BA student Douglas Gordon presented at the seventh Ottawa Conference for Linguistics Undergraduates (OCLU) December 4th and 5th. His talk was based on ongoing work on Mi’gmaq, and titled “Asymmetric coordination in Mi’gmaq”.
Douglas Gordon at OCLU
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Mayan presentations at CILLA
Jessica Coon and BA Honours student Cora Lesure recently traveled to the University of Texas at Austin for the 7th Conference on Indigenous Languages of Latin America (CILLA). The title of Jessica’s talk was “Inergativos, antipasivos y la categorización de raíces: Evidencia en Chuj.” Cora is presenting collaborative research with recent Postdoc Lauren Clemens (SUNY Albany): “An investigation of the acoustic correlates of prosodic phrasing in Chol.” This work will form part of Cora’s BA Honours thesis.
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Erlewine & Kotek on wh-quantification in Tibetan
Michael Erlewine (Singapore) and Hadas Kotek (McGill) recently presented their work on Dharamsala Tibetan at the 37th International Conference of the Linguistic Society of India (ICOLSI-37) at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India. The title of their talk, which grew out of work with Tashi Wangyal here at McGill, is ‘Wh-quantification in Dharamsala Tibetan’. An abstract and slides are available here.
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Mayan presentations at NELS 46
There were two presentations at this year’s NELS 46 involving work on Mayan by current and former Fieldwork Lab members.
- Robert Henderson (Arizona) & Jessica Coon (McGill) – ‘When adverbs embed clauses: An explanation of variability in Kaqchikel Agent Focus’ [handout]
- Hadas Kotek (McGill), Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (U. Singapore) – ‘Unifying Definite and indefinite free relatives: Evidence from Mayan’ [manuscript]
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Tibetan presentation at ICSTLL
McGill BA student Nadia Famularo, recent graduate Madeleine Mees, and Tibetan consultant Tashi Wangyal, traveled to UC Santa Barbara last week to present collaborative work at ICSTLL: The International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics. The work grew out of the 2014 Field Methods class on Tibetan. The title of their talk was “Ergative marking in Dharamsala Tibetan”.
Maddie, Nadia, and Tashi, between conference talks
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Louisa Bielig’s BA thesis on Chuj topic constructions
Louisa Bielig’s 2015 BA Honours thesis, “Classifiers and constraints in Chuj topic constructions”, is now available for download here: [PDF]. Louisa finished her BA in 2015 and was awarded McGill’s Cremona Memorial Prize in linguistics for her research on Chuj.
Abstract: Like many other Mayan languages, Chuj, a language of the Q’anjob’alan branch, exhibits syntactic ergativity in the form of an extraction asymmetry. The A’-extraction of transitive subjects (ergative arguments) requires the use of a special construction, known as Agent Focus. However, preverbal ergative subjects without Agent Focus are permitted in topic constructions, where a corresponding nominal classifier, which I refer to as a resumptive classifier, appears post-verbally. Transitive and intransitive preverbal subjects can appear as topics with resumptive classifiers, while preverbal object topics are strongly dispreferred.
In this paper I propose that the preverbal subject in this construction has not been fronted, as is the case in Agent Focus. I argue that it has instead been base-generated in an external topic position and is co-indexed with the resumptive classifier below, following Aissen’s (1992) account of Tsotsil and Popti’ (Jakaltek) external topics. I will employ Aissen’s diagnostics and other tests to show that these topics are not compatible with a movement account, supporting the high base generation analysis. Subsequently, I will present two constraints on the external topic construction, which explain the strong dispreference of object topics.
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Lizzie Carolan’s Chuj presentation now online!
Lizzie Carolan (McGill BA ’14 and current RA) presented her work on Chuj at last year’s VocUM conference at Université de Montréal, a “colloque multidisciplinaire en traduction, linguistique, litteìratures et langues modernes.” Her talk was titled “An exploration of tense in Chuj” and is based on her ongoing work with Magdalena Torres here at McGill. It can now be viewed online here.
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Michael Hamilton’s dissertation defense
Congratulations to Mike Hamilton, who successfully defended his dissertation, “The syntax of Mi’gmaq: A configurational account” this past Monday. Mike begins a Mellon Postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell University this fall. Mike has been an active member of the Mi’gmaq Research Partnership since it began in 2011.
Mike joins the “recently defended” side of the picture board
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3rd Annual Mi’gmaq Summer Language Workshop
This year’s Summer Language Workshop was a huge success, thanks to a great organizing committee, guest speakers, and interactive booths. Nice work everyone!
Organizing Committee: Diamond, Shoshana, Lola, Maddie, and Carol
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Chuj project training underway
Collaborator Pedro Mateo Pedro has begun training Chuj speakers to record and transcribe Chuj narratives in Guatemala. This project is a joint project between McGill and Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, supported by a SSHRC Connection Grant.
Chuj project trainees recording a narrative
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