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show that both concatenative and nonconcatenative verb formation strategies are productive. Factors that influence verb shape includethe prosodic structure of the borrowed item and whether or not it has obviously foreign segmental elements. However, linguisticstructure alone does not account for the type of verb formation that is applied. There also appears to be an element of optionality inword formation strategy, revealing that both the expected Semitic borrowing pattern and nonnative suffixing are productive.Cherlon Ussery (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) Session 25AGREE to control: Case optionality in IcelandicI propose an analysis of control in which case is optionally transmitted from the controller to PRO. Evidence from Icelandic suggeststhat while PRO necessarily inherits the controller's phi features, PRO optionally inherits the controller's case feature. I argue that thisoptionality is derived from the ‘timing’ of the controller-PRO AGREE relation. If AGREE is established after the controller has beencase-marked, PRO inherits the case and phi features of the controller. If AGREE is established before the controller has been casemarked,PRO inherits only the controller's phi features and PRO bears nominative by default.Kristin J. Van Engen (Northwestern University) Session 45Pronouns in coordination: Effects of modality, grammatical weight, & information structureI investigate variation in the usage of first-person, subject-position coordinated pronouns in American English. In particular, I focuson the roles of linguistic modality, grammatical weight, and the information structure status of elements conjoined with pronouns aspotential factors in conditioning the usage of the different variants (X and I, X and me, I and X, me and X). Corpus analysis resultsshow differences in usage across speech and writing, as well as significant effects of the grammatical weight and information status ofthe conjoined elements.Gerard Van Herk (Memorial University of Newfoundland) Session 91Questioning question formation research in Early African American EnglishIn Early African American English (AAE) questions, noninversion of the verbal auxiliary (Where your riches is?) has been taken asevidence of either a creole origin (DeBose 1995) or an extension of earlier English do-support constraints (Van Herk 2000). I useAAE diaspora data to investigate the constraints on auxiliary-less questions (Where you-all come from?), which may reflect eitherauxiliary deletion or noninversion of verbs unmarked for tense or agreement (Rickford 2005). I demonstrate the utility of thecomparative method in determining verbal function and suggest methodological implications for the study of other varieties.Gerard Van Herk (Memorial University of Newfoundland) Session 61Adrienne Jones (University of Ottawa)Ethnic & national self-reference among 19th-century African AmericansTo investigate the ethnic naming practices and motivations of everyday antebellum African Americans, we extract all ethnonyms forpeople of color--including colored, black, Negro, brethren, African, Sons of Ham, and Ethiop(ian)--from 427 letters from AfricanAmericans settling in Liberia (1834-1866.) We demonstrate how settlers deployed this repertoire to situate themselves relative toAmericans (Black and White), native Africans, and their ancestors, and to claim social and political capital. We suggest that settlers'frequent use of brethren as an ethnonym reflects indirection as a discourse strategy and suggests a deeper history for the contemporaryethnonyms brother/sister.Sarah VanWagenen (University of California, Los Angeles) Session 26Exploiting surface cues in grammar inductionI characterize the nature of structural information that can be extracted from string percepts, i.e., independent of semantic/contextualinformation. I consider symbolic markers analogous to case and agreement markers. Tree transducers analogous to case/agreementmarking systems and word order manipulations are applied to derivations of a restricted class of context free grammars called ‘verysimple grammars’ (VSGs) resulting in an expanded class. Learners are defined which exploit the surface cues introduced by the treetransducers and learn the expanded classes, demonstrating that at least some information about constituency and predicate-argumentrelations can be gleaned from distributional information.Tonjes Veenstra (Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin) Session 82Creoles as beyond the basic varietiesNew languages tend to emerge in multilingual contact situations, creoles being one of the prime examples. Much of the recent170