here - Linguistic Society of America

David Boe (Northern Michigan University) Session 74Saussure’s Course and linguistic historiographyThe opening chapter of Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1916), entitled “A Brief Survey of the History ofLinguistics,” provides an overview of what Saussure considered to be the key developments in the language sciences prior to hisown academic career and before the establishment what he felt was the “only true object of study” within linguistics. This year isthe 100th anniversary of the death of Saussure in 1913, and in this presentation, I will re-examine the relevance of Saussure’sshort history of our field, approximately one century after his famous series of lectures were given in Geneva.Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten (University of Massachusetts Amherst) Session 17Anisa Schardl (University of Massachusetts Amherst)Expressing uncertainty with gisa in TshanglaThis paper describes and analyzes the particle gisa in Tshangla, an understudied Tibeto-Burman language. Sentences of the formgisa p are felicitous only where some agent A has a lack of certainty about p. Identity of A (Speaker, Addressee) depends onsentential force. In declaratives, A is the Speaker. In interrogatives, A is the Addressee. We argue that gisa is a speech actoperator that indicates the absence of directly perceived evidence for p by A, thus implying uncertainty on A’s part. We relategisa to the broader issue of the division (or lack thereof) between epistemic modality and evidentiality.Juergen Bohnemeyer (University at Buffalo)Words that cut across phrase boundaries – and how to avoid themSessionThe two most frequent aspect markers of Yucatec Maya, the perfective and imperfective markers, have previously been treated asprefixes that attach to the verb across what turns out to be a major phrase boundary. I propose an alternative analysis according towhich these markers obligatorily form portmanteaus with the ergative clitics. The same behavior can be observed with themorphologically unbound aspect markers. This phenomenon is an instructive example of how the appearance of exotic syntacticphenomena can be the result of deceptively simple but flawed morphonological assumptions.Juergen Bohnemeyer (University at Buffalo) Session 24Jesse Lovegren (University at Buffalo)Elena Benedicto (Purdue University)Katharine Donelson (University at Buffalo)Alyson Eggleston (Purdue University)Gabriela Pérez Báez (Smithsonian Institution)Reference frames in Mesoamerica: linguistic and nonlinguistic factorsWe test the hypothesis that language-specific practices of frames-of-reference (FoRs) use in discourse reflect the speakers’individual adaptations to non-linguistic factors such as literacy and education (Li & Gleitman 2002). Data on FoR use indiscourse was collected from speakers of eight indigenous languages of Mexico and Nicaragua and three varieties of Spanish andanalyzed together with estimates of the speakers’ literacy, education, and L2 use. Results of a generalized linear mixed-effectsmodel suggest that FoR use in discourse cannot be reduced to non-linguistic factors: a speaker's native and second language(s) arethe strongest predictors of their FoR preference.Claire Bowern (Yale University) Session 24Patience Epps (University of Texas at Austin)Hannah Haynie (Yale University)Jane Hill (University of Arizona)Catherine Sheard (Yale University)On drugs, wildcats, and eagles: loan and inheritance patterns in hunter-gatherer ethnobiological systemsHypotheses regarding the structure of ethnobiological nomenclature systems have focused on correlations with the dominantmeans of food production in linguistic communities, relating to differences in rates of lexical replacement and the presence ofgeneric ethnobiological terms. Here we evaluate some of these hypotheses using standard wordlists for 105 hunter-gatherer andagriculturalist languages from North America, Amazonia, and North Australia. We find that loan rates in flora/fauna vocabularyare nearly always significantly higher than those in basic vocabulary, but are correlated, and differ significantly by case studyregion. Hunter-gatherer communities also show significantly higher flora-fauna loan rates than do agriculturalists.133