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here - Linguistic Society of America

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In 1895, J.M.R. Le Jeune published a distinct Nicola Dene vocabulary, hitherto unstudied. It expands knowledge <strong>of</strong> Nicola, butits resemblances to Salish complicate this language's genetic classification. On one hand, Le Jeune provides a 13%+ increaseover the 31 previously known Nicola items. On the other, many items closely resemble local Salish, especially Thompson. TheNicola Athabaskan people were culturally Salishanized by 1895, so some linguistic influence may be expected. Thepronunciation and usage <strong>of</strong> the known Nicola forms suggest long nonnative usage, perhaps a distinct L2 variety <strong>of</strong> Thompson orelse old borrowings into Nicola.Ian Robertson (University <strong>of</strong> the West Indies at St. Augustine) Session 80Sandra Evans (University <strong>of</strong> the West Indies at St. Augustine)Guynawalla: critical factors in the survival <strong>of</strong> a transplanted Creole languageOne major lacuna in the study <strong>of</strong> Creole languages <strong>of</strong> the Caribbean is the absence <strong>of</strong> documentation on the movement <strong>of</strong> peoples fromterritory to territory and the consequent impact on their Creole language. In this regard, the movement <strong>of</strong> French-lexicon Creole speakersfrom St. Lucia to Guyana is instructive. This paper provides evidence <strong>of</strong> the retention <strong>of</strong> their native French-lexicon Creole language andidentifies the several factors that influenced the fate <strong>of</strong> this Creole language. The paper also indicates the extent to which the fates <strong>of</strong>other Creole languages under parallel situations might be explained.Jason R. Robinson (Georgetown University) Session 46Probabilistic graphical modeling <strong>of</strong> Spanish mood choiceThis work empirically evaluates some competing linguistic theories on Spanish verbal mood choice through the use <strong>of</strong>probabilistic graphical models (PGMs, see Koller & Friedman 2011). Probabilistic models <strong>of</strong> minimal pair, mood choicesentences are automatically learned from a corpus <strong>of</strong> epistemic assertions regarding gradable adjectival properties and theirmeasures. The models learn to predict all features —surface forms or latent, theoretical features— from proposed sentences, sothat the best PGMs not only predict the mood morpheme with high accuracy, but can also predict theoretical values such aspolarity, gradability and scalar implicatures.Bryan Rosen (University <strong>of</strong> Wisconsin–Madison) Session 17Postverbal DPs in Hocąk as rightward scramblingThis talk examines data from Hocąk (Siouan) concerning the syntax <strong>of</strong> postverbal DPs. Given that unmarked word order inHocąk is SOV, I propose that postverbal arguments are instances <strong>of</strong> rightward scrambling. Following Manetta’s (2012) analysisfor Hindi-Urdu, I suggest this movement is driven by discourse features on T 0 since rightward-displaced arguments are interpretedas discourse-old. Evidence from stranded elements, postverbal wh-expressions, and scopal effects <strong>of</strong> locatives support such ananalysis. Moreover, the data present evidence against a VP-remnant approach to rightward movement (cf. Rajesh and Dayal2007) and motivate rightward movement as an independent mechanism parallel to leftward scrambling.Nicole Rosen (University <strong>of</strong> Lethbridge) Session 53Latter-day Saints as a linguistic enclave in southern AlbertaUsing the Southern Alberta Corpus <strong>of</strong> English (Rosen 2012), I investigate two Canadian dialect features: the raising <strong>of</strong> /æ/ before/g/, and the Canadian shift (Boberg 2008, 2010) among Latter-day Saints (LDS) and non-LDS living in Southern Alberta. Resultsshow that LDS are not participating in the distinguishing Canadian changes in the same way as other Canadians, supportingMeechan (1998) and showing that the LDS form a linguistic enclave within Southern Alberta.Catherine Rudin (Wayne State College) Session 90Aspiration and glottal/ejective marking in Dorsey's Omaha-Ponca materialsOmaha-Ponca (Siouan) distinguishes ejective, aspirated, and unaspirated-tense stops. Idiosyncratic marking <strong>of</strong> these in JamesOwen Dorsey’s Omaha-Ponca materials raises problems for conversion <strong>of</strong> his 1890s slip-file to modern orthography in adictionary database. Dorsey employs two different marks to represent glottal or ejective, in different contexts; one <strong>of</strong> these samemarks represents aspiration in other contexts, complicating orthography conversion. Aspiration <strong>of</strong>ten is not indicated in the slipfile,necessitating hand-correction <strong>of</strong> dictionary entries. Beyond practical database issues, marking <strong>of</strong> aspiration and glottalizationraises questions <strong>of</strong> how Dorsey heard and analyzed these sounds, and their linguistic status.Jelena Runić (University <strong>of</strong> Connecticut) Session 17The Person-Case Constraint: a morphological consensus199

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