[CS] Assistant Professor of Linguistics **CANDIDATE JOB TALK** Thursday, Feb. 6 at 5:00 in the ASH AUDITORIUM (snacks will be served!)

[Paula Harmon]

Carlos Molina-Vital, Visiting Assistant Professor of Linguistics, 
Hampshire College, to give JOB TALK:   "Directionality, Language Change, 
and the Expression of Subjectivity in Ancash Quechua Verbal Morphology"

Abstract: What is the relationship between the location of objects and 
the distinction between subjective and objective perspectives in events? 
In contrast to commonly studied Indo European languages, many indigenous 
languages display a system of suffixes that alter the meaning of a 
lexeme in order to derive subtle meaning distinctions. In this talk, I 
will concentrate on the analysis of three very common suffixes from 
Ancash Quechua (Central Andes, Peru): ingressive -yku, upwards  rku, and 
middle voice -ku. At an early historical stage the main directional 
contrast seems to have been modeled after a container-schema favoring 
the opposition between inside/down and outside/up, expressed with the 
proto-suffixes *-ya and *-ri, respectively. I will claim that * ku, 
originally a marker of volitional engagement, became fused to *-ya and 
*-ri to create the current forms  yku and  rku, respectively. 
Consequently, these forms went from a purely directional meaning to one 
that subjectively focuses on the motivation behind an event ( yku), and 
another that objectively focuses on the event as a completed entity ( 
rku). Finally, I will present some ideas about how this distinction 
influences efforts for standardization of an indigenous language.

Biography: Carlos Molina-Vital did his Ph.D. in Linguistics at Rice 
University. He specializes in language typology and universals, 
Usage-Based approaches to Linguistic Theory (Cognitive and Functional 
Linguistics), and Language Education (Spanish and Quechua). He has also 
done Linguistic Fieldwork in the Andes in Peru in 2009, 2011, and 2012. 
He is interested in the use of a functional grammatical description to 
the design of pedagogical grammars, especially regarding to the issue of 
standardization of indigenous languages with little or no written tradition.

-- 
Paula Harmon, Administrative Assistant
School of Cognitive Science
Hampshire College
893 West Street Amherst, MA 01002
phone: 413.559.5502
fax: 413.559.5438
http://cs.hampshire.edu
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