Ling 241 Schedule

Ling 241 Schedule of topics and readings

The schedule below shows the topics and assigned readings for the Spring 2008 offering of Linguistics 241: Language in Native America, at the University of Pennsylvania. See also the course syllabus and the pages with links for homework and Wikipedia.

Click on the links for the online lecture notes and additional web-accessible information.
- For some special characters, your browser must be able to read 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 our Silver & Miller textbook, American Indian Languages: Cultural and Social Contexts; or as links for other readings.

Be aware that the readings are not final until the week preceding the relevant class; the scheduling of specific topics is also subject to adjustment.

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

Week 1
Jan 15	no Monday or Tuesday classes this week
Jan 17	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]
Week 2
Jan 22	Language families: 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 24	Loanwords: language contact through borrowings and placenames Silver & Miller, §§ 11.6, 13.4 - 13.5 Mark Manmonier (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 29	Sounds: articulation 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 31	Phonetic alphabets: varying systems and their interpretation Silver & Miller, appendix I Issues in the transcription of adopted languages
Week 4
Feb 5	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] Lindsay
Feb 7	Syllables and feet: linguistic prosody and stress placement Student contributions
Week 5
Feb 12	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 14	Winnebago verbs: morphology and phonological rules Review the last section of the White Eagle reading. [pdf] Handout on morphological operations
Week 6
Feb 19	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 21	Discourse structure: organizing information David Shaul (1988). Topic and information structure in a Hopi radio commercial. IJAL 54, 96-105. [pdf] Emma 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 26	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 28	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
Mar 4	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 6	Linguistic relativism: responses and nuances Steven Pinker (1994). Mentalese. The Language Instinct. MIT Press. [pdf, pp. 55-73]. Jill 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]. Tegan
Week 9
Mar 18	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]
Mar 20	Language change: development over time 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] Melika
Week 10
Mar 25	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 27	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] Lucy
Week 11
Apr 1	Diffusion: the spread of features in linguistic areas Silver & Miller, §§ 12.3 - 12.6
Apr 3	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] Silvia
Week 12
Apr 8	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] Danielle review Spanish loanwords in Kashaya
Apr 10	Multilingualism: societies in which multiple languages are spoken Silver & Miller, ch. 9-10 , §7.3 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] Anna
Week 13
Apr 15	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]
Apr 17	Literature and translation: traditional forms and modern translations Silver & Miller, ch. 5
Week 14
Apr 22	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]
Apr 24	Language preservation: attempts to preserve and revive languages W. Wayt Gibbs (2002). Saving dying languages. Scientific American, August, pp. 78-85. [pdf] Sarah Grey Thomason (2007). At a loss for words. Natural History vol. 116, issue 10. [pdf] Agnieszka Leanne Hinton (1994). Keeping the languages alive. Flutes of fire, pp. 221-233. [pdf] Jim
Week 15
Apr 29	Student presentations
May 1	Reading day