Events

The foundation of American linguistics would not be possible without the significant intellectual contributions made by speakers of Native American languages in collaboration with linguists and anthropologists starting around the turn of the twentieth century. More than a century later, speakers of these languages are engaged in Indigenous language revitalization, reclamation and documentation and now partner in new collaborative ways with linguists. In language revitalization, communities often focus on learners sounding “right,” achieving an accent that closely approximates fluent first language speech and minimizes “accentedness” (Munro and Derwing 2015). This puts phonetics and phonology, that is, sound, front and center in […]

The talk reports on a typological study of negative indefinites, i.e., the counterparts to standard English nobody and nothing, in Englishes, primarily the New Englishes, and in English Creoles. Particular attention goes to “Negative Concord” (“NC”), i.e., the exponence of negation through both a negative indefinite and a verbal negator. The study confirms that NC is widespread in both Englishes and English Creoles and claims that although this holds for both Englishes and English Creoles, they have to be considered separately and that there is a lot of variation with respect to NC subtypes.  Important, but mostly for the New Englishes, […]