Forum Lectures

That’s a Word! Middle Class African American English and the Significance of the Spoken Word
Despite decades of sociolinguistic research, most studies of African American English (AAE), have focused on working-class speech communities, largely at the exclusion of middle-class speakers. As a result, little consideration has been given to the linguistic dexterity of middle-class speakers and the extent to which they draw on the full range of the AAE continuum in the construction of their identities. In this talk, I explore some of the ways in which middle class speakers make use of vernacular structural features, as well as camouflaged features, and lexical and rhetorical expression, to strategically construct both race-based and class-based identities.

Usage-based Theory and Language Change
Conceiving of grammar as the cognitive representation of one’s experience with language means that common conceptions of how languages change need to be re-examined. Structuralist models require that change be an abrupt change in the grammar, which is often quite distanced from the details of language use. If cognitive representations contain details of usage, including phonetic detail as well as lexical and contextual information, all aspects of change can be gradual and can occur in language use. Moreover, if grammar is based on experience with language, then a separation of the individual from the community is not necessary, nor is it plausible to assume that speaker and listener play different roles in change. All language users have cognitive representations that reflect what they have heard and produced. Innovation itself is not an individual but a joint phenomenon since it arises from interaction among users who share common biases. These inherent biases make cross-generational directional change possible.

More information coming.

More information coming.

More information coming.

From Prosody toward Explanation?
There is now a rich and voluminous literature on relations between prosodic and syntactic structure, and interesting work continues to emerge. A basic observation is that speakers speak in spurts, or intonation units. Some models take syntactic structure as their point of departure and describe processes by which prosodic structure can be derived from it, considering how mismatches between syntactic constituents and prosodic units might be accounted for. Others begin with prosodic structure and consider how grammatical structure might emerge from it over time. With the second approach, it is generally agreed that syntactic and morphological structures tend to develop from the crystalization of frequently occurring sequences of adjacent elements, presumably within the same intonation unit. A closer look at languages which differ syntactically and morphologically from those on which much prosodic analysis has been based can help us to enrich our understanding of such processes. Prosody in Mohawk (Kanien’kéha’) reflects the organization of information at levels from discourse, through sentence-level syntax to fully crystalized morphology, with varying degrees of formal and functional categoriality. A close look at speaker choices in unscripted speech indicates that it is not simple adjacency within the intonation unit that shapes the gradual crystalization of structures, but rather the cognitive organization of ideas underlying the prosodic structure. The trajectory has not stopped with the development of morphology, however. The emergence of the rich morphology has in turn profoundly shaped modern syntactic structure.