Jeff Good

Data and language documentation

The role of data in language documentation is rather different from the way that data is traditionally treated in language description. For description, the main concern is the production of grammars and dictionaries whose primary audience is linguists (Himmelmann 1998, Woodbury 2003). In these products language data serves essentially as exemplification and support for the linguist’s analysis. It is typically presented as individual example sentences, often without source attribution, and often edited to remove ‘irrelevant material’. There may also be a ‘sample text’ or two in an appendix to the grammar. Language documentation, on the other hand, places data at the centre of its concerns. Woodbury (2003:39) proposes that:

Tone and accent in Saramaccan: charting a deep split in the phonology of a language

Saramaccan, an Atlantic creole spoken in Surinam, has traditionally been analyzed as exhibiting a high-tone/low-tone opposition in its lexicon. However, while it is true that part of its lexicon exhibits a robust high/low opposition, the majority of its words are marked not for tone but pitch accent. The Saramaccan lexicon, therefore, is split with some words being marked for tone and other words marked for accent. This lexical split has important effects in the phrasal phonology of the language which, like the lexicon, is a mix between a tonal phrasal system and an accentual one.

Tonal morphology in a creole: High-tone raising in Saramaccan serial verb constructions

We have seen in this paper that Saramaccan is apparently unique among Atlantic creoles in that it makes use of inflectional tonal morphology. While the existence of such morphology is an interesting fact for studies of Saramaccan itself, it also could have bearing on McWhorter’s (1998) notion of the creole prototype since a lack of both inflectional and tonal morphology is taken by him to be an important typological property of creole languages. Importantly, however, an analysis of available evidence indicates that these morphemes do not appear to be the result of substrate transfer but are instead a languageinternal innovation.

A grammar of Saramaccan Creole

Saramaccan has been central to various debates regarding the origin and nature of creole languages. Being the most removed of all English-based creoles from European language structure in terms of phonology, morphology and syntax, it has been seen as one of the most extreme instantiations of the creolization process. This is the first full-length description of Saramaccan. The grammar documents, in particular, a valence-sensitive system of indicating movement and direction via serial verb constructions, hitherto overlooked amidst the generalized phenomenon of serialization itself.

The MILE Corpus for Less Commonly Taught Languages

This paper describes a small, structured English corpus that is designed for translation into Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTLs), and a set of re-usable tools for creation of similar corpora. The corpus systematically explores meanings that are known to affect morphology or syntax in the worlds languages. Each sentence is associated with a feature structure showing the elements of meaning that are represented in the sentence. The corpus is highly structured so that it can support machine learning with only a small amount of data. As part of the REFLEX program, the corpus will be translated into multiple LCTLs, resulting in parallel corpora can be used for training of MT and other language technologies. Only the untranslated English corpus is described in this paper.

Opening up gift-openings: Birthday parties as situated activity systems

Abstract We analyze the interactional organization and embodied actions of children and adults involved in gift-opening activities. Attention is drawn to gift-opening as a situated activity system, comprised of gift-opening activities occurring within shifting participation frameworks and intense focus clusters. Talk and embodied actions (the use of objects, body orientations, and the structure of the environment) are revealed as seamlessly conjoined in the midst of a routine birthday party. Attention is further drawn to an extended summons–answer sequence involving initiation of a gift-opening, enthusiastic response cries, positive assessments of the gifts, the offering and prompting of thanks, and related actions. It is revealed that children at the party are not just playing games and opening gifts, but involved in a complex social system where adults model and facilitate the construction and integration of past, present, and future relationships. Implications are raised for understanding how gift-opening activities provide opportunities for examining how language development and childhood socialization are enacted as interactional achievements.

The Typology of Templates

The notion of a template has been used in a number of linguistic domains to refer to grammatical patterns where the form of some linguistic constituent appears to be well conceptualized as consisting of a fixed linear structure, whether in terms of the arrangement of its subconstituents or its overall length. Most work on templates has restricted the topic of investigation to a single grammatical domain, e.g., morphophonology, rather than looking at templatic phenomena across grammatical domains. Such comparison reveals that a commonality among templatic constructions is that they involve ‘unexpected’ linear stipulation. This leaves open many questions regarding how they might be typologically compared, but the existing literature, nevertheless, indicates some dimensions of variation worthy of further investigation that could form the basis of a comprehensive study of template typology.

Quantifying Language Dynamics

Drawing upon data from the phonologies, morphologies, numeral systems, constituent orders, case systems, and lexicons of the world’s languages, Quantifying Language Dynamics introduces new, quantitative methodologies for understanding language contact, evolution, and patterns of phylogenetic descent.

Modeling Signifiers in Constructional Approaches to Morphological Analysis

Constructional approaches to morphology and syntax are based on the idea that the Saussurean sign is not only a powerful device for modeling the relationship between the form and meaning of morphemes, but, if appropriately adapted, it can be usefully extended to any kind of morphological and syntactic structure. Such approaches have been shown to be able to effectively account for a wide range of morphosyntactic phenomena, but an underexplored area is how different kinds of signifiers become associated with both lexical and constructional meanings. This article considers this issue by exploring the range of variation found in the shapes of signifiers in morphological constructions. A particular focus will be signifiers that deviate from a canonical linear ideal and the role of templates in constraining the realization of signifiers. The kinds of meanings that specific kinds of signifiers can be associated with in signs will also be briefly considered. The primary goal of this article is to establish the study of possible signifier shapes as an important issue for Construction Morphology. It will also be argued that constructional approaches are especially well suited for analyzing generalizations holding among the signifiers in a given language.

Socio-spatial Networks, Multilingualism, and Language Use in a Rural African Context

A GIS spatial perspective can provide important insights into many poorly understood sociolinguistic phenomena such as multilingualism in rural Africa. By relying on ethnographic and individual-based sociolinguistic information as well as on high spatial-temporal resolution data, our interdisciplinary team composed of linguists and geographers aims to (i) make original contributions to the cartographic representation of multilingualism and (ii) develop spatial-analytical models able to capture a complex array of linguistic, cultural, and spatial variables for a compact rural area of Cameroon.