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Katherine Strong and I were invited to give the Early Career Pleneary talk titled "Sociophonetic variation in the South Fly: Evidence from Ende" at the University of Oslo for the Austronesian and Papuan Languages and Linguistics conference.
Slides/handout are below:
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I gave a talk on capturing breadth and depth in the documentation of Ende for the Austronesian and Papuan Languages and Linguistics conference this summer. Slides are below.
I am honored to have received the Language Legacies Award from the Endangered Language Foundation to continue my work documenting the Pahoturi River language family. This award will go towards jumpstarting documentation of Kawam.
I recently gave a talk titled 'The importance of language learning and intercultural literacy" at St. Mark's School.
Slides/handout are below: Christian Brickhouse and I gave a poster at the LSA this year on the phonetics/phonology interface by looking at Ende field date.
Recently, I had the opportunity to give a talk with Eri Kashima, Dineke Schokkin and Katherine Strong at the Current Trends in Papuan Linguistics. The slides are here.
Invited Talk: Papua New Guinea, a proposal for collaboration @ Tertulia Junior Faculty Colloquia10/16/2019
Program: Tertulia Junior Faculty Colloquia
Title: Papua New Guinea: A proposal for collaboration Slides: here. Papua New Guinea is a linguistic paradise boasting at least 850 diverse languages in an area the size of California. Though field linguists, anthropologists, and biologists have flocked to PNG for decades to explore its beauty, the southern region of the country is still relatively undocumented. In this talk, I will illuminate some fascinating aspects of language and life in Southern New Guinea, focusing on the area where Ende is spoken, the language about which I wrote my dissertation. I will show some photos, maps, and videos and try to convince some of you to collaborate with me in this exciting field. This talk was given by Katherine Strong (UHM) and represents collaborative research led by Strong and assisted by myself and Katie Drager (UHM).
Linking prestige with power: Gender, oration, and variable affrication in Ende Women tend to use standard variants more than men (Labov, 1990), possibly to access symbolic power when traditional avenues to power are unavailable (Eckert, 1989:256). We present results from a study examining variable affrication of retroflex obstruents (ʈ͡ʂ)~(ʈ) and (ɖ͡ʐ)~(ɖ) in Ende, a language spoken in Papua New Guinea. Despite no written standard, Ende speakers have strong opinions on what constitutes “good” Ende. Men, older speakers, and community orators hold positions of prestige. A variationist analysis of the speech of 16 Ende speakers demonstrates that the variable is more likely to be realized as a stop when produced by orators. Among the orators, older speakers and women are more likely to produce tokens as stops compared with younger speakers and men. We argue both that the observed patterns arise because the stopped variants are linked with power and that women orators use the variants to assert symbolic power. with Danielle Barth, Dineke Schokkin, James Stanford, and Catherine Travis
Google Group: here. Workshop slides: here. Variation off the beaten track: Expanding our understanding of social structures In recent years, there has been an increased interest in the intersection of documentary linguistics and sociolinguistics. This means that more and more sociolinguistic work is being done with non-Western communities, and more documentary linguists are incorporating variation and sociolinguistic patterning into their grammar writing and documentation. In this workshop, we share our experiences of analyzing linguistic variation in under-documented languages, while trying to understand the effects of social structures both familiar and unfamiliar in Western communities as they play out in surprising ways. We present case studies from Papua New Guinea, China, and Vanuatu. How can we understand an under-studied social variable such as clan and how it interacts with community contact, alliances, social networks, and obligations? How might we reconceptualize age as a variable, which may have differing meaningful divisions from culture to culture, and may vary in the role it plays in innovation and diffusion? We discuss some specific problems we have faced, which are not necessarily exclusive to those working in “exotic” locations, such as: difficulties in interpreting variation due to lack of anthropological and ethnographic background, data sparsity, the transcription bottleneck, unbalanced sampling, and challenges in reconciling variation and abstraction in describing linguistic structures. This workshop is aimed at both documentary linguists who are interested in looking at sociolinguistic variation in the languages they are working with, and at sociolinguists who have encountered similar issues in their own research. We present some of our solutions and will have a portion of the workshop dedicated to discussion with workshop participants for sharing their ideas and experience. As of September 1, I am officially a faculty member in the Linguistics department at Boston University. I have received a very warm welcome, both by the BU administration and other junior faculty at the orientations, and by my wonderful colleagues in the Linguistics department. I am very excited for what is to come!
My dissertation has been submitted!
The link to my dissertation is here: https://www.proquest.com/docview/2467838314 Melbourne! We love you! What a wonderful visit to a wonderful, wonderful city! We loved (1) the coffee and cafés, (2) the street art, (3) the penguins!! and kangaroos and wombats and koalas, (4) the (vegan!) food!!, (5) the neighborhoods, (6) the bars and nightlife, (7) the FUNKY architecture, (8) the people!, (9) the bookstores and libraries, (10) the galleries and parks. Everything everything!
Invited talk: Exploring phonetic variation and change in understudied languages @ Uni Melbourne7/8/2019
I had a blast chatting with the linguists at University of Melbourne about identifying and analyzing variation in minority languages while showcasing exciting work on Ende by Katherine Strong and Christian Brickhouse! It's so enriching having other people look at Ende data with their own expertise and curiosity.
Slides and slide notes Nick Evans, Dineke Schokkin, and I presented our work in reconstructing the phoneme inventory of proto-Pahoturi River. This presentation focused on the reconstruction of the liquids. Although there are at most three liquids in each PR language, there are five distinct correspondence sets across the family.
Slides What a thrill to defend my dissertation in front of so many of my advisors, friends, and family! Abstract: In this work, I expand Zoll’s (1996) analysis of subsegmental phenomena to address the fact that her uniform treatment of ghost elements cannot account for a key behavioral property: the default realizational state of the ghost element (Zimmermann 2018). This property subclassifies ghost elements into two groups: those that are preferentially realized unless they violate markedness and those that are preferentially deleted unless they repair markedness. I call these martyr and hero ghosts, respectively. In Optimality Theory, presence and absence of phonological elements in the output is regulated by ranked and violable constraints. If a constraint that penalizes non-realization of a phonological element is ranked higher than a constraint that penalizes realization, then the optimal output will not include the element. This is the necessary constraint ranking for a ghost element that exhibits martyr-type behavior. The opposite ranking generates hero-type behavior. If ghost elements are represented uniformly as subsegments as Zoll (1996) proposes, then we predict only two types of languages: one in which all ghost elements are martyrs and one in which all ghost elements are heroes. This theoretical typology undergenerates the empirically observed typology of phonological patterns. Ende (Pahoturi River) exhibits two types of ghost elements: floating nasals, a martyr ghost, and infinitival reduplication, a hero ghost. I propose a representational distinction that splits ghost elements into two subsegmental types: those that are specified for their melodic features and those that are specified for their skeletal or structural features. This engenders faithfulness constraints which can be ranked with respect to one another to indicate a language’s preference to realize or not realize melodic or skeletal subsegments, predicting four types of languages, including Ende. This work provides analyses of both ghost elements in Ende and other languages with multiple ghost elements, including Chaha, Yowlumne, and Welsh. I also provide the first descriptive analyses of the phonotactics, phonology, and morphology of Ende and introduce the basic typological profile for the language and the language family. I had a lovely time at PHREND (PHonology Research weekEND) 2019, which was held at UC Berkeley this year. I presented the briefest of snapshots of my dissertation work and enjoyed hearing more about the development of Q Theory in Panãra (Myriam Lapierre, Martha Schwarz, Karee Garvin, Sharon Inkelas) and catching up with Emily Grabowski and learning about tone in Coatlán-Loxicha Zapotec. Cherry on the top of this conference was catching a beautiful sunset over the city and both bay bridges from Larry Hyman's gorgeous home in the Berkeley hills. Ghost elements in Ende phonology
Kate L. Lindsey (Stanford University) Ende phonology exhibits several phenomena where partially underspecified segments seem to appear and disappear at the service of phonotactics, much like yers in Slavic. Following Zoll (1996) and Kiparsky (2003), I call such elements ghosts. I will present two types of ghosts in Ende and show how the interaction of these two patterns informs formal theories on the representation of underspecification in the input. Ende floating nasals demonstrate alignment of an underspecified nasal segment to the leftmost non-initial obstruent in the word, much like how stress and affixes may be aligned to left or right edges of stems or feet (McCarthy & Prince 1993) or how tone patterns may spread to adjacent tone-bearing units. A phonotactic analysis of the Ende dictionary and corpus reveals that prenasalization is a contrastive feature of morphemes, much like nasalization in Máíhɨ̃ki (Sylak-Glassman 2013). Ende phonotactic reduplication displays semantically vacuous copying of segmental structure to repair verb roots that violate a phonotactic constraint on word minimality. Monosyllabic verb roots reduplicate in isolated forms, but multisyllabic verb roots do not. Curiously, morphological structure also seems to play a role. Representing both ghost elements as subsegments in the input allows for straightforward constraint-based analyses of the phenomena independently. However, when the two ghost patterns co-occur in the same word, a ranking paradox arises. This puzzle is solved if the two types of ghost elements are represented distinctly in the input. Is Ende reduplication phonological copying or morphological doubling? Ende infinitival verbs are an interesting puzzle for the Dual Theory of reduplication (Inkelas 2008), which distinguishes phonological and morphological doubling as formally and functionally distinct phenomena. In Ende, infinitival reduplication is sensitive to phonological structure (monosyllabic verb roots reduplicate, multisyllabic verb roots do not reduplicate) and to morphological structure (monomorphemic verb roots reduplicate, multimorphemic verb roots do not). The shape of the reduplicant may be phonologically-determined (CV template, TETU patterns) or morphologically-determined (total reduplication, no TETU patterns). In this talk, I will contrast the two potential analyses, showing that neither a strictly phonological nor a strictly morphological analysis can account for all the data, and suggest an alternative mixed approach. Inkelas, S. (2008). The dual theory of reduplication. Linguistics, 46, 351–402. CLICK THIS POST TO SEE HANDOUT Thrilled to share the news that I just accepted a position in Boston University's Department of Linguistics for this Fallǃ I will be teaching phonology and fieldwork and continuing my research in southern Papua New Guinea, hopefully with some BU graduate students joining in on the fun. I'm so grateful for all the support from my friends and family this past year <3
Excited to discuss new collaborative work with Katherine Strong and Katie Drager (UH Manoa) on sociolinguistic variation in Ende retroflex affrication at Stanford's weekly Sociolunch.
It was a fun experience to be interviewed for an in-flight magazine after reading so many of them over the years! This article came out in their January-February edition on all Air Niugini flights.
Abstract summary: Following Schokkin's (2018) work on linguistic and age effects on final /n/-realization in Idi verbs, this paper presents a matched study of the same variation in related Ende. The findings show that the pattern is not as simple as /n/-elision or /n/-addition, but rather that the youngest and oldest speakers are eliding /n/ (e.g. da instead of dan) and young women are adding /n/ (e.g. danən instead of dan). This work expands what is known about the Pahoturi River language family and contributes to the study of sociolingusitic variation in minority languages.
Abstract: To what extent can the results of variation studies in large-scale speech communities be extended to small-scale speech communities? Many sociolinguistic differences would lead us to reject the "uniformitarian principle" that allows us to extrapolate across space and time (Labov 1972), for example: rates of linguistic change, rates and types of multilingualism, and conditions of language acquisition are all different between WEIRD and small-scale societies like in southern New Guinea. In this talk, I will discuss how I planned, collected, analyzed, and interpreted a sociolinguistically annotated corpus of Ende, a Pahoturi River language of southern New Guinea, taking into account the unique characteristics of this community. Together, we can discuss the advantages and difficulties for engaging in this type of research in small-scale speech communities.
Phonological Variation and Gradient Representation
This Friday, I would like to discuss two topics with the P-interest group. For the first half of our meeting, I will discuss a phonological variable relevant to my dissertation: verb-final /n/-realization in Ende. I will discuss my methods and preliminary findings. Then, I will present a recent paper (Smolensky & Goldrick 2016) on the use of Gradient Symbolic Representations (GSR) to model French liaison consonant realization. The big take-away from this paper is that a symbol in the input can be gradient in its degree of presence in the input (i.e., partially present), such that it incurs a partial violation of Dep to be realized and a partial violation of Max to not be realized. My hope is that we can discuss the advantages and disadvantages of introducing gradience in the input of phonological grammars in order to account for idiosyncratic patterns in languages like French and Ende.
Giving native speakers a voice improves linguistic data collection. In this talk, Kate Lindsey will detail the ways in which actively engaging native speakers in the linguistic exploration of the Ende language resulted in better research outcomes for her doctoral work on phonological variation in the Ende verb. This half-hour presentation will be followed by the screening of a short film, which is the culmination of collaboration between Ende community members, who directed and narrated the auto-documentary, and Lindsey, who provided technical training during an eight-week class.
The movie shows life as it was in southern Papua New Guinea before Christianity and how it all changed when two missionaries came from up river, and sent two Ende couples to bible school in the late 50s. They returned three years later as the first Ende pastors. The movie talks about the hardships they faced and how the arrival of Christianity came with the arrival of clothes, medicine, air strips, and schools. Ende Tän e Indrang is a unique ethnographic document as it details the cultural conversion of a little-known tribe from their own perspective. Film: Ende Tän e Indrang ‘Light into Ende Tribe’. Papua New Guinea, 30 mins. In Ende language with English subtitles.
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March 2022
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