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Friday, 5 JanuarySymposiumEndangered Languages and Linguistic TheoryCalifornia C2:00 – 5:00 PMOrganizer:Sponsor:Participants:Alice C. Harris (University at Stony Brook, State University of New York)Committee on Endangered Languages and Their PreservationStephen R. Anderson (Yale University)Mark C. Baker (Rutgers University)Juliette Blevins (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig)Heidi Harley (University of Arizona)Sally McConnell-Ginet (Cornell University)Maria Polinsky (University of California, San Diego)In recent years there has been much discussion among linguists as well as others about the problems of endangered languages.Meetings are held regularly on this topic, and many books have now been published on a variety of aspects of the problem, especiallycauses, human rights, the humanitarian impact, and means of revitalization. The LSA’s Committee on Endangered Languages andTheir Preservation (CELP) has also sponsored several forums on issues related to endangered languages.The topic of this particular symposium was inspired in part by the topic of the 2007 Linguistics Institute, “Empirical Foundations forTheories of Language”. In this symposium we emphasize those empirical foundations that rest on data from endangered languages.Data from endangered languages have repeatedly provided challenges to linguistic theory and in this way have helped to shaped it.Language is a uniquely human faculty, and one of the concerns of linguists is to determine the limits of the human language capacity,the extent to which languages can vary. The ability to determine these limits accurately is crucially limited by what is known of thevariety actually found in languages of the world. The variety that has developed in languages is the natural laboratory within whichlinguists conduct their research. If only the 10 languages with the largest numbers of speakers survive, the constraints on the researchof linguists would be comparable to that of biologists if only the top 10 predators had survived among all living animals. Withoutvariety, we might be unaware that birds could survive without flying, or we might not even be aware that wings could evolve! Aslinguists, we need all the data we can get on the full range of possible languages. The next fact from a language spoken by hardlyanyone could change our model of what language can be and could improve the questions we must ask in investigating all languages.Our knowledge of how language in general works is based on the accumulation and integration of facts from languages large andsmall from all over the world.Speakers summarize ways data from endangered languages have contributed to their own theoretical work or to theoretical work intheir subfield of linguistics. The symposium opens with a brief introduction by Sally McConnell-Ginet and proceeds to JulietteBlevins’ overview of the importance of data from a broad range of endangered languages for phonological theory. Heidi Harleydiscusses theoretical questions raised by affixation, and Stephen R. Anderson addresses several issues at the morphology-syntaxinterface for which evidence from endangered languages has played a key role. Mark Baker speaks on the question “What if therewere no noun-incorporating languages?”. The last speaker, Maria Polinsky, addresses the relevance of evidence from severalendangered languages, including Tsez, Malagasy, and Kabardian, in characterizing backward subject control.81