And next in our series of speakers from UCSD, the department welcomes Sharon Rose, expert on the languages of the Horn of Africa, who will be giving a colloquium today, 2 April, on “Phonologically-Conditioned Mobile Affixes? Evidence from Moro.” T’ena yəst’əlləññ!
All are welcome to the Greenberg Room at 3:30 for the talk. Here’s the abstract.
Affixes whose position varies within a word are termed ‘mobile affixes’. Some cases have been reported to be phonologically-conditioned (Afar: Fulmer 1991, Rucart 2008 and Huave: Noyer 1994, Kim 2008), but Paster (2006) has argued that phonologically-conditioned affixation is illusory, a position which allows for a stricter conception of the morphology-phonology interface. In this talk, we explore a case of mobile affixation in Thetogovela Moro, a Kordofanian language of Sudan, in which identical object markers (OM) appear as either prefixes or suffixes on the verb stem. High toned OMs appear as prefixes in some aspect/mood/directional forms, but as suffixes in other forms. We explore whether a phonological account of these facts based on the tone patterns of the verb forms is preferable to one based on the morphosyntactic properties of the forms, and argue that the system is, in part, phonologically-driven. High-toned OMs appear as prefixes on verb stems which require H tone left-aligned with the verb stem, but appear as suffixes on verb stems with other tone patterns, cross-cutting the aspect/directional dimension. The single low-toned OM is always a suffix, a fact unexplained by a morphological account. We compare the Moro case to the case of Afar, and show that Afar has lexical exceptions and is in the process of shifting to a suffixing system. Nevertheless, it still shows hallmarks of a phonologically-driven system, and cannot be dismissed outright.
Roger Levy (2005 Stanford Linguistics PhD, now Assistant Professor at UCSD) visited the SPLaT group yesterday (April 1) to talk about his research on sentence comprehension. His title was ‘Uncertain input in rational human sentence comprehension’. Organizers Chigusa, Middy, and Tania assured everyone that this was note an April Fool’s joke — "He is ACTUALLY coming. And it’s real Roger." We shall have seen!
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You’ve heard, perhaps, the gleeful news that Stanford will be hosting soon a confèrence on topics such as Metrics and Poetic Forms. The date is set for weekend next–be sure to be there, be our guest!
You can find all the information you need, including a program, here. Speakers are:
Bruce Hayes (UCLA): Maxent Grammars for the Metrics of Shakespeare and Milton
Russell Schuh (UCLA): Making Sense of Bole Folk Metrics
Lev Michael (Berkeley): Nanti karintaa: A Metrical Genre of Verbal Art from Amazonia
Kristin Hanson (Berkeley): Death and Catalexis
Chris Golston (CSU Fresno): Arrhythmia
Matthew Adams: Poetic Correspondence and the Welsh Cynghanedd Meter
Alex Jaker: Stress and Caesura in Dante
Ashwini Deo (Yale) and Paul Kiparsky: Poetries in Contact: The Encounter of Perso-Arabic and Sanskritic Meters in Urdu Poetry
Stephanie Shih: Corpus and computational tools for generative metrics
See you there!
An interesting homophone was spotted recently in an AT&T store. There are a number of possible interpretations, and several layers of pun in store.
And there are more! Read about it here.
Thanks Stephanie!
