TOOSARVANDANI GOES EAST

Maziar Toosarvandani, who is on research leave this Fall, filed this report:

I have been making regular trips to Mono Lake in eastern California to continue my work with speakers of Northern Paiute, an endangered Uto-Aztecan language. I have also done some traveling farther afield. Last week, I attended NELS 46 at Concordia University in Montreal, where I presented a poster on verb suppletion in Northern Paiute, using it to probe the locality conditions on vocabulary insertion in Distributed Morphology. In attendance were a couple of alumni: Robert Henderson (Arizona) gave a joint talk on “When adverbs embed clauses: An explanation of variability in Kaqchikel agent focus,” and Kyle Rawlins (Johns Hopkins) gave a joint talk called “Or what? Challenging the speaker”. I got a chance to chat with Idan Landau (Ben-Gurion University), who recalled spending a fun and productive year at Santa Cruz in 2009-2010 as an LRC Research Associate.

On my way to Montreal, I stopped off in Boston to see old colleagues and friends at MIT and to give a colloquium at BU. I talked about the process of durative gemination in Northern Paiute, which conveys an aspectual category of some kind. I located it within a typology of imperfective aspect, shedding light on certain unexpected uses of the imperfective in better-studied languages. The discussion period afterwards was very productive with a number of questions from alumnus Pete Alrenga, who is now an Assistant Professor there.