here - Linguistic Society of America

Martina Anissa Strommer (University of Vienna) Session 80Creating secret pidgin languages as indigenous resistance? A case study from Papua New GuineaOne linguistic consequence of German colonialism is Rabaul Creole German (RCG), which is considered the only German-basedcreole language. It originated as the ‘secret’ language of mixed-race children in a catholic school in Papua New Guinea after 1897and is de facto extinct today. Drawing on mission sources, the paper reconstructs the linguistic circumstances of its developmentand compares them to other settings in which secret pidgins have emerged, such as slavery or prisons. While some argue thatcertain group languages are so-called antilanguages, arising to challenge an established norm, this paper explores whethercreating RCG illustrates anti-colonial struggle.Allyson Stronach (University of Nevada, Reno) Session 97Orthographic vowel pairs in Colonial Valley Zapotec willsTlacolula Valley Zapotec is a language with contrastive tone and phonation, and syllable stress. In this paper, I analyze theorthographic representation of tone, phonation, and stress in Colonial Valley Zapotec, an ancestor of TVZ, by evaluating archivalwills written in Zapotec by native speakers during the Mexican colonial period. As these wills were written using the Romanalphabet, some phonologic features cannot be represented well. This paper presents data on the striking occurrence of doublevowels in one will, and the possibility that they may be attempts at representing something about tone, phonation, or stress.Giedrius Subačius (University of Illinois at Chicago) Session 75“Experts” of Lithuanian Cyrillic script in the Russian Empire (1864-1904)Throughout the 40 years of the ban on Latin letters for Lithuanian (1864–1904), the Russian administration in Vilnius and Kaunashad relied on “experts” who were preparing Lithuanian texts in Cyrillic and evaluating the language and orthography. Those“experts” were the source of firsthand knowledge of Lithuanian for an administration that was unable to comprehend thelanguage. During the years of the ban, five major “experts” of Lithuanian were employed: Mikuckis, Krečinskis, Kashirin,Liatskii, and Poidėnas. But many of them were lacking competence, which significantly contributed to the empire’s failure toattract Lithuanians to the Cyrillic script.John Ryan Sullivant (University of Texas at Austin) Session 97The tones of Tataltepec ChatinoMeghan Sumner (Stanford University) Session 7Reiko Kataoka (San Jose State University/Stanford University)I heard you but didn’t listen: listeners encode words differently depending on a speaker’s accentAccent variation can be costly to spoken word recognition as exemplified by reduced semantic priming of out-of-accent speechfor the speakers of General American English (GA). In this study, we tease apart two possible explanations of this cost: (1)Differences in the initial encoding of the words; or (2) Differences in lexical activation and subsequent semantic spreadthroughout the lexicon. Using the false memory paradigm, we find greater false memory effects for NYC-accented speech thanfor RP- and GA-accented speech, suggesting that semantic spread is unimpaired. We argue that listeners encode wordsdifferently depending on a speaker’s accent.Sandhya Sundaresan (University of Tromsø/University of Stuttgart) Session 17Syntacticizing perspective: the formal anatomy of Tamil kolThe clause-internal binding of the Tamil anaphor ta(a)n typically requires the suffixation of a morpheme kol to the predicate. kolalso marks unaccusatives, motivating its analysis as a predicate-detransitivizer (Lidz, 2004), similar to Greek “non-active”morphology (Embick, 2004). Based on new evidence involving kol-suffixation on non-reflexive transitives and underlyingintransitives, I show that it doesn't affect predicate-valency. Rather, I propose that kol realizes a Point-of-View head thatcontributes a mental/spatial perspective to the highest argument, which then allows it to antecede ta(a)n. I show, by extension,that many anaphors crosslinguistically are just “perspective-seekers” and develop a formal syntactico-semantics for perspective.Daniel Suslak (Indiana University) Session 101The Mayanization of Ayapanec Gulf ZoqueanAyapanec Gulf Zoquean has been significantly reshaped via contact with Chontal, coming to resemble in many respects a Mixe-Zoquean language with Mayan syntax. In this paper we identify and examine Mayan features in Ayapanec, with emphasis on207