A number of comparative, superlative, and elative suffixes are longer than they would be if

they had simply undergone regular sound changes, e.g. the Latin superlative/elative sux

-issimus. Closer inspection reveals that they have developed in a parallel fashion. The

development involves the analogical extension of a longer sound pattern from a small class

of forms to a large one. I suggest how we might relate this to the semantics of adjective

gradation.

An event in honor of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. sponsored by the UK Department of Linguistics

There has been a Chinese population in Cambodia for more than 500 years and contact with Cambodia was first mentioned by the eminent China emissary Zhou Daguan as early as 1296 during his travels there. Despite a relatively high degree of integration into to the majority Cambodia culture, ethnic Chinese have maintained their own social organizations, news media, and schools.  The Cambodian Chinese population is organized around five Huiguan (会馆) ‘congregations’  corresponding to the southern-origin Chinese groups that comprise it: Chaozhou 潮州会馆,  Cantonese 广肇会馆，Hakka 客属会馆, Fujian 福建会馆, and Hainan 海南会馆.  Until the Khmer Rouge forced closure of Chinese schools in the mid seventies, the language of Chinese education followed the dialects of each association.  However, in recent times Mandarin has become the lingua franca of the Sino-Cambodia community, though among ethnic Chinese there are few if any native speakers of Mandarin.

Through examination of survey data and recorded interviews, this presentation sketches a picture of the contemporary Chinese community in Cambodian and outlines some of the language change occurring by contact with the majority Khmer langauge. The paper gives special attention to examples from the local Cantonese.

EVENT SCHEDULE

12:00-12:25:  Gihyun Gal   (faculty mentor: Greg Stump).
12:25- 12:50:  Aaron Mueller   (faculty mentor: Mark Lauersdorf).
1:00-1:50: Corey Meeks   (faculty mentor: Jennifer Cramer).

ABSTRACTS

Gihyun Gal
Comblending in Korean neologisms with borrowing English words
This research focuses on an interesting type of word formation process in Korean that involves the combination of different morphological processes, namely compounding, blending, abbreviation and acronym. As previously shown, both of these processes are both very productive in Korean (Jung 1992, Seo 2013, Lee 2014). 'Comblending', a term I coined to describe this new process, draws from the above-mentioned processes and seem to be on the rise on the World Wide Web and on social media like Instagram. However, although they might be argued to arise from those sources, these new forms get integrated in current speech rather than just being used on the previously mentioned platforms. More importantly, in many of those neologisms also involve borrowings from English and include an agent-like word 족[dʒok], which means 'person or group of people'.
(1) Grup dʒok 'elders who keep on living like students' > grown-ups + dʒok
(2) BMW dʒok 'Office workers using public transport' > Bus Metro Walking + dʒok
(3) Naports dʒok 'People who enjoys sports after work' > 'night' [naɪt] + sports + dʒok
(4) Eomma cri 'interrupted PC user, usually by his/her mother' > Eomma ‘mother’+crisis
(5) Chilaryman 'person who still live with his parents' > child + salaryman
Such data raise questions relating to (1) the internal structure of these new complex words (2) the order of which the different processes come into play (3) the type of analysis that would appropriately describe this peculiar process and (4) whether we have instances of phonological overlapping or not. I will here examine these newly coined words from an argue that given the derived meanings, a purely morphological approach seem favorable. When the Korean neologisms are formed by either compound process or blend process, some sub-processes would be happened such as acronym or abbreviation before the neologisms are coined completely through compound or blend processes by Korean speakers on the World Wide Web or on social media. Because those two processes would be a sort of important process in order to form of the Korean neologisms productively. Through the neologisms, it is possibly to glance some tendencies of current Korean social situations. Because most of Korean neologisms mirror of thoughts of Korean aspect such as lifestyle, a desire of education, social economy situation and characters of people.

Aaron Mueller
Lexical and Semantic Shift in the Linguistic Construction of Social Gender: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Written U.S. English
This study aims to track shifts in linguistic constructions of gender in written U.S. discourse using the Corpus of Historical American English (1810-2009). Lexical values were examined by dividing selected gender words by gender and by word type (e.g. male pronouns, female titles); per-million occurrences were observed by decade and word-type category. Semantic values were compared by decade through calculating mutual information and t-scores for select collocations. Preliminary results indicate that male words appear more frequently than female words for almost every word-type category; non-binary gender words appeared too infrequently for analysis. Semantically, men are associated with appearance, wealth, and power, and intellectual pursuits; women, mainly with appearance. Appearance was the main semantic association for all genders, though women exhibited this to a greater extent than men. Mutual information and t-scores varied less than was expected; this could suggest that linguistic constructs of these genders have changed little despite perceived sociocultural progress.

Corey Meeks
Creative production and pedagogy: Teaching and learning through documentary creation
As students and teachers transition into the modern classroom, we must understand how to teach and learn in new ways. Educators may teach the way they are taught, yet there are many reasons that suggest we cannot continue to teach as we have for the past several hundred years. Dr. Cramer experimented with the idea of teaching through creating in a class on American English (LIN/ENG 310), and she facilitated the creation of a documentary that would showcase our knowledge about dialectal variation in the United States. Ultimately, the class produced a roughly 20-minute film on the dialects of Kentucky, a topic selected and cultivated by the students themselves. Several teams did everything from scripting to video production and editing with minimal control from the instructor. By playing their roles, they were given a better reason to understand and internalize the material covered in the course compared to hearing it in a lecture or reading it from a book. We hope teachers will continue to experiment with the idea of teaching through creating, as the Italian enlightenment thinker Vico Giambattista said, "To know is to put together the elements of things."

When more than one person talks simultaneously, overlaps happen. Overlapping talk is a ubiquitous phenomenon found in any speech exchange systems (cf., Schegloff, 2000). However, when it comes to the second language acquisition (SLA) research, overlapping talk has seldom been taken up as an object of investigation.

In this presentation, I will present my preliminary investigation of overlapping talk observed during pair work activities in elementary Japanese language classrooms at a U.S. university. The data come from a corpus of 67 video-recorded pair work cases. A conversation-analytic (CA) framework is used to closely examine the occurrences of overlapping talk on a turn-by-turn basis.

By drawing on the ‘unusual’ characteristics of overlapping talk found in the database, I will discuss whether or not these pair work activities afford opportunities for SLA.

Through this presentation, I would also like to discuss how CA, established by sociologists, such as Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schegloff, can be applied to the analysis of L2 interaction data in order to advance our understanding of the SLA process.

This presentation details a case study of two competing participles of the Spanish verb matar ‘to kill’ (matado/muerto ‘killed/dead’). I provide quantitative data from corpora of modern Spanish that show that muerto ‘dead’ is the preferred form for matar in passive periphrastics. The use of the participle muerto (from the infinitive morir ‘to die’) in the paradigm of matar has long been considered a textbook example of verbal suppletion in Romance; however, I offer an alternate explanation. The objective of this analysis is to demonstrate that these two participles are best considered to be allomorphs of the same archimorpheme /to die/. The general premise of my claim is that agentivity determines the distribution of forms: an agentive reading triggers the participle matado, while a non-agentive reading triggers muerto. The nature of this particular instance of verbal allomorphy provides insight into the origins and maintenance of irregular verbal forms in language.