Seminars

Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma is planning to publish a dictionary of Cherokee in 2025 to celebrate the 50 year anniversary of the publication of Durbin Feeling & William Pulte's monumental "Cherokee-English Dictionary" (1975). I have been involved in this project as a linguist. In this talk, I will go through the process of documentation of Oklahoma Cherokee through transcription of interviews and analysis of old documents written in Cherokee syllabary, and discuss the challenges that we have faced and how we have been overcoming such issues.   Date: Thursday, September 21, 2023 Time: 3:30-5:00 pm Zoom: https://hku.zoom.us/j/97258842055 (Meeting ID: 972 5884 2055)

Attitude verbs, which typically describe mental states, like English think, want, and know, are found in languages around the world. These verbs pose a number of interesting puzzles. One long-standing puzzle is how children come to learn the meaning of these verbs, which describe highly abstract mental states and so cannot be easily learned by observation. An influential account explains this fact with syntactic bootstrapping: attitude verbs can be differentiated by their morphosyntax, and children can use easier-to-observe morphosyntactic distinctions to draw conclusions about harder-to-observe verb meanings. But to what extent do attitude verbs have distinctive syntactic properties? In fact, given cross-linguistic variation, [...]