SPRING 2001 SERIES

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Sohini Ray

Senior Fellow
Center for the Study of World Religions
Harvard University

Trigraphia in the Meitei Language: a Linguistic, Cultural and Historical Analysis

Tuesday,   April 3, 2001  6:30pm
Language Building 310

Sohini Ray received her Ph. D. in Anthropology from the University of California at Los Angeles in September 2000.  Her dissertation entitled The Sacred Alphabet and the Divine Body: the Case of Meitei Mayek in North-Eastern India was based on fieldwork in Manipur. 

 

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Peter Hallman

Visiting Assistant Professor
University of North Texas

The Syntactic Function of Arity Changing Morphology

Monday,  March 26, 2001  6:30 p.m.
Language Building 202

Peter Hallman is visiting professor of linguistics in the UNT Department of English.  His current research concentrates on the relationships between morphology and syntax and between syntax and semantics.  The first focuses on templatic morphology in Semitic and how it reflects its syntactic context, and the second on how quantification and case interact.   He has previously worked extensively on verb-movement, in particular verb-second in Germanic and its alternations with verb-final and other non-verb-second orders.  His presentation compares passivization in Lebanese Arabic and English and draws conclusions about the morphosyntactic composition of the passivization process and the syntactic role of arity changing morphology in general.

 

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Salikoko S. Mufwene
Professor and Chair
Department of Linguistics
University of Chicago
 

English in the USA:  "Ebonics" and Its White-American Kin

Wednesday, February 7th, 6:30 p.m.
EESAT 125
 
 

Professor Mufwene's recent research has focused on language evolution, including questions of language vitality and the development of creoles and of other varieties of European languages in their former settlement and exploitation colonies. His book on the subject matter is titled The Ecology of Language Evolution (in press, Cambridge UP). He has authored over 150 essays on these topics and on the semantics and morphosyntactic aspects of English, creoles, and Bantu languages.