities undergoing mergers, individuals‘ systems may be at various stages of mergedness in production. In addition, individuals within a community vary in terms of being able to perceptually distinguish the contrast. This talk explores the flexibility of speakers' representations of merged sounds through a spontaneous phonetic accommodation paradigm. I describe an experiment in which speakers of New Zealand English, a dialect undergoing a merger of the vowels in NEAR/SQUARE lexical sets, completed an auditory naming task where they produced words in response to productions from an unmerged speaker of Australian English. Phonetic accommodation was measured using both a perceptual similarity task and acoustic measurements. The results indicate that speakers who were less merged in baseline productions were able to further unmerge in response to the Australian model. The degree to which New Zealanders accommodated to the Australian model was also affected by individuals' social biases toward Australia. The results suggest that the degree of merger can be lessened when exposed to an unmerged model, but that those who are more fully merged do not unmerge spontaneously. These findings also underscore the role of social preferences in the mapping of perception to production. .

November 28
Meagan Louie
"Evidence and Consequences for a Stative/Eventive Distinction in Blackfoot's Modal Domain"
Time: 12:15-1:45
Location: TFS 103
Abstract: Dunham (2008) and Reis Silva & Matthewson (2008) propose that temporal interpretation in Blackfoot is driven by the stative/eventive distinction. Where the aforementioned research focuses on the temporal orientation of non-modal assertions, I claim that this distinction likewise holds for temporal perspective (cf. Condoravdi 2002) in Blackfoot's modal domain - i.e., some Blackfoot modals pattern as if they are stative, whereas others pattern as if they are eventive.

I then show that there are reflexes of the modal stative/eventive distinction in other parts of the Blackfoot grammar (namely, in the form of temporal restrictions on conditional constructions). In accounting for these patterns of temporal interpretation, however, the semantic component of Blackfoot grammar needs to contrast not only a null past/present distinction, but also a null perfective/prospective distinction. I propose that strict restrictions encoded in Blackfoot's ontology allow for such a profligate use of absent/null temporal morphology, without sacrificing clarity in terms of temporal interpretation. .

January - May 2012

January 18
Vera Hohaus
Context Dependency and the Semantics of the Positive in Samoan
Time: 12:15-1:45
Location: TFS 103

January 25
James Crippen
Some properties of relative clauses in Tlingit
Time: 12:15-1:45
Location: TFS 103

February 1
Lisa Cheng (Leiden University)
Mapping phonology to syntax: Evidence from two Bantu languages
Time: 12:15-1:45
Location: TFS 103

February 29
Carmela Toews
Everything I Know About Siamou Perfectives and Imperfectives.
Time: 12:15-1:45
Location: TFS 103
Abstract: I give an overview of the perfective and imperfective in Siamou, discussing phonological form, syntactic position (briefly), and meaning. I argue that the perfective is a low-tone suffix and that the imperfective is a mid-tone nasal suffix. I consider the possibility that perfective and imperfective aspect are syntactically lower than other aspects in Siamou. I show that the Siamou perfective and imperfective generally fit with cross-linguistic patterns for these aspects, including, for example, culmination entailments, but likely differ from other languages with regard to stative verbs.

March 21
Gitksan Research Group
Research on Gitksan at UBC
Time: 12:15-1:45
Location: TFS 103 Abstract: In this talk we present an overview of our current and planned research on Gitksan (Tsimshianic). We briefly present our projects on consonant-vowel interactions, ejectives, noun modification, focus, rhythm, and plurals in the language. We also present one of the traditional legends we have collected and analyzed.

March 28
Heather Bliss
Title: Argument expressions, argument structure, and argument licensing: A proposal for Blackfoot
Time: 12:15-1:45
Location: TFS 103
Abstract: In this talk, I sketch out a proposal for Blackfoot’s “non-configurational” properties that takes one step further the insight of the Pronominal Argument Hypothesis (cf. Jelinek 1984, Baker 1991) that there can be a disconnect between argument expressions on the one hand and argument structure and licensing on the other. Specifically, I propose that, argument expressions do not function as concerted units to satisfy argument structure and licensing requirements in the clause. Rather, they span across the various syntactic domains in the clausal spine, with NPs satisfying argument structure requirements in the thematic domain (vP layer), and Determiners (or other nominal heads) satisfying argument licensing requirements in the grammatical domain (IP layer). These pieces of nominal expressions may be composed in the discourse domain (CP layer) where they are linearized and satisfy information structural requirements. Under this model, all grammatical arguments are external arguments, licensed vP-externally. I propose that they are introduced via a generalized Voice head (akin to an Applicative head) that, in principle, can select for any verbal functional category (e..g CP, IP, AspP, vP). Further, I propose that Blackfoot’s verb agreement and other argument-licensing morphology instantiates these Voice heads at different levels in the clausal spine.

April 4
Field Methods Class Presentations
Time: 12:15-1:45
Location: TFS 103