Colloquium talk by Marianne Mithun (UC Santa Barbara)

Converging methodologies: Making bigger sense out of the smaller stuff

Department Colloquium
Monday, April 27, 2009
4:00 PM to 5:30 PM
Dwinelle 182

Certain phenomena can be easy to miss in a language when they are below the consciousness of speakers. These can range from abstract, discourse-level patterns to nearly inaudible markers of syntactic structure. When we overlook them, we can miss a chance to learn something of what is special about a particular language on the one hand, and how grammatical systems function and evolve over time on the other.

Certain markers are pervasive in the spontaneous speech of skilled native Mohawk speakers, particularly in lively, highly interactive conversation. But they can be nearly imperceptible auditorily, and they are routinely missing from English to Mohawk translations and from pedagogical materials prepared by these same speakers. They are also conspicuously rare in the speech of otherwise remarkable second language learners. A combination of technical, analytic, and conceptual methodologies helps us to make sense of this constellation of nearly a dozen markers, all of which surface as little more than syllabic n in spontaneous speech.