Category Archives: Announcements

The Ergativity/Fieldwork Lab will be meeting on Monday, 11/21, from 12-1pm in room 002.

Jessica Coon will be presenting her FAMLi4 talk, titled “Building roots in Chuj and Ch’ol”.

Abstract:

In this talk I examine verb-stem forming morphology in two Mayan languages: Chuj and Ch’ol. I show how the inventory of v/Voice heads has an effect on the available types of verbs in each language. Specifically, I investigate the division of labor between the root and functional heads, arguing that roots are not entirely acategorical, but must come minimally with information about whether they assign a thematic role to an internal argument.

Recommended reading is Coon (2016), “Unergatives, antipassives, and roots in Chuj”.

The Ergativity/Fieldwork Lab will be meeting on Monday, 11/14, from 12-1pm in room 002.

Martha Schwarz will be presenting “Ergative in Hindi/Urdu: Reconciling the perfective oblique and the heavy imperfective analysis”, by Raghavachari Amritavalli.

The Fieldwork Lab will be meeting on Monday, 11/7, from 12-1pm in room 002.

Richard Compton, Lisa Travis, and Jessica Coon will discuss important first steps in every fieldwork project, such as recruiting consultants, the REB, and consent forms. Recommended reading is Bowern (2008) Chapter 11, “Ethical Field Research”.

Welcome back!

This semester, the Fieldwork Lab and the Ergativity Lab will be having joint weekly meetings on Mondays from 12-1pm in room 002. Information will also be posted here, as well as on McLing. All are welcome!

At this week’s meeting, Mikael Vinka will be presenting on Saami.

Abstract:

This presentation will bring up two themes. On the one hand, when working with an endangered indigenous language like South Saami, it is not uncommon to encounter disparities in grammaticality judgments among L1 speakers. At least some of these inconsistencies are probably best viewed as heritage speaker effects. I will illustrate the issue with data on VP anaphora in South Saami.

The second theme deals with training L1 speaking elders in language documentation. The elders have mastered transcription programs such as ELAN and PRAAT. 45 audio transcription of spoken South Saami are published at http://digitaltmuseum.no/search?page=2&type_filter=Audio&query=saemien%20sijte, as a result of efforts in the local community.

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If you have any questions, or want to be added to the Fieldwork Lab email list, please contact me (Lydia) at lydia.felice@mail.mcgill.ca. I am the lab organizer this semester, and I would love to hear from you!