Ling 241 Schedule

Ling 241 Schedule of topics and readings

The schedule below shows the topics and assigned readings for the Spring 2012 offering of Linguistics 241: Language in Native America, at the University of Pennsylvania. See also the course syllabus and the pages with links for Wikipedia assignments.

Click on the links for the online lecture notes and additional web-accessible information.
- For some special characters, your browser must be able to render the Unicode format.
- Because they contain some copyrighted material, these pages are password-protected; the password will be provided in class.
Readings for each class meeting are also provided.
- As chapters or sections in the Silver & Miller textbook, American Indian Languages: Cultural and Social Contexts.
- As links for readings available online.
- Those marked * are available for presentation by students.

Be aware that the list of readings is not final until the week preceding the relevant class; the scheduling of specific topics is also subject to adjustment as we move through the semester.

Jump to week: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15.

Week 1
Jan 10	no Monday or Tuesday classes this week
Jan 12	Introduction: course content and requirements Silver & Miller, ch. 1 Ives Goddard (2004). Endangered knowledge: What we can learn from Native American languages. AnthroNotes 25.1. [pdf] Melissa Meyer, et al. (2001). Indian history and culture. Oxford Companion to U.S. History. [pdf; entire book in html] Language reports Guide to choosing a language [pdf]
Week 2
Jan 17	Languages: overview of the languages of the Americas Silver & Miller, ch. 14 Lyle Campbell (1997). The origin of American Indian languages. American Indian languages: the historical linguistics of Native America, Oxford University Press. [pdf, ch. 3] Ives Goddard (1974). The Delaware language, past and present. A Delaware Indian symposium. Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. Anthropological series, number 4. Harrisburg. Pp. 103-109. [pdf]
Jan 19	Loanwords: language contact through borrowings and placenames Silver & Miller, §§ 11.6, 13.4 - 13.5 Mark Monmonier (1995). Excerpt, pp. 65-71. Drawing the line: Maps and controversy. Henry Holt, New York. [pdf] Robert Oswalt (1994). History through the words brought to California by the Fort Ross colony. In Leanne Hinton, Flutes of fire, pp. 101-105. [pdf]
Week 3
Jan 24	Sounds: articulation and phonetic alphabets Physics/Physiology, Consonant Voicing/Place, Consonant Manner, and Vowels. Language Samples Project, University of Arizona. Sound clips in dozens of languages, including all the IPA symbols. UCLA Phonetics Lab Data.
Jan 26	Phonetic alphabets: varying systems and their interpretation Silver & Miller, appendix I Issues in the transcription of adopted languages Bring examples of your language's orthography
Week 4
Jan 31	Phonological alternations: manipulation of sound structure Silver & Miller, §§ 2.7, 6.3, 6.6 Josie White Eagle (1982). Teaching scientific inquiry and the Winnebago language. IJAL 48, 306-319. [pdf]
Feb 2	Syllables and accent: linguistic prosody van der Hulst, Harry (2011). Pitch Accent Systems. The Blackwell Companion to Phonology, ch. 42. [pdf] read for general ideas, especially §2 Student contributions Bring examples of syllable structure in your language See what you can find out about stress, accent, or tone
Week 5
Feb 7	Words: their internal structure Silver & Miller, ch. 2 Anderson, Stephen R. (2003). Morphology. Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, vol. III, pp. 78-83. MacMillan. [html]
Feb 9	Winnebago verbs: morphology and phonological rules Review the last section of the White Eagle reading. [pdf] Handout on morphological operations
Week 6
Feb 14	Case marking and word order: syntactic organization Marianne Mithun (1991). Active/agentive case marking and its motivations. Language 67, 510-546. [pdf; read pp. 514-521 only.] Mark C. Baker (1988). Noun incorporation [excerpt, pp. 76-79]. Incorporation: a theory of grammatical function changing. University of Chicago Press. [pdf]
Feb 16	Discourse structure: organizing information David Shaul (1988). Topic and information structure in a Hopi radio commercial. IJAL 54, 96-105. [pdf] * Ives Goddard (1990). Aspects of the topic structure of Fox narratives: Proximate shifts and the use of overt and inflectional NPs. IJAL 56, 317-340. [pdf] *
Week 7
Feb 21	Lexical semantics: the meaning of words Silver & Miller, §§ 3.1 - 3.5 Geoffrey Pullum (1991). The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax. Chapter 19 of The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax and other irreverent essays on language. University of Chicago Press. Pp. 159-171. [pdf] * Charles J. Fillmore (1983). How to know whether you’re coming or going. In Essays on Deixis, ed. by Gisa Rauh. Gunter Narr Verlag, Tübingen. Pp. 219-227. [pdf]
Feb 23	Categorization: dividing up the world Silver & Miller, §§ 3.6 - 3.10 Kinship diagrams 1, 2 Leanne Hinton (1994). "Slapping with the mouth" and other interesting words. Flutes of fire, pp. 133-137. [pdf]
Week 8
Feb 28	Linguistic relativism: Whorf and his ideas Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956). The relation of habitual thought and behavior to language. Language, thought, and reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. John B. Carroll, pp. 134-159. [pdf] * Terry Au (2001). Language and thought. The MIT Encylopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. [html] Paul Kay (2001). Color categorization. The MIT Encylopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. [html]
Mar 1	Linguistic relativism: responses and nuances Steven Pinker (1994). Mentalese. The Language Instinct. MIT Press. [pdf, pp. 55-73]. * George Lakoff (1987). Whorf and relativism. Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. University of Chicago Press. [pdf, pp. 304-337]. *
Week 9
Mar 13	Language relatedness: detecting relationships among languages Donald A. Ringe (2003). Language change: Some basics. Class handout, University of Pennsylvania. [pdf] Johanna Nichols (1997). Modeling Ancient Population Structures and Movement in Linguistics. Annual Review of Anthropology 26, 359-384. [pdf] Bronwyn
Mar 15	Language change: development over time; example of Tupi-Guaraní Silver & Miller, §§ 12.1 - 12.2 Wallace Chafe (1984). How to say They Drank in Iroquois. Extending the rafters: Interdisciplinary approaches to Iroquoian studies, ed. Michael K. Foster, Jack Campisi, and Marianne Mithun. SUNY Press, Albany, pp. 301-311. [pdf] Bronwyn
Week 10
Mar 20	Amerind: a radical hypothesis Silver & Miller, § 12.7 Elizabeth Pennisi (2002). Speaking in tongues. Science, February 27 (vol. 303), pp. 1321-1323. [pdf] Joseph Greenberg and Merritt Ruhlen (1992). Linguistic origins of Native Americans. Scientific American 267, 94-99 (November 1992). [pdf] Joseph Greenberg (1987). Appendix D. Language in the Americas. Stanford University Press, pp. 378-89. [pdf]
Mar 22	Challenges: evaluating the hypothesis Ives Goddard (1987). Review of Greenberg 1987, Language in the Americas. Current Anthropology 28.5 (December 1987), 656-657 [pdf; also contains other material] * Howard Berman (1992). A comment on the Yurok and Kalapuya data in Greenberg’s Language in the Americas. IJAL 58.2, 230-233. [pdf] * Lyle Campbell (1988). Review of Greenberg 1987, Language in the Americas. Language 64, 591-615. [pdf] Lee
Week 11
Mar 27	Diffusion: the spread of features in linguistic areas Silver & Miller, §§ 12.3 - 12.6
Mar 29	Linguistic paleontology: reconstructing past societies Silver & Miller, §§ 13.1 - 13.3 Leanne Hinton (1994). What language can tell us about history. Flutes of fire, pp. 87-93. [pdf] Emily
Week 12
Apr 3	Language contact: influence from language to language Silver & Miller, §§ 11.1 - 11.6, 11.7 William Bright (1979). Notes on Hispanisms. IJAL 45, 267-271. [pdf] Emily review Spanish loanwords in Kashaya
Apr 5	no class today
Week 13
Apr 10	Multilingualism: societies in which multiple languages are spoken Silver & Miller, ch. 9-10 , §7.3 Simon Romero (2012). Memo from Paraguay: An indigenous language with unique staying power. New York Times, March 12. [pdf] Carroll Barber (1982). Trilingualism in an Arizona Yaqui village. Bilingualism in the Southwest (2nd edition), ed. by Paul Turner. University of Arizona Press. [pdf, pp. 281-304] Leah
Apr 12	Written language: before and after European contact Silver & Miller, ch. 8, §7.4 Lawler (2006): Claim of Oldest New World Writing Excites Archaeologists, Science 313, p. 1551 [pdf]
Week 14
Apr 17	Literature and translation: traditional forms and modern translations Silver & Miller, ch. 5
Apr 19	Government policies: laws and their consequences Jon Reyhner (1992). Policies toward American Indian languages: A historical sketch. Language loyalties: A source book on the Official English controversy, ed. James Crawford. University of Chicago Press, pp. 41-51. [pdf] * Leanne Hinton (1994). The Native American Languages Act. Flutes of fire, pp. 181-187. [pdf] *
Week 15
Apr 24	Language preservation: efforts to preserve and revive languages W. Wayt Gibbs (2002). Saving dying languages. Scientific American, August, pp. 78-85. [pdf] Leah Sarah Grey Thomason (2007). At a loss for words. Natural History vol. 116, issue 10. [pdf] * Leanne Hinton (1994). Keeping the languages alive. Flutes of fire, pp. 221-233. [pdf] Lee
Apr 26	Reading day