COLLOQUIUM FRIDAY
Cathryn Donohue
Linguistics Research Center Associate
Case licensing in four place predicates in Basque
Friday, October 29, 2004
5:00 p.m.
Cowell College Conference Room
Basque, an ergative isolate, has three structural cases but case doubling is not allowed. Adding a fourth argument, e.g. through causativizing a ditransitive verb, thus poses an interesting problem for case licensing: exactly one argument must be rendered oblique. Previous studies addressing these data have correctly modeled the morphological marking of these arguments. However, they have either neglected to correctly predict the structural status of all four arguments (Joppen and Wunderlich, 1995), or have done so stipulatively (Joppen-Hellwig, 2001). I present an analysis of these data within Optimality Theoretic Lexical Decomposition Grammar (OT-LDG) (Kiparsky 2001, Wunderlich 2001) which correctly captures the morphological and structural properties of each of the arguments. I conclude by presenting the typology of causee case-marking in four-place predicates predicted by the model and show how these predictions are borne out.
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COLLOQUIUM NEXT THURSDAY
Phonetics and Phonology of Kagoshima Japanese
Haruo Kubozono (Department of Linguistics, Kobe University)
THURSDAY, November 4, 2004
4:00 p.m.
Cowell Conference Room
This talk discusses major linguistic features of Kagoshima Japanese, a
southern dialect of Japanese that has an endangered prosodic system. It
begins with a brief summary of syntactic and morphological properties of the
dialect, including the yes/no and go/come distinctions. It will then
describe main phonological features of the dialect in comparison with those
of standard Tokyo Japanese. These features include the dominance of closed
syllables over open syllables, relatively high frequency of voiced geminates
such as /dd/ and /gg/, and the frequent appearance of obstruents in
word-final position. This will be followed by a sketch of prosodic features
with main focus on the peculiar use of a falling (not rising) tone for
questions and a mathematical rule of high tone shift. The final part of the
talk presents a rather detailed analysis of ongoing tonal/accentual changes
in Kagoshima Japanese. These changes seem to indicate how one prosodic
system 'perishes' in contact with a socially more dominant system.
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PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT LECTURE
Elisabeth Camp, Harvard Society of Fellows
"Metaphor and that Certain 'Je ne sais quoi' "
Wednesday, November 3, 2004
4:00 p.m.
Silverman Conference Room, Stevenson College
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THANKS
A big thank you to Anne Sturgeon for taking everyone's picture! The photographs of this good-looking group of linguists are on display in the glass case next to the LCR.
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New at the Rutgers Optimality Archive
Jaye Padgett and Marzena Zygis
"The evolution of sibilants in Polish and Russian"
   
http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?id=949
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GALANA
   
The University of Hawai'i at Manoa's Department of Linguistics and Department of Second Language Studies announce the inaugural conference of GALANA (Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America)
17-20 December 2004
Honolulu, Hawai'i
http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/galana
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Jorge Hankamer will be teaching a two unit Freshman Seminar on "Symbolic Systems" during winter quarter.
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Native Vietnamese speaker needed as a Translator/Transcriber for the Psychology Department.
Up to 10 hrs/wk; variable schedule
Job #04-10-26
http://jobs.ucsc.edu/
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Earn a Teaching Credential at UCSC - Informational Meeting
Wednesday, November 3, 2004
12:15-1:30 p.m.
Academic Resources Center (ARC), Room 216
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New in the LRC Library
Nanzan Linguistics
No. 1, March 2004
Published by the Center for Linguistics, Nanzan University, Japan
  
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