Program

Invited Speakers:

Samuel Akinbo, Evaluative morphology in Fungwa and cross-linguistic comparison, abstract here

Dr. Neda Todorović, Gitksan and reduced complement sizes

In this talk, I explore the sizes of clausal complements in Gitksan. As a primary diagnostic, I look at the available temporal interpretations. Gitksan is a language without temporal morphology. Bare predicates in Gitksan can receive present or past reading. Jóhannsdóttir and Matthewson (2007) capture these readings with a covert non-future Tense. However, bare predicates get future readings only with a marker dim, which in syntax combines with the non-future Tense. In this talk, I focus on the connection between the syntactic make-up of Gitksan complements and the availability of future-oriented readings. Assuming the non-future Tense in Gitksan, I show that the attested readings can only be captured if some of the complements project TPs, while the others do not. Instead, I propose that the observed patterns follow straightforwardly from Wurmbrand’s (2001 et seq.) idea that clausal complements are of different sizes – some complements are CPs, but some can project as little as vPs or VPs.

Dr. Miikka Silfverberg

In recent years, Computational Linguistics for the Indigenous languages of the Americas has grown into a lively research area. Computational tools are important because they can support language revitalization efforts in many ways, for example via Computer-Assisted Language Learning. These tools can also aid in language documentation efforts by facilitating digitization and annotation of datasets. A central challenge in computational modeling for Indigenous languages is the high morpheme-per-word ratio present in many of these languages. This challenge is exacerbated by the often small datasets which are available for training models. Models which can automatically analyze word structure and break down complex word forms into component-morphemes are, therefore, important building blocks in systems for Indigenous Computational Linguistics. The area of Computational Linguistics which deals with word structure is called Computational Morphology.  In this talk, I will review some of the most exciting work in Computational Morphology for Indigenous languages. I will also present ongoing work at UBC for Gitksan (an Indigenous language of the Canadian west coast) and applications of this work to language documentation.

Conference Program:

Schedule for all three conference days available here

Abstracts:

Session A

Session B

Session C

Session D

Session E

Poster Sessions:

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