Category: Faculty News

PulanSpeaks is a Guam-based YouTube-channel devoted to the creating and sharing of video discussions of cultural and political issues affecting Pacific island cultures and communities. It is hosted by Edward Leon Guerrero, who became a cultural and language activist as an undergraduate at the University of Guam. In the most recent installment of PulanSpeaks (April 15th), Guerrero hosted Professor Emerita Sandy Chung in a discussion of her career-long commitment to the study of the Chamorro language (or Chamoru as it is known in Guam), and of the character, origin, and history of the language. They also consider the issues that the language currently faces in the Mariana Islands, and the history of her own involvement with the language and its communities. 

This past Friday, Professor Maziar Toosarvandani gave a colloquium in the Department of Linguistics at UCLA. His talk on “Representing animacy in the grammar”, reported some recent results relating to the ongoing NSF funded project on animacy and resumption. The abstract for his talk is below:

We are used to thinking about person, number, and gender as features to which the grammar is sensitive. But the place of animacy is less familiar, despite its robust syntactic activity in many languages. I investigate the pronominal system of Southeastern Sierra Zapotec, identifying an interpretive parallel between animacy and person. Third person plural pronouns, which encode a four-way animacy distinction in the language, exhibit a cluster of interpretive properties I call “associativity”; these have been argued also to characterize first and second person plural pronouns. Building on Kratzer’s (2009) and Harbour’s (2016) theories of person, I propose a plurality-based semantics for animacy that captures their shared properties. The compositional mechanism underlying this semantics ties person and animacy features to a single syntactic position inside the noun phrase. This enables an understanding of these features’ shared relevance to syntactic operations, including those underlying pronoun cliticization.

While down south, Maziar had the opportunity to catch up with fellow Oto-Mangueanist Ben Eischens (PhD, 2022), who is now on the linguistics faculty at UCLA.

Professors Junko Ito and Armin Mester recently returned, in February, from a safari tour. They had the following report to share with the WHASC Editor:

After a grueling 20-hour flight to Johannesburg, South Africa, we started our three-week African tour, staying in safari camps in Zimbabwe, Zambia and Botswana. Spectacular game-viewing drives on jeeps — exhilarating scenery and closeby roaming wildlife (elephants, giraffes, lions, etc.).  One of the highlights was a boat expedition on the Zambezi river, with Victoria Falls on the horizon, where several hippos decided to chase our boat. We managed to do some field work with one of our safari guides, who was a speaker of Ndebele, a Bantu click language.  We were fortunate in coming across a small herd of endangered white rhinos — which turned out not to be “white” at all, but “wide-mouthed” (vs. the “pointed-mouth black rhinos”)  — a curious linguistic misinterpretation (and resulting misnomer) amongst the Dutch and English settlers in South Africa. Yes, final devoicing can have real-life consequences!

Professor Junko Ito encounters a lion

In November, Professor Rachel Walker gave a talk at UC Berkeley on “Gestural organization and quantity in English rhotic-final rhymes,” in the Phorum talk series. The abstract for her talk can be found below.

“In phonological structure, the segment root node is classically the locus of temporal organization for subsegmental units, such as features, governing their sequencing and overlap (e.g. Clements 1985, Sagey 1986). Root nodes also classically figure in the calculation of weight-by-position, by which coda consonants are assigned a mora (Hayes 1989). In this talk, I discuss evidence that motivates encoding temporal relations directly among subsegmental elements, represented phonologically as gestures (Browman & Goldstein 1986, 1989). A case study of phonotactics in syllable rhymes of American English, supported by a real-time MRI study of speech articulation, provides evidence for a controlled sequence of articulations in coda liquids. This study finds support for phonological representations that include 1) sequencing of subsegments within a segment (within a liquid consonant), and 2) cross-segment partial overlap (between a liquid and preceding vowel). Further, the assignment of weight in the rhyme is sensitive to these configurations. To accommodate such scenarios, it is proposed that segments are represented as sets of gestures without a root node (Walker 2017, Smith 2018) with a requisite component of temporal coordination at the subsegmental level. A revised version of weight-by-position is proposed that operates over subsegmental temporal structure. By contrast, the scenarios motivated by the phonotactics of rhymes with coda liquids are problematic for a theory in which sequencing is controlled at the level of root nodes.”