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NAAHoLS Abstracts (San Francisco,
2009)
Mark Amsler (University of Auckland)
Pickering’s Eliot: Retexting the American
origins of comparative philology
Long out of print, Eliot’s The Indian Grammar
Begun: or, An essay to bring the Indian language into rules (1666) was
republished by John Pickering and Peter Stephen Duponceau (1822), with
extensive notes and commentary. These scholars promoted an “American”
linguistics, a new “comparative philology” rivaling German scholarship
and relying on the linguistic fieldwork of Moravian missionaries.
Pickering and Duponceau displaced Eliot’s religio-linguistic program and
“retexted” his Grammar as a new, American origin for comparative philology.
They used Eliot’s Grammar to demonstrate that American Indian languages
were fundamental for an adequate language typology and comparative grammar.
David Boe (Northern Michigan University)
Pinker’s epistemological pentarchy
In 2007, the Harvard cognitive scientist Stephen
Pinker (b. 1954) published The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into
Human Nature, a work devoted mainly to semantics and pragmatics.
In its preface, Pinker states that this book represents the culmination
of two separate “trilogies” of texts, one concerning language and mind,
and the other concerning human nature more broadly. As will be discussed
in this presentation, these five books, intended for an educated non-specialist
audience, represent a coherent body of work, and furthermore, find a final
synthesis in the epistemological writings of the philosopher Immanuel Kant
(1724-1804).
Wallace Chafe (UC-Santa Barbara)
Linguistic contributions to knowledge of the
Seneca language
Work with the Seneca language both mirrors and
contrasts with other Native American linguistic endeavors. The earliest
known document devoted to that language is the dictionary compiled by the
Jesuit missionary Julien Garnier between 1671 and 1709. After
an eighteenth century hiatus, the nineteenth century saw relatively accurate
grammatical descriptions by the protestant missionary Asher Wright, followed
by culturally important and well-recorded indigenous texts by J. N. B.
Hewitt. Modern linguistic work began with preliminary descriptions
by Carl Voegelin, William Preston, and Nils Holmer. The subsequent
extensive work of Chafe has benefited from collaboration by members of
contemporary Seneca communities.
Stuart Davis (Indiana University)
Duponceau’s English Phonology of 1817 from
a contemporary perspective
Peter Duponceau’s “English Phonology: or, An Essay
towards an Analysis and Description of the component sounds of the English
Language” appeared in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society
in 1818. Duponceau’s paper is fascinating in that it is certainly
the earliest American work that defines the nature of phonology and gives
direction for what “phonologists” [his term] are to do. Further,
Duponceau describes English sounds in a way that provides a specific phonological
view on matters that are controversial in contemporary English phonology.
In this presentation, I discuss Duponceau’s conception of phonology and
his perspective on issues of English phonological analysis.
Hope C. Dawson (Ohio State University)
Brian D. Joseph (Ohio State University)
So, who’s really been in charge? A look at
Language’s editorial structure(s)
The standard picture of Language’s editorial history
records six editors since its founding in 1925. A careful look at
the journal’s various editorial structures, however, suggests that this,
while accurate, is not the whole story. For instance, an LSA Committee
on Publications was in charge at first, whereas now there is an editor
with several associate editors. We survey these different governing
structures for the journal over its 84 years, discussing the requirements
of the LSA constitution vis-à-vis Language, and compiling a roster
of all committee members and officially designated associate editors.
We thus offer a comprehensive picture of what has made Language “tick”
administratively throughout its existence.
Brian Fleming (Boston College)
A historiography of Waldensian Patouà
The Waldensian dialect of Occitan, spoken by a
group of pre-Reformation Protestants in Italy, as well as in Valdese, NC,
has been studied by various groups for centuries. In the early 20th
century, sociolinguists in Europe gathered the first important set of data
on spoken Waldensian in linguistic atlases, followed by a synchronic comparison
of the Valdese dialect in the US. Since then, a divergence seems
to have emerged in the goals of the study of Waldensian in Europe and the
US. This presentation examines the history of the study of Waldensian
as well as the causes and results of this dichotomy.
Shawn Gaffney (SUNY-Stony Brook)
Revisiting early Algonquian linguistics
The study of early Algonquian linguistics has
long been dominated by reference to John Eliot, and to a lesser extent,
some of his well-known peers. I will present some of the neglected
work and contributions of other participants in early North American and
Algonquian linguistics including bilingual natives and Englishmen, such
as John Sassamon, James Printer, and Experience Mayhew, and in particular,
Thomas Hariot. Though not a prolific writer, Hariot was perhaps the
first scholar and student of Algonquin, an early teacher of English, and
an early contributor to phonetics and the invention of a phonetic writing
system.
Richard D. Janda (Indiana University)
M. L. Wagner 1923 and “grammaticalization
of suffix function” as increased lexical content
Relatively soon after Meillet 1912 defined grammaticalisation
as “the progressive attribution of a grammatical role” to a formerly lexical
element, counterevidence to its alleged unidirectionali-ty appeared when
Max Leopold Wagner 1923 documented the progressive attribution of a lexical
role to a grammatical(ized) element — still calling this Grammatikalisation.
Wagner’s laconic note on “...Suffixfunktion in den iberoromanischen Sprachen”
argues that words like tramp-al ‘quagmire’ (from tramp-a ‘trap’) show Spanish
to have developed a “swamp-suffix” -al whose development progressed from
the bleached meanings of first ‘regarding’ and then “associated place”
to the much greater lexical content (real-world reference) of “swampy place”.
Marcin Kilarski (Adam Mickiewicz University)
On cultural patterns and grammatical gender
in Iroquoian and Algonquian
In this presentation, I examine the correlations
proposed between selected semantic and morphological properties of grammatical
gender in Iroquoian and Algonquian and cultural and social patterns, in
particular sex roles, in Iroquois society and the notion of power among
the Algonquians. The role of such non-linguistic criteria echoes
the view of linguistic structure as a reflection of culture, which has
characterized the description of Native American languages since the earliest
studies on Huron from the 1630s, and raises more general issues relevant
to morphological description.
Danilo Marcondes (Pontifícia Universidade
Católica do Rio de Janeiro)
“The diversity of men’s ingenuity”: Language
in José de Acosta’s Historia Natural y Moral de las Índias
Acosta’s Historia Natural y Moral de Las Índias
(1590) was the first scientific work about the New World after the realization
that Ancient natural science did not contribute towards the understanding
of that new reality. One of the challenges Europeans faced in the
New World was the understanding of the native languages which lead to a
doubt about the universality of human nature. The importance of accepting
the “diversity of men’s ingenuity” rather than adopting a general conception
of mankind is one of Acosta’s main conclusions. Language could only
be understood in relation to these new cultures.
Arika Okrent (Philadelphia, PA)
Loglan: The rise and fall (and rise again)
of the “logical language”
In the late fifties, a time of exciting developments
in computer programming languages, new approaches to the experimental study
of cognition, and fresh attention to the language/thought question, James
Cooke Brown created Loglan, an artificial language based on the rules of
modern logic and designed to test the "Whorf hypothesis." Though
the project got favorable attention at first, a combination of factors
-- including refinements in the science of language and cognition and Brown's
difficult personality -- led to its demise. It survives today under
a different name (a result of legal actions initiated by Brown against
his volunteers) and with a different, unscientific though interesting,
purpose.
Marc Pierce (University of Texas-Austin)
On the contributions of Ernst Ebbinghaus to
Gothic studies
Ernst Ebbinghaus (1926-1995) was one of the world's
foremost scholars of Gothic. Among other contributions to the field,
he prepared four of the later editions of Wilhelm Braune's Gotische Grammatik,
one of the standard handbooks of the language; continued the Bibliographica
Gotica originated by Fernand Mossé; and published a wide range of
articles on Gothic topics. This paper assesses his place in the history
of the field, first briefly reviewing Ebbinghaus' work on Gothic and then
examining its reception, with an eye to situating this work in its larger
historiographical context.
Nataliya Semchynska (Purdue University)
Andrij Biletsky’s language model
Biletsky’s model, developed in 1960s, represents
language as a holistic dynamic system consisting hierarchically of the
endosystems which in their turn consist of hyposystems. Relative
stability of language is provided by intrasystemic and intersystemic connections.
The intermediate diasystems do not have their own units, but use the ones
of the three main endosystems and provide functional intersystemic connections.
The extralingual part of this model includes anti-systems (kinetic, graphic,
percussive, etc.). Biletsky’s work represents an original linguistic
theory which takes into account the complexity and semiotic nature of language,
as well as its systematic and asystemic behavior.
Margaret Thomas (Boston College)
Names and pseudonyms in linguistic case studies:
A historical overview
This presentation explores conventions for the
use of pseudonyms in linguistic case studies during the 19-20th centuries.
Data derive from research on feral children; typically developing child
language learners; adults and children with unusual language profiles;
and animal language learning. The analysis uncovers instances of
birth names replacing pseudonyms and vice versa; birth names and pseudonyms
alternating to preserve meaningful distinctions; “pseudo-birth names” and
“real-life pseudonyms”; birth names achieving the character of pseudonyms
and vice versa. Linguists employ names and pseudonyms in case studies
to subtly and strategically define their positions vis-à-vis both
their objects of inquiry and their readers.
Toon Van Hal (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)
Terminology in early “precomparative” linguistics
This paper will concentrate on the linguistic
terminology used in Early Modern treatises on historical and comparative
linguistics. In the first part, a survey of terms designating (linguistic)
similarity, derivation, stability, and change will be carried out.
From these data, general conclusions will be drawn in the second part.
The paper will discuss to what extent the humanists exactly defined the
terminology applied in their works, and it will trace its often geographical
origin. Finally, it will focus upon some recurrent metaphors and
will formulate further research questions.
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