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Program Description Center for International Education |
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MAFLL ColloquiumFall 2009Friday, November 20, 12:00pm-1:30pm The talk focuses on the classifying morphemes in Ashéninka Perené, of the Kampan subgrouping of Arawak. It discusses the inventory of classifiers in Ashéninka, their morphosyntactic loci, semantics, functions, and origin, and presents the preliminary results from the fieldwork data collected in Ashéninka communities of eastern Peru. The results show that Ashéninka has an elaborate set of classifiers optionally assigned to nominal and verbal hosts. Noun classifiers categorize inanimate nouns in terms of their shape, dimensionality, consistency, and amount while the categorization of verbal classifiers is based on the semantic parameters of function, arrangement and amount. All are welcome! Please feel free to bring your lunch. Wednesday, November 11, 2:00pm Employing the contemporary literary theory of intertextuality for analyzing the author's use of the prophecy of Joel in the Acts of the Apostles (Hebrew Bible/OT 2:28-32 [-3:21]//parallel, New/Christian Testament Acts 2:1-42), this talk explores the authorial use of a previous literary text for addressing a new context. Intertexuality as such, it must be noted, has less to do with a narrow or restrictive concept of "literary influence," than with ways of accounting for the complex relationship of texts to texts, to interpretive traditions, to writers and readers, and to institutional contexts. In addition, intertextuality, cutting across different methodological and theoretical borders (including formalism, semiotics, narratology, poststructuralism, deconstruction, and other postmodern approaches, and disciplinary fields—such as, literature, film, architecture, ethnography, etc.), serves as a critical lens through which to view matters of ideology, subjectivity, the material production of meaning, and accountability. What such an approach to Acts 2 exposes for critical examination is that the New Testament author creates certain expectations for the reader in the narrative (for example, an openness for the elimination of ethnic, status, and gender barriers) that in the end remain unresolved and "unfulfilled" in the remaining narrative exposition. It is just such a tension in the text as this that provides fertile soil for evaluating the usefulness of "secular literary criticism" for biblical interpretation. Thursday, October 29, 3:30pm An internationally-known medieval scholar, Professor William Calin has authored eleven books and over a hundred articles and chapters in books. His areas of expertise include medieval literature (epic, romance, allegory); French poetry (Renaissance to the present); Occitan (Provençal), Anglo-Norman, and modern Breton literature; and Franco-British literary relations in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. His book, The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England received the American Library Association Outstanding Academic Book of the Year award in 1995. His most recent volumes include Minority Literatures and Modernism: Scots, Breton, and Occitan, 1920-1990 and The Twentieth-Century Humanist Critics: From Spitzer to Frye. His current project is The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval and Renaissance Scotland. Friday, October 9, 12:00pm - 1:30pm In the last fifteen years we've seen the rise of a branch of linguistics called documentary linguistics. The emergence of this discipline which is concerned with making and keeping records of the world's small languages coincided with the major changes in the technology of linguistic data representation and maintenance, alongisde with the growing awareness that linguistic documentation has stakeholders both in the endangered language communities and the academic community. This talk aims to discuss the agenda, methods, and tools of linguistic documentation, using by way of example the researcher's summer fieldtrip to the Peruvian Amazon. Spring 2009Wednesday, April 29, 1:30pm This presentation aims to introduce my part in a forthcoming co-taught MAFLL seminar (Spring of '09/'10). The seminar will be about literary theories and their application to both the Hebrew Bible (The Old Testament) and the Christian Bible (The New Testament). The part on the New Testament will be taught by Professor Demetrius Williams. This colloquium will focus on applying literary theories to selected texts from the book of Genesis. I will display some of the aesthetic functions and analytical tools of literary interpretation which stem from the dynamic, sequential nature of literary text. Upon introducing the literary theories, I will succinctly relate them to the dynamics of the literary text since it is the very bedrock of the literary theories in particular and of any text in general. The dynamics of the literary text will be first demonstrated on three "run-on lines" and a Hebrew children's poem. Subsequently, the literary theories will be applied to a sample of texts from the Hebrew Bible. Wednesday, April 15, 1:30pm When analyzing a spoken language, it is unwise to assume that sounds behave or are distributed consistently across the entire language; this is because social and historical factors influence language change unevenly across different types of words. In sign languages, distributional differences are also found between words with varying backgrounds (e.g. 'core' words, fingerspelled borrowings, classifiers). This presentation will examine some of the distributional differences for handshape across the ASL lexicon, focusing on which handshape features (e.g. joint positions, finger combinations) are used in various kinds of signs. Wednesday, April 8, 1:30pm Many languages use tone (differing levels of pitch) to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning. In languages such as Chinese or Thai, for example, each syllable of a word can carry its own tone. Many dialects of the Rhine valley originally made use of tone accent (also called pitch accent) in which there is a maximum of one tone per word, which is associated only with its stressed syllable. This talk will describe both sorts of tone systems and discuss theories of how they may have originated (a process sometimes referred to as tonogenesis).
This talk investigates the claim that children and adults process speech in the essentially same manner. For example, when the phrase nail~key is said as a compound word, do listeners respond as if they heard a new compound (nailkey) or as if they heard two familiar words (nail and key) said in a odd manner? The results show that adults and children respond differently to this questions, but that their answers are related in intriguing ways. Fall 2008Friday, November 21, 12:30pm Prototypical applicatives are derivational processes within the verbal morphology that add a peripheral participant e.g. a semantic recipient, goal, stimulus, location, source, associate to the set of core arguments. One of the most notable features of the typological profile of Kampan (Arawak) languages of Peru is the presence of elaborate applicative systems which include polyfunctional or generalized applicative markers referring to multiple thematic participants. The present study is concerned with the generalized applicative -ako 'with reference to' whose meaning and syntactic status have remained problematic in Kampanist literature. The talk will address the following issues:
The data for this paper mainly come from the collections of texts and research materials published by SIL linguists. Wednesday, November 19, 1:30pm This talk will examine the private and public figure of two canonical contemporary Latin American writers through their autobiographical writings.
Do you know how many languages are spoken in the USA? More than 230! Korean is one of them. In this paper I will discuss speech patterns of Korean speakers living in the U.S. We will see that U.S.-Korean exhibits code-switching; i.e., the alternating use of two or more languages in the same conversation. I will further show that the amount of code-switching differs between the generations of speakers and even within single generations depending on social and other environmental conditions. Wednesday, October 15, 1:30pm Black Feminist writer Audre Lorde writes: "When there is no connection at all between people, then anger is a way of bringing them closer together, of making contact." In this presentation, I will discuss the possibility of creating a multi-perspective classroom through the use of anger as a pedagogical tool. I will first examine my experience of growing up as a teenager in China when I had to work through my anger caused by the discrepancy between the inculcation of the official doctrines and an increasing awareness of alternative perspectives. Then I will examine an emotionally charged scene in a freshman composition class at UWM and analyze the different expressions of anger in the classroom. Finally, I will discuss what I could have done to unite the class through the transformative power of anger, rather than turning it into a divisive force that hinders learning and understanding. |
Master of Foreign Language and Literature, UW-Milwaukee, Curtin Hall, PO Box 413, Milwaukee, WI 53201 Send questions or comments to: mafll@uwm.edu © 2002, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Last Updated: November 17, 2009 |
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