Category Archives: Publications

Faculty News, General Interest, Publications, Student News

Dr. William O’Grady and Ph.D candidate Sejung Yang help in publication of Jejueo language textbook

A sample page from the textbook. Courtesy of Sejung Yang.

Dr. William O’Grady and Ph.D candidate Sejung Yang, along with Dr. Changyong Yang from Jeju National University, have seen the first volume of their Jejueo textbook published on July 5, 2017. The textbook, written for Korean speakers, is the first of its kind for Jejueo, recognized by several international groups (including UNESCO, Endangered Language Group, and Ethnologue) as an independent language rather than a dialect of Korean.

The textbook is the first in a projected four-volume series. You can purchase the textbook from Kyobo (website in Korean).

For more information, including small previews of the book, please read the Center for Korean Studies article.

Faculty News, General Interest, Publications

Albert Schütz publishes paper about first Hawaiian primer

Professor Emeritus Al Schütz recently published a paper on the first Hawaiian primer in the journal Palapala:

Schütz, Albert J. 2017a. Reading between the lines: A closer look at the first Hawaiian
primer (1822). Palapala– He Puke Pai no ka ʻOlelo me ka Moʻolelo Hawaiʻi (A Journal
for Hawaiian Language and Literature) 1:1–29, 173–90.

This is related to the presentation he gave earlier at the Mission Houses Museum.

Publications, Research Activities, Student News

Publication Updates: Raina Heaton and Thomas Kettig

Raina Heaton and Patricia Anderson (Tulane University) have been published in the International Journal of American Linguistics (83:2), with their article “When Animals Become Humans: Grammatical Gender in Tunica.”

Thomas Kettig and Bodo Winter have been published in Language Variation and Change (), with their article “Producing and perceiving the Canadian Vowel Shift: Evidence from a Montreal Community.”

You may click on each title for the abstract, and find the citations below.

Heaton, Raina, and Patricia Anderson, “When Animals Become Humans: Grammatical
Gender in Tunica,” International Journal of American Linguistics 83, no. 2 (April 2017):
341-363. DOI: 10.1086/689832

Kettig, Thomas, and Bodo Winter. “Producing and Perceiving the Canadian Vowel Shift:
Evidence from a Montreal Community.” Language Variation and Change, vol. 29, no. 1,
2017, pp. 79–100., doi:10.1017/S0954394517000023.

Alumni News, Faculty News, Presentations, Publications, Research Activities, Student News

Graduate Student News (Spring & Summer 2016)

Claire Stabile and Victoria Chen, along with Dr. Kamil Deen and Nian Liu had their paper Cross-linguistic priming of the passive in Mandarin and English bilinguals published in the proceedings of the 13th Annual Generative Approaches to Second-Language Acquisition Conference.

Ryan Henke received two grants to fund a nine-week summer pilot research trip to Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. While there, he also worked at the University of Alberta’s Canadian Indigenous Languages and Literacy Development Institute (CILLDI), where he taught a computer class and served as an intern for two courses.

Victoria Chen presented her paper Actor voice ≠ Antipassive: Against the syntactic ergative analysis for Formosan languages at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in January.

Victoria Chen presented her paper Pivot ≠ Absolutive: Evidence from Formosan at the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society.

Victoria Chen presented her paper Philippine-type “”voice”” affixes as A’-agreement markers: Evidence from productive causatives at the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistic Association.

Victoria Chen, along with Dr. Shin Fukuda, presented their paper Re-labeling “”Ergative””: Evidence from Formosan at the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistic Association.

Victoria Chen’s book review To see a world in a grain of sand: Review of Voice and v: Lessons from Acehnese was published in Oceanic Linguistics.

Victoria Chen and Dr. Shin Fukuda’s paper Raising to object out of CP as embedded left dislocations: Evidence from three Formosan languages was published in Proceedings of the 33rd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics.

Victoria Chen and Dr. Shin Fukuda’s paper Three ways to steal an element from a CP: evidence from Formosan was published in Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association.

Victoria Chen is participating in a one-year collaborative project called Constituency in Formosan languages with Dr. Daniel Kaufman. The project is funded by the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange.

Colleen O’Brien presented her paper At the Crossroads of Language Death: Displacement, Language Loss, and Identity in Colombia at the Society for Applied Anthropology meeting in Vancouver in March. She received a grant from the GSO to cover her travel expenses.

Colleen O’Brien presented her paper Creating Relevant Curricula for Endangered Languages in Colombia at the Sixth Cambridge Conference on Language Endangerment in July.

Colleen O’Brien was awarded a Lewis and Clark Exploration Grant from the American Philosophical Society to fund her fieldwork on Kamentsa, a language isolate of Colombia.

Bryn Hauk received the Bilinski Summer Research Award. For her project, she traveled to Zemo Alvani, Georgia, met members of the Batsbi (Tsova-Tush) community, and recorded their language.  Summer 2016_BrynHAUKRaina Heaton’s article Variation and change: The case of movement verbs in Kaqchikel appeared in the International Journal of American Linguistics.

Raina Heaton, Dr. Kamil Deen, and Dr. William O’Grady’s article An investigation of relativization in Kaqchikel appeared in the journal Lingua.

Raina Heaton and Patricia Anderson’s paper When animals become human: Grammatical gender in Tunica is currently in press at the International Journal of American Linguistics.

Raina Heaton’s article Active-stative Agreement in Tunica is currently in press at Anthropological Linguistics.

Raina Heaton and Igor Xoyon’s article Assessing language acquisition in the Kaqchikel program at Nimaläj Kaqchikel Amaq’ is currently in press at Language Documentation & Conservation.

Raina Heaton was awarded a Bilinski dissertation fellowship, and also spent a month in Guatemala over the summer finishing her dissertation fieldwork. This included, among other things, four picture elicitation experiments, the results of which will be presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas in 2017.S16_RainaHeatonRaina Heaton presented two talks at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas. The first was titled How many ‘antipassives’ are there? Towards a functional typology of antipassive-type constructions in Kaqchikel. The second, co-presented by Dr. Judith Maxwell (Tulane University), was titled A re-evaulation of the perfect in Kaqchikel. Raina also presented a poster at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America on her work with the Kaqchikel immersion school in Guatemala.

Raina Heaton presented at the Societas Linguistica Europeae in Naples, Italy. Her presentation was based on work from her dissertation, where she developed a typology of languages with multiple antipassive constructions.

Anna Belew received funding from the Bilinski Educational Foundation to conduct summer research in Cameroon; her study investigated language attitudes and language shift in Iyasa, an endangered Bantu language.S16_AnnaBelewJonny Kim received a Bilinski dissertation fellowship, and has successfully collected data in Korea and Hawaii, including three versions of lexical decision experiments and one eye-tracking experiment.

Jonny Kim presented his poster at the 15th Conference on Laboratory Phonology, Cornell University, and received a LabPhon15 conference travel award.S16_JonnyKimKevin Bätscher presented his mapping project Ing Pámitalátalúkì ding danuman Kapampángan (The map of Kapampangan waterways) along with his collaborators Michael R. Pangilinan (language activist, Kapampangan nation) and JC Gaillard (geographer, University of Auckland) at the 26th Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society in Manila.S16_KevinBaetscherKevin Bätscher received a Jacobs Research Fund for the project Hul’q’umi’num’ Voices: The Language of Music, for which he interviews Coast Salish elders on Vancouver Island about cultural teachings and the linguistic encoding of the wide range of musical traditions in the area. This is a collaborative project with Sewit (Thomas Jones) of the Snuneymuxw FIrst Nation.

Faculty News, General Interest, Presentations, Publications, Research Activities, Student News

Graduate Student News (Fall 2016/Winter 2017)

Brad Rentz, along with Dr. Victoria Anderson, presented a poster at the 5th Joint Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and Acoustical Society of Japan entitled The Pohnpeian stop contrast between laminal alveolars and apical dentals involves differences in VOT and F2 locus equation intercepts. The poster and data can be viewed here.

Raina Heaton presented a paper at the Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) Annual Meeting at LSA, entitled Towards a unified account of variability in Kaqchikel focus constructions.

Thomas Kettig presented his poster One hundred years of stability: The case of the BAD-LAD split at the LSA 2017 meeting. He also received a GSO grant of $700 for his trip to Spain last summer to present at the Sociolinguistic Symposium.

PhD students Dannii Yarbrough and Thomas Kettig at the 2017 LSA Annual Meeting.
PhD students Dannii Yarbrough and Thomas Kettig at the 2017 LSA Annual Meeting.

Alex Smith’s journal article Merap historical phonology in the context of a central Bornean linguistic area was accepted for publication in Oceanic Linguistics, and his article Sebop, Penan, and Kenyah internal linguistic subgrouping was published in the Borneo Research Bulletin. He also finished his fieldwork on 78 languages of Borneo during Fall 2016.

Victoria Chen’s paper When synthetic meets analytic: A note on structural borrowing in Kaxabu Pazeh was published in Oceanic Linguistics 55(2).

Victoria Chen’s paper Pivot ≠ Absolutive: Evidence from Formosan, was published in the Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society.

Victoria Chen, along with Dr. Shin Fukuda, published their paper “Absolutive” marks agreement, not Case: Against the syntactic ergative analysis for Austronesian-type voice system in the Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistics Society.

Victoria Chen and Dr. Robert Blust‘s paper The pitfalls of negative evidence: ‘Ergative Austronesian’, ‘Nuclear Austronesian’ and their progeny is in press at Language & Linguistics.

Victoria Chen’s paper, Philippine-type “voice” affixes as A’-agreement markers: Evidence from causatives and ditransitives is in press in the Proceedings of the 23rd Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association.

Victoria Chen and Dr. Shin Fukuda’s published a paper Re-labeling “Ergative”: Evidence from Formosan is in press in the Proceedings of the 23rd Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association.

Ryan Henke and Dannii Yarbrough took part in the workshop “Building Capacity in Linguistics and Endangered Languages at Tribal Colleges and Universities”, which was put on by the Linguistic Society of America and the Endangered Language Fund. The workshop brought together linguistics faculty and students as well as students and faculty from TCUs to discuss how we can better use linguistics to help TCU programs with their language teaching and learning goals.

Photo provided courtesy of the LSA.
Photo provided courtesy of the LSA.

Meagan Dailey and Ryan Henke presented their poster Data citation, attribution, and employability at the 2017 LSA meeting. Their poster investigated how data citation and attribution relate to the job market and training of up-and-coming linguists. It can be viewed here.

Ryan Henke, Meagan Dailey, and Kavon Hooshiar presented their poster Questions, curiosities, and concerns: Talking points for data citation and attribution” at the 2017 LSA meeting. The poster is part of the larger effort to change the way linguists, university departments, and administrations approach data citation and attribution. It can be viewed here.

John Elliott presented a poster at the Acoustical Society of America annual meeting entitled For bilinguals, Enxet vowel spaces smaller than Spanish, which was a phonetic vowel analysis of Enxet, a Paraguayan language with a typologically rare small vowel system.

John Elliott was awarded a grant from the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) for “The Enxet Documentation Project”, a video documentation project working with speakers of Enxet Sur, a threatened Enlhet-Enenlhet language of Paraguay.  The project focused on bushwalk videos as a means of eliciting stories about and descriptions of the uses of medicinal and food plants in the Enxet indigenous communities.

John Elliott and Russell Barlow attended a training session for the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) as part of their being awarded ELDP grants for documentation projects. The training focused on details of video and audio recording and the ever evolving best-practices in archiving, and was attended by researchers and endangered language community members working on documentation projects in almost every region of the globe.

Andrew Pick presented a poster titled Word boundaries attenuate the effects of emphasis in Lebanese Arabic at the Acoustical Society of America annual meeting.

General Interest, Publications

HSL in The Guardian

An article about Hawaii Sign Language has been published in The Guardian (UK). Dr. William O’Grady is quoted as saying, “this may be the last new language discovered in the US,” while the research efforts of visiting faculty members James “Woody” Woodward and Barbara Earth, as well as the graduate students assisting them, are also featured.

Click the link above for a PDF download.

Publications, Research Activities, Student News

Documenting Hawai‘i’s Sign Languages

Linguistics student Samantha Rarrick and independent scholar Brittany Wilson have just published an article description the Sign Language Documentation Training Center (SLDTC), a joint effort of Kapi‘olani Community College students and faculty, and graduate students in the Department of Linguistics. Founded in 2013, SLDTC expands on the successful model of the Language Documentation Training Center to document signed language use in Hawai‘i, including American Sign Language and the critically endangered Hawai‘i Sign Language (ISO 639-3: hps).

  • Rarrick, Samanath & Brittany Wilson. 2016. Documenting Hawai‘i’s Sign Languages. Language Documentation & Conservation 10.337-346.  http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24697

 

General Interest, Publications, Research Activities

UH scholars describe local variety of English

Recent work by researchers from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Department of Linguistics and Georgetown University demonstrates that the pronunciation of vowels is a part of what makes Hawai‘i English unique compared with other varieties of English. Hawai‘i English, the name given to the English that is spoken in the islands, is commonly spoken alongside Pidgin/Hawai‘i Creole, and is an understudied variety. This work provides a stepping stone toward our knowledge of the ways that people from Hawai‘i speak. The results of this work were recently published in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association; the full citation is given below.

Kirtley, M. Joelle*, James Grama*, Katie Drager*, and Sean Simpson+ (2016) An acoustic analysis of the vowels of Hawai‘i English. Journal of the International Phonetic Association. doi:10.1017/S0025100315000456.

* The University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
+ Georgetown University

Faculty News, Publications

Katie Drager’s New Book Published

About the Book:  Speakers use a variety of different linguistic resources in the construction of their identities, and they are able to do so because their mental representations of linguistic and social information are linked.

While the exact nature of these representations remains unclear, there is growing evidence that they encode a great deal more phonetic detail than traditionally assumed and that the phonetic detail is linked with word-based information. This book investigates the ways in which a word’s phonetic realisation depends on a combination of its grammatical function and the speaker’s social group. This question is investigated within the context of the word like as it is produced and perceived by students at an all girls’ high school in New Zealand. The results are used to inform an exemplar-based model of speech production and perception in which the quality and frequency of linguistic and non-linguistic variants contribute to a speaker’s style.

The book is published by Language Science Press and is freely downloadable from: http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/75

Drager, Katie (2015) Linguistic Variation, Identity Construction, and Cognition. Berlin: Language Science Press.

About the Author:  Katie K. Drager is Associate Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Her research is located at the intersection of sociolinguistics and phonetics, combining qualitative and quantitative methodologies to examine the ways in which social factors influence the production and perception of linguistic variables, and vice versa. Her recent work has appeared in Language Variation and Change, Journal of Phonetics, and Language and Speech, and she is currently leading a project on the production and perception of linguistic variation in Hawai‘i.