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<font face="Palatino">Carlos Molina-Vital, Visiting Assistant
Professor of Linguistics, Hampshire College, to give JOB TALK:<font
face="Palatino"> "</font>Directionality, Language Change, and
the Expression of Subjectivity in Ancash Quechua Verbal
Morphology"<br>
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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.<br>
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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.<br>
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Paula Harmon, Administrative Assistant <br>
<div class="moz-signature"><small> School of Cognitive Science <br>
Hampshire College<br>
893 West Street Amherst, MA 01002 <br>
phone: 413.559.5502 <br>
fax: 413.559.5438 <br>
<a href="http://cs.hampshire.edu">http://cs.hampshire.edu</a></small>
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