BABBLE
Newsletter of the University of South Carolina Linguistics Program
Fall 1998

Check out our previous issues in Babble Archives

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Word from the Director
As you can see from the banner above, our program newsletter has a new look. While the content categories have not changed that much, the change in style is intended to signal some significant developments in the Program. Prominent among these is our newly redesigned website (www.cla.sc.edu/LING/index.html), which now hosts links to faculty, course information, program activities, students, alumni, programs, specializations, and library collections. If you haven’t yet explored the site, you should. And if you have, you should check back regularly, as new information is being added all the time.
Some other significant developments this past semester include: the addition of 2 new core faculty, 1 new consulting faculty member, and 2 adjunct core faculty; the inauguration of a professional development workshop series designed to address the mentoring needs of our graduate students; the introduction of 2 new courses (with more on the way); changes in the TEFL Certificate (to be announced soon); reciprocal Ph.D. minor agreements with Experimental Psychology and Comparative Literature (with more on the way); and the inauguration of a web-based refereed working papers journal in cooperation with the Linguistics Dept. at UNC-Chapel Hill. I hope you like the changes that you’re seeing, and that you will be even more pleased with the changes yet to come.

— Stan Dubinsky

Carolina Working Papers in Linguistics
USC graduate students in Linguistics are initiating a format for students and faculty at USC and UNC to publish their work. The first issue of the working papers will be web based, but the editors are considering printing hard copies for future editions. More information, including a call for papers, can be found on the Linguistics webpage under Carolina Working Papers in Linguistics.

Professional Development Workshops
Program director Stan Dubinsky conducted a series of professional development workshops this semester. So far, topics have included publishing research, where students learned how to move from developing a research idea to presenting it at a conference to initiating steps for getting published, and writing a curriculum vita, where students were able to present their own c.v.’s and receive suggestions. Future topics will include non- academic careers in Linguistics, and ESL teaching opportunities.

Colloquium Series
Three USC faculty members and one invited guest gave presentations as part of this fall’s colloquium series. Speakers included:
Laura Ahearn "Grammatical agency: Love, marriage, and discourse in Nepal"
Reiko Mazuka (Duke U.) "Learning to speak with ‘mora’: Development of mora-timed rhythm in Japanese language acquisition"

Kurt Goblirsch "Consonant shifts and the history of Germanic"

Eric Holt "Vowel harmony in Asturiano, a dialect spoken in Spain"

Colloquium speakers for Spring 1999 include:
Aaron Broadwell (SUNY Albany) "Directional particles in Choctaw"
William Davies (U. of Iowa) "Madurese focus questions: When long distance is a really local call"

Aydin Durgunoglu (U. of Minnesota-Duluth.) "Literacy development in a multilingual context"

Charles Kisseberth. Topic TBA.

Anatoly Liberman. (U. of Minnesota) "Where do words come from?"

Kemp Williams (Florida International U.) Topic TBA.

New Faculty
Several new faculty members joined the ranks of the Linguistics Program this semester, or have altered their previous status. Laura Ahearn (Anthropology) has moved from consulting to core faculty. Eric Holt (Spanish) joins the University and the Linguistics Program this year as a core faculty member. Darrell Dernoshek (Spanish) has been added as consulting faculty. And two adjunct core faculty have also joined the program, Charles Kisseberth (U of Tel Aviv) and Farida Cassimjee (Benedict College).
Laura Ahearn is a linguistic and cultural anthropologist (Ph.D. Michigan 1994) who works on issues of gender, kinship, and marriage in Nepal. Her most recent project is a book, Invitations to Love: Literacy, Love Letters, and Social Change, which is about the novel courtship practice of love letter writing in the village where she was a Peace Corps volunteer for several years in the early 1980's. She is also interested in agency, constraints on meaning in Nepali women's songfests, and the changing meanings and values surrounding childbirth in Nepal.
Farida Cassimjee has taught African literature at the University of Illinois and phonology at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. She is currently Associate Professor at Benedict College as well as being Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of South Carolina. Her teaching and research have combined both the study of African literature and the study of African languages, particularly phonology. In addition, she has broad interests in issues of multiculturalism, feminism, anthropological linguistics, and the study of the African diaspora.
Professor Cassimjee has also published two major books on the tonal pattern of languages of her native South Africa: Venda and Isixhosa. In addition, she has collaborated extensively with her husband, Professor Charles W. Kisseberth, on several Bantu languages (particularly Shingazidja, Mijikenda, and Emakhuwa).

Darrell Dernoshek received his doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh in 1996, with a dissertation titled "The Effects of a Reductive Grammar Approach Versus a Traditional Grammar Approach on Middle School Spanish I Classes". Professor Dernoshek’s research interests lie in the areas of Spanish Applied Linguistics, Spanish Language Methodology and Pedagogy, Spanish Theoretical Linguistics, and Translation Studies. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in Spanish language, Spanish linguistics and Spanish applied linguistics, and supervises student teachers.

Eric Holt received his doctorate from Georgetown University in 1997, with a dissertation titled "The Role of the Listener in the Historical Phonology of Spanish and Portuguese: An Optimality-Theoretic Account". Professor Holt’s research interests lie in the areas of phonology, historical linguistics, and dialectology. He teaching interests are: Spanish language, composition and culture; Spanish/Hispanic linguistics; linguistic theory; and Portuguese language.

Charles W. Kisseberth taught at the University of Illinois from 1969 until 1996, at which time he took early retirement, but remains Emeritus Professor of Linguistics. In 1996 he became Professor of Linguistics at Tel Aviv University. He will be commuting between Tel Aviv and South Carolina, where he and his wife, Farida Cassimjee, have taken up residence.
The major focus of Prof. Kisseberth's research and teaching is theoretical phonology. His work on theoretical phonology in the 1970's contains the seeds for the current revolution in phonological theory, Optimality Theory. Together with Michael Kenstowicz, he published the standard textbook on Classical Generative Phonology in 1979. He is currently writing a new textbook that seeks to guide the student through Generative Phonology and into Optimality Theory.
The major empirical focus of Prof. Kisseberth's research for many years has been the languages of Africa, particularly the Bantu languages of eastern and southern Africa. He has focused particularly on tone. While he has published widely in this area, several book length monographs are currently in preparation dealing with a variety of Bantu tone systems. In addition, he has recently co-edited, with Larry Hyman, "Theoretical aspects of Bantu tone" (CSLI, 1998).

New Students
Several new students enrolled in the Linguistics Program this semester. Some of them have offered to share their backgrounds and interests.
Craig Callender was born in New Orleans and grew up in a small town near New Orleans. After getting a B.A. in German from LSU he spent three years in Germany, where he studied translation and spent some time working as a translator at a computer consulting firm, and as an English teacher at a German community college.
Elizabeth Cassagne is a first-year M.A. student from New Orleans. She received a B.A. in English and Linguistics at Ole Miss. After attending law school for a year she decided to go back to Linguistics. She is interested in psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics but would like to find a job outside the university setting.

Matt Ciscel was born in Houston and raised in Memphis. He has a B.A. from UT Knoxville and an M.A. from Iowa, both in German. He has spent about four years total living in Europe, mostly in Marburg, Germany, as a student and in Chisinau, Moldova, as an English teacher. In addition, he has spent a couple years of his life as an optician, mostly doing optical lab work. Last summer, he got married and moved back to the South after an absence of six years.

Angela Green is a South Carolina native who earned an M.A. in English from Winthrop University in Rock Hill, SC in 1984. She has taught English for the past 16 years, most recently at Lee University in Cleveland, TN where she was the Freshman Composition Director. She has two children, Jordan who is 11 and Brittany who is 9.

Theresa McGarry is a Michigan native who earned a B.A. in French at MSU and an M.A. in TESOL at Temple Univ. of Japan, Osaka. She has been an ESL teacher for a long time in a few different places, and is interested in SLA. She describes herself as "just nosy about stuff in general."

Chalmers van Deusen received a BA in German and an MA in Econ at Clemson. He then studied Linguistics at USC for one year (1981-82) but transferred to the University of Washington and got an MA in Germanics. He also spent one year studying Germanic Linguistics at Munich under German Academic Exchange Service (1984-85).

New Courses
Two new courses have been added to the Linguistics Program’s graduate course offerings. In Spring 2000, Laura Ahearn will be teaching a course titled "Language as Social Action" (Ling 747), a course which she taught at the University of Michigan.
The purpose of this course is to develop a framework for viewing language as a social, cultural, and political matrix, a form of action through which social relations, cultural forms, ideology, and consciousness are constituted. Topics covered include: models of language as action; why language and culture cannot be viewed as shared systems of meaning; the sociolinguistic division of labor; the interactional construction of social actors and of reference; meaning and intentionality; cultural inference and presupposition; language and the reproduction of ideology; linguistic hegemony; the reproduction of interactional style; linguistic and cultural polyphony; conversation analysis; language, gender, and sexuality; agency, resistance, and the emergence of cultural meanings.

In addition, Donald Cooper will be teaching a course in Applied English Phonetics (LING 715). Since the sounds of one's native language inevitably constitute a phonetic reference when we learn or teach that language or others, Applied English Phonetics is designed to provide students with an objective and systematic frame of reference for American English pronunciation. The acoustic description of English sounds provides this objective reference. At the same time, it also specifies one aspect of the goals of instruction in the English language, for the teaching of English as a native or foreign language. The textbook is the most up to date and comprehensive study of American English speech,"Acoustics of American English Speech", by Olive, Greenwood, and Coleman. It was published by researchers at AT&T Bell Laboratories. Students will gain laboratory experience in sound spectrography of speech in order to compare their own speech objectively with general American English pronunciation. The course will cover the elements of phonetics with an emphasis on acoustics, the sounds of English and their contextual variation, and the nature and conditions of acoustic variability of English pronunciation."

Faculty Research
The following faculty members presented and published their work this fall. Also listed are earlier presentations and publications omitted from previous editions of Babble.
Laura Ahearn

The Main Meaning of Love is Life Success: Constructions of Emotion in Nepali Love Letters. Paper to be presented at Society for Psychological Anthropology Southeastern Reunion, Emory University. 1999.
A Twisted Rope Binds My Waist: Locating Constraints on Meaning in a Tij Songfest. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. Volume 8, Number 1. 1998.
Reading, Writing, and Romance: Literacy, Love Letters, and Agency in a Nepali Village. Texas Linguistic Forum. Volume 39, 248-258. 1998.
Love Keeps Afflicting Me: Agentive Discourse in Nepali Love Letters. Paper to be presented at a session entitled, "Permutations of Desire: Sex, Love, and the Longing for Intimacy," American Anthropological Association, December 1998.
Farida Cassimjee
Isixhosa Tonology: An Optimal Domains Theory Analysis. 1998.
Farida Cassimjee and Charles Kisseberth
Optimal Domains Theory and Bantu tonology: a case study from Isixhosa and Shingazidja. In Kisseberth and Hyman (eds.), Theoretical Aspects of Bantu Tone, 33-132. Stanford: CLSI. 1998.
Optimality Theory and the Phonology-Syntax Interface: Evidence from Xitsonga. Paper presented at the Mid-continental Workshop on Phonology IV. Ann Arbor, Michigan October 1998.
Darrell Dernoshek
A Reductive Grammar Approach to the Teaching of Ser and Estar to Anglophone Learners. Paper presented to the Asociacion Espanola de Linguistica Aplicada, La Rioja, Spain. April 1998.
Rev. of Cohesion and retorica en la conversacion by Jordan, Isolde J. in Hispania. Wilhemsfeld: Gottfried Egert Verlag. 1997.
Stanley Dubinsky
(with William Richey). Assessing the stylistic proclivity of the poet: Evidence from the -ed/-’d alternation. Session on Poetic Language, Division on Linguistic Approaches to Literature. Paper to be presented at the MLA Annual Meeting, San Francisco. December 1998.
Easy clauses to mistake as relatives: The syntax of postnominal infinitives in English. Paper presented at Western Conference on Linguistics (WECOL), Arizona State University. October 1998.
(with Junko Baba). The structure and evolution of polite expressions. Paper presented at the Southern Japan Seminar, Hilton Head, SC. October 1998.
Eric Holt
Underspecification, constriction-based vowel geometry and scalar raising in Asturiano. Paper to be presented at the annual meeting of Linguistic Society of America, Los Angeles. January 1999.
The moraic status of consonants from Latin to Hispano-Romance: The case of obstruents. Paper presented at the Second Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, Ohio State University, October 1998. To be published in the proceedings.
How 'ch' and 'll' both derive from Latin CL, PL, FL. Alternate paper for the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, San Francisco. December 1998.
Kurt Goblirsch
The Types of Gemination in West Germanic. New Insights in Germanic Linguistics I. Ed. Irmengard Rauch and Gerald F. Carr. New York: Lang. (Forthcoming article in conference proceedings). 1998.
Consonant Strength and Syllable Structure in Swedish and Bavarian. Interdigitations: Essays for Irmengard Rauch. Ed. Gerald F. Carr, Wayne Harbert and Lihua Zhang. New York: Lang. (Forthcoming Article in Festschrift). 1998.
Consonant Shifts in the Germanic Languages. Paper to be presented at the Modern Language Association Conference, San Francisco, December 1998.
Charles Kisseberth
Theoretical Aspects of Bantu Tone. Charles Kisseberth and Larry Hyman (eds). Stanford: CSLI (Center for the Study of Language and Information). 1998.
Michael Montgomery
(with Thomas Nunnally). From the Gulf States and Beyond: Studies in Honor of Lee Pederson. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. 1998.
(with Robert J Gregg). The Scots Language in Ulster. In The History of Scots, Charles Jones (ed.), 569-622. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 1997.
(with Maria F Garcia-Bermejo Giner). Regional British English from the Nineteenth Century: Evidence from Emigrant Letters. In Current Methods in Dialectology, Alan S. Thomas (ed.), 167-183. University of Wales. 1997.
A Tale of Two Georges: The Language of Irish India Traders in Colonial North America. In Jeffrey Kallen (ed.), Focus on Ireland, 227-254. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 1998.
John Dinsmoor: Another Ulster-Scot-American Poet. Ullans 6.50-54. 1998.
Foreword to Ulster Scots: A Grammar of the Historical written and Spoken Language, by Philip Robinson. Belfast: Ullans Press. 1997.
Speech. In Carroll Van West (ed.), Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, 875-876. Nashville: Rutledge Hill Press. 1998.
Ulster-American Missing Links: Evidence from Vernacular Poetry. Paper presented at Ulster-American Heritage Symposium, Cullowhee, North Carolina. July 1998.
(with Steve Nagle). Back to the Future: The Development of the Future Perfect in English. Paper presented at International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, Manchester, England. August 1998.
The Myths of Appalachian English. Invited talk at Appalachian Perspectives series, Maryville College, TN. September 1998.
The Celtic Element in American English. Paper presented at Celtic Englishes II Symposium, Potsdam, Germany. September 1998.
Bruce L. Pearson
Bruce L. Pearson (professor emeritus) spent three days in August conducting a linguistic workshop in Miami OK for the Wyandotte Tribe and several neighboring tribes. In September he spent a week at the Museum of Civilization in Ottawa, Canada, doing research on the Wyandotte language, and in October he attended the Iroquois Research Conference near Albany NY.

Student Research
The following students presented their research this fall.
Rick Hallett

(with Megan Melancon, LSU). Variation in Southern Address Terms. Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation in English and Other Languages (NWAVE) Conference, Athens, GA. October 1998.
Foreigner Talk in the ESL Classroom. Paper presented at the Southeast Regional Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (SETESOL) Conference, Louisville, KY. October 1998.
Rachel Hayes
An OT Analysis of Re-Ranking Stages in the Acquisition of Japanese as a Foreign Language. Paper presented at SECOL, Atlanta. November 1998.
Larry L. LaFond
Titanic Tales: ESL competence and the Gricean maxims. Paper presented at the Southeast Regional TESOL Conference, Louisville, KY. October 1998.
L1 Attrition and the revised hierarchical model of L2 acquisition. Paper presented at the Second Language Research Forum (SLRF), University of Hawaii. October 1998.
Alumna Profile: Janet Fuller
Janet Fuller earned a Ph.D. in Linguistics from USC in 1997 with a dissertation titled "Pennsylvania Dutch with a Southern Touch: A Theoretical Model of Language Contact and Change". She is currently an Assistant Professor at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, where she teaches Sociolinguistics, Discourse Analysis, Pragmatics, and Language and Gender. She also directs theses on those topics, as well as topics in second language acquisition and teaching (especially having to do with Interlanguage Pragmatics).
The program at SIU is an M.A. program, with about 2/3 of the students doing an MA in TESOL, the other 1/3 doing an M.A. in Applied Linguistics. Many of the Applied Linguistics track students go on elsewhere for their PhDs, and Fuller is excited about being able to work with students who want academic careers. There is also an undergraduate major and minor at SIU, and Fuller teaches an introduction to the nature of language course in that program.

Fuller’s research interests are in language contact and discourse analysis. She wrote a dissertation on Pennsylvania German and is currently working on more analyses of those data as well as some German-English codeswitching data. She has three forthcoming papers: one in American Speech on internal and external factors in Pennsylvania German development; one on discourse markers in Pennsylvania German to appear in the proceedings of the 6th International Pragmatics Association conference; and a paper on changes in word order in Pennsylvania German which will appear in a volume titled Papers in Sociolingusitics: NWAVE 26.

She will also be presenting a paper this spring (with Heike Lehnert, who is currently a student at SIU) at the 2nd International Symposium on Bilingualism on noun phrases in German-English codeswitching. Last but not least, she will be on a panel of young researchers talking about fieldwork in the new century at SECOL in Norfolk in April.

Fuller currently has an internal research grant (provided by the Office of Research and Administration at SIU) to study discourse markers in different genres of conversation by both native and non-native speakers. This project combines a lot of her interests: bilingualism, speech styles, discourse markers.