here - Linguistic Society of America

Gunnar Jacob (Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism) Session 30Mark Calley (Northeastern University)Kalliopi Katsika (University of Kaiserslautern)Neiloufar Family (University of Kaiserslautern)Shanley Allen (University of Kaiserslautern)Syntactic representations in bilinguals: the role of word order in cross-linguistic primingProposals differ on whether shared syntactic representations between a bilingual’s two languages involve abstract syntacticstructure or surface word order. We examine this using cross-linguistic priming of the dative alternation (prepositional object vs.double object) in German and English. Word order is identical cross-linguistically in the main clause, but differs in thesubordinate clause. Thirty-two advanced German speakers of English participated in a sentence completion task with Germanprimes and English targets. We found priming from L1 to L2 across main clauses, but not across subordinate clauses. Thisprovides strong evidence that word order is central in shared syntactic representation.Alessandro Jaker (Goyatiko Language Society) Session 17Weledeh verb classes: from agglutination to fusionWithin the morphological typology of Sapir (1921), it is now well understood how isolating languages become agglutinating(through grammaticalization), and how fusional languages become isolating (through loss of inflection), but the process by whichagglutinating languages become fusional is still poorly understood. Weledeh (Dogrib), provides a rare glimpse into this process:the language is underlyingly agglutinating and templatic, like most Athabaskan languages, but surface-fusional, with multipleinflectional classes, due to intervocalic consonant deletion and vowel coalescence. Weledeh is therefore an important language toexamine for linguists interested in the diachronic origins of inflectional class systems.Bridget Jankowski (University of Toronto) Session 40A variationist approach to disentangling grammatical change and register changeThe comparative method of variationist sociolinguistics has demonstrated that change in variable frequency is not reliable fordetermining whether an underlying grammatical change is taking place. Frequency changes can be the result of either extralinguisticregister changes, changes within the underlying grammar, or a combination. This work examines two English variablesknown to vary along the written-to-spoken continuum — relative clause pronouns, and the genitive construction — across threeregisters and 100 years. This method allows us to account for changes including the factor of frequency and beyond, and provides away to tease apart potential grammatical change from register change.Carmen Jany (California State University, San Bernardino) Session 99Individuality versus unity in Mixean: challenges in orthography designLinguistic and dialectal diversity is uniquely complex and highly understudied for the hundreds of Mixean varieties spoken inOaxaca, Mexico. The sparsity of linguistic documentation poses a challenge for comparative work and prevents the developmentof a precise division into dialectal and linguistic groupings. As a result, each community retains its linguistic individuality whichis reflected in their orthographies. This paper discusses the challenges of orthography design in the Mixean region and compareseight existing orthographies. It is shown that the implementation of a unified spelling system has largely failed and thatestablished spelling conventions diverge, often highlighting dialectal idiosyncrasies.Adam Jardine (University of Delaware) Session 38Angeliki Athanasopoulou (University of Delaware)Peter Cole (University of Delaware)Prestopped nasals in Banyaduq: issues in phonological representationBanyaduq, an undocumented Land Dayak language of Indonesia, exhibits word-final nasals articulated with a precedinghomorganic oral stop. Final “prestopped” nasals are analyzed in other Austronesian languages as complex segments deriving fromunderlying “clear” nasals. However, such an option is problematic for Banyaduq, since the distribution of the stop portion is notpredictable. This supports the hypothesis that prestopped nasals are represented underlyingly, either as complex segments or assequences of two segments. We argue that for Banyaduq the latter is preferable, and suggest that this option may offer insight intoother Austronesian languages as well.162