Contact/historical reading group

From 2011 to 2015 I coordinated a reading group on language contact and historical linguistics at Yale University with Claire Bowern. It is still going strong and you can join the mailing list here.

Here is a record of what we read.

10 Jul 2015
  • Presentation by Hannah and Claire on in-progress work on colour.
1 Jul 2015
  • Update one another on what we’ve been working on.

Summer break

24 Apr 2015
  • Presentation by E-Ching: Script evolution is a cycle, or detecting formal technique. Recap of Yale Lectures in Medieval Studies, New Haven, 9 April.
10 Apr 2015
  • Enfield, Nicholas J. (2008). Transmission biases in linguistic epidemiology. Journal of Language Contact 2(1): 299–310.
3 Apr 2015
  • E-Ching’s practice talk for PhoNE.
27 Mar 2015
  • Siegel, Jeff (2006). On the language bioprogram hypothesis. Language 82(1): 2–4.
  • Siegel, Jeff (2008). Constraints on substrate influence. The emergence of pidgin and creole languages. Oxford University Press. Chapter 6.
20 Feb 2015
  • DeGraff, Michel (2003). Against creole exceptionalism. Language 79(2): 391–410.
6 Feb 2015
  • Literature review of E-Ching’s dissertation, focusing on the ‘Out of Africa’ controversy.
23 Jan 2015
  • Presentation by E-Ching on French front rounded vowels in creoles vs. L2 acquisition.

Winter break

5 Dec 2014
  • Dunn, Michael et al. (2008). Structural phylogeny in historical linguistics: Methodological explorations applied in Island Melanesia. Language 84(4): 710–759.
7 Nov 2014
  • Dunn, M. (2015) Language phylogenies. In The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics, ed. by C. Bowern and B. Evans. New York: Routledge.
  • Greenhill, S.J. & Gray, R.D. (2009) Austronesian language phylogenies: myths and misconceptions about Bayesian computational methods. In Austronesian historical linguistics and culture history: a festschrift for Robert Blust, ed. by A. Adelaar and A. Pawley. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
17 Oct 2014
  • Rikker works through Burmese Khamti dataset with us, using:
  • Gedney, William J. (1972). In Studies in Linguistics in Honor of George L. Trager, ed. by M. Estellie Smith. The Hague: Mouton. 423–37.
3 Oct 2014
  • LaCharité, Darlene & Paradis, Carole (2005). Category preservation and proximity versus phonetic approximation in loanword adaptation. Linguistic Inquiry 36(2): 223-258.
19 Sep 2014
  • Wedela, Andrew, Abby Kaplanb, and Scott Jackson (2013). High functional load inhibits phonological contrast loss: A corpus study. Cognition 128: 179–186.
5 Sep 2014
  • Short organizational meeting

Summer break

11 Apr 2014
  • Uffmann, Christian (2009). Creole consonant inventories: How simple? In Simplicity and complexity in creoles and pidgins, ed. by Nicholas Faraclas & Thomas B. Klein. London: Battlebridge. 81-106.
28 Mar 2014
  • Rosenberg, Peter (2003). Comparative Speech Island Research: Some Results from Studies in Russia and Brazil. In Deutsche Sprachinseln weltweit. Interne und externe Perspektiven [German language varieties worldwide. Internal and external perspectives] ed. by William D. Keel & Klaus J. Mattheier. Frankfurt: Lang. 199–238.
28 Feb 2014
  • Informal meeting to discuss John McWhorter’s talk
21 Feb 2014
7 Feb 2014
  • Dohus, Katrin (2005). Phonetics or Phonology: Asymmetries in Loanword Adaptations – French and German Mid Front Rounded Vowels in Japanese. ZAS Papers in Linguistics 42: 117-135.

Winter break

3 Dec 2013
  • Bowern, Claire & Bethwyn Evans (in press). Foundations of the new historical linguistics.
5 Nov 2013
  • Vincent, Nigel (2001). LFG as a model of syntactic change. In Time over matter ed. by Miriam Butt & Tracy Holloway King. CSLI. 1–42.
22 Oct 2013
  • Gelderen, Elly van (2010). Features in reanalysis and grammaticalization. In Gradience, gradualness and grammaticalization ed. by Elizabeth Closs Traugott & Graeme Trousdale. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 129–147.
8 Oct 2013
  • Hock, Hans Henrich (2013). Proto-Indo-European verb-finality: Reconstruction, typology, validation. Journal of Historical Linguistics 3(1): 49-76.
24 Sep 2013
  • Thomason, Sarah Grey & Terrence Kaufman (1988). Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. University of California Press. Chapter 1 (1–12) and Chapter 3 (35–64).
10 Sep 2013

Summer break

18 Apr 2013
  • Towner, Mary C., Mark N. Grote, Jay Venti & Monique Borgerhoff Mulder (2012). Cultural macroevolution on neighbor graphs: Vertical and horizontal transmission among Western North American Indian societies. Hum Nat 23: 283-305.
7 Mar 2013
  • Peterson, David A. (1997). The evolution of applicative constructions and Proto-Austronesian morphosyntax. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Pragmatics and
    Grammatical Structure
    . 278-289.
21 Feb 2013
  • Chang, Charles B. (2012). Rapid and multifaceted effects of second-language learning on first-language speech production. Journal of Phonetics 40(2): 249–268.
7 Feb 2013
  • Breu, Walter (2003). Bilingualism and linguistic interference in the Slavic-Romance contact area of Molise (Southern Italy). In Words in Time: Diachronic semantics from different points of view, ed. by Regine Eckardt, Klaus von Heusinger & Christoph Schwartz. Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 351–373.
24 Jan 2013
  • Presentation by E-Ching Ng: Paragoge as an indicator of language contact (recap of LSA talk).

Winter break

27 Nov 2012
  • McWhorter, John H. (2008). Why does a language undress? Strange cases in Indonesia. In Language complexity: Typology, contact, change ed. by Matti Miestamo, Kaius Sinnemäki & Fred Karlsson. John Benjamins. 167–190.
16 Oct 2012
  • Presentation by Hannah Haynie: Dialect geography in the Eastern Miwok languages of California.
2 Oct 2012
  • Remco Bouckaert, Philippe Lemey, Michael Dunn, Simon J. Greenhill, Alexander V. Alekseyenko, Alexei J. Drummond, Russell D. Gray, Marc A. Suchard, Quentin D. Atkinson (2012). Mapping the origins and expansion of the Indo-European language family. cross-generational sound change. Science 337: 957–960
18 Sep 2012
  • Thomason, Sarah G. (2010) Safe and unsafe language contact. Presidential address at LSA, Jan 2010.
6 Sep 2012
  • Joseph Salmons, Robert Fox & Ewa Jacewicz (to appear). Prosodic skewing of input and the initiation of cross-generational sound change. In The initiation of sound change: Production, perception and social factors, ed. by Maria-Josep Solé & Daniel Recasens. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Summer break

6 Apr 2012
  • Joseph Salmons, Robert Fox & Ewa Jacewicz (to appear). Prosodic skewing of input and the initiation of cross-generational sound change. In The initiation of sound change: Production, perception and social factors, ed. by Maria-Josep Solé & Daniel Recasens. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
2 Mar 2012
  • Rice, Keren (Dec 2011). Convergence of prominence systems? Ms., University of Toronto.
17 Feb 2012
  • Bakker, Peter, Aymeric Daval-Markussen, Mikael Parkvall & Ingo Plag (2011). Creoles are typologically distinct from non-creoles. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 26(1): 5–42. Special issue: Creoles and typology. [Handout]
3 Feb 2012
  • Jeff Siegel (2010). Second dialect acquisition. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 6: The difficulty of SDA [second dialect acquisition]. 134–156. [Handout]

Winter break

3 Nov 2011
  • Labov, William (2007). Transmission and diffusion. Language 83(2): 344–387.

4 Oct 2011
22 Sep 2011
16 Sep 2011
  • Friday 12pm (not the standard meeting time)
  • Roger Lass (1997). Historical linguistics and language change. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 1: The past, the present, and the historian. 4–43.

Summer break

18 Apr 2011

4 Apr 2011
  • Malcolm Ross (2001). Contact-induced change in Oceanic languages in North-West Melanesia. In Areal diffusion and genetic inheritance: Problems in comparative linguistics, ed. by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald & R.M.W. Dixon. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 134–166.
28 Mar 2011
  • John V. Singler (2008). The sociolinguistic context of creole genesis. In The handbook of pidgin and creole studies, ed. by Silvia Kouwenberg and John Victor Singler. 332–358. Chichester, West Sussex & Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Spring break

28 Feb 2011
  • Andrew Garrett (2006). Convergence in the formation of Indo-European subgroups: Phylogeny and chronology. In Phylogenetic methods and the prehistory of languages, ed. by Peter Forster and Colin Renfrew. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. 139–151.
21 Feb 2011
  • Campbell, Lyle (2006). Areal linguistics: A closer scrutiny. In Linguistic areas: Convergence in historical and typological perspective, ed. by Yaron Matras, April McMahon & Nigel Vincent. Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 1–31. [Handout]
  • Optional: Dench, Alan (2001). Descent and diffusion: the complexity of the Pilbara situation. In Areal diffusion and genetic inheritance: Problems in comparative linguistics, ed. by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald & R.M.W. Dixon. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 105–132.

7 Feb 2011
  • Thomason, Sarah Grey & Terrence Kaufman (1988). Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. University of California Press. Chapter 3: Contact-induced language change: An analytic framework. 35–64. [Handout]
  • Optional: Coetsem, Frans van (1995). Outlining a model of the transmission phenomenon in language contact. Leuvense Bijdragen 84: 63–85. [Handout]

24 Jan 2011
  • Initial organizational meeting
  • Thomason, Sarah Grey & Terrence Kaufman (1988). Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. University of California Press. Chapter 1: Introduction. 1–12. [Handout]