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Rosa Vallejos (University of New Mexico) Session 99Rosa Amías (FORMABIAP)Documenting for revitalization: working with the Kokamas from the AmazonToon Van Hal (University of Leuven) Session 75Génie de la langue, from Augustine to Whorf? On the roots of an influential notion and on its vicissitudes in scholarly learningthroughout centuriesScholars writing on language(s) during the 18th century were obsessed with the génie de la langue. This rather vague, but veryinfluential concept highlighted the distinctiveness of an individual language in comparison to others. As such, it has been ofparamount importance in national(ist) discourse. In spite of recent historiographical attention given to the vicissitudes of this idea,its very origin has remained underexposed. This paper aims at revealing the more remote history of the notion génie de la langue.Its main focus is on Early Christian Latin texts as well as Early Modern Neo-Latin texts of the late-sixteenth and earlyseventeenthcenturies.Stephanie Villard (University of Texas at Austin) Session 99John Ryan Sullivant (University of Texas at Austin)¿Por qué no das clases de inglés? Obstacles to language revitalization in two Chatino communitiesWhile there is an overall positive sentiment associated with Chatino identity and language, for two Chatino-speaking communitiesthere has been much less support for community-wide revitalization efforts than would be expected. Our hypothesis is that inaddition to other factors in play—such as the absence of the high degrees of multilingualism found in other Latin Americanregions such as Amazonia and the shift from a linguistic identity to a cultural identity—the community's exposure to andparticipation in cyclical migration to the United States has brought about favoritism towards English, which depresses motivationfor Chatino language revitalization efforts.Marine Vuillermet (University of California, Berkeley) Session 100Verb compounding in Ese Ejja: sit-go.in and listen-well!Ese Ejja (Takana) is an Amazonian language spoken in Peru and Bolivia. In (1), the single predicate consists of two verbs (pojo-‘divide’ and jaja- ‘cut’), which can also appear separately.(1) Mei=pa [jaja-pojo]-ka-ani-naje.stone=REP cut-divide-3A-HAB-PAS‘they used to cut stones into pieces.’Verb compounding may consist of two verb roots, but it is also productive with (a verb and) an adjective. The characteristics ofthe compounding process to be considered are their: basic semantics of cause-result; valency harmony within verb-verb compounds; argument structure within verb-adjective compounds; reduplication (with an antipassive function), which only involves one element.Abby Walker (The Ohio State University) Session 17Christina García (The Ohio State University)Yomi Cortés (University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez)Kathryn Campbell-Kibler (The Ohio State University)The global and local meanings of /s/ to Puerto Rican listenersIn this study we investigate how the social evaluation of pre-consonantal /s/ in Spanish interacts with the speakers’ region,comparing two regional dialects known to differ in the predominant realization of /s/: Puerto Rican Spanish (aspirated) andMexican Spanish (sibilant). Both /s/ variants were spliced into the recorded speech of 7 Mexican and Puerto Rican males, and 62Puerto Rican listeners then rated the speakers on social dimensions. The results suggest that when listeners process the socialmeaning of a variable they take the variable’s regional status into account, but that there are some global associations of thevariants.213