When more than one person talks simultaneously, overlaps happen. Overlapping talk is a ubiquitous phenomenon found in any speech exchange systems (cf., Schegloff, 2000). However, when it comes to the second language acquisition (SLA) research, overlapping talk has seldom been taken up as an object of investigation.

In this presentation, I will present my preliminary investigation of overlapping talk observed during pair work activities in elementary Japanese language classrooms at a U.S. university. The data come from a corpus of 67 video-recorded pair work cases. A conversation-analytic (CA) framework is used to closely examine the occurrences of overlapping talk on a turn-by-turn basis.

By drawing on the ‘unusual’ characteristics of overlapping talk found in the database, I will discuss whether or not these pair work activities afford opportunities for SLA.

Through this presentation, I would also like to discuss how CA, established by sociologists, such as Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schegloff, can be applied to the analysis of L2 interaction data in order to advance our understanding of the SLA process.

This presentation details a case study of two competing participles of the Spanish verb matar ‘to kill’ (matado/muerto ‘killed/dead’). I provide quantitative data from corpora of modern Spanish that show that muerto ‘dead’ is the preferred form for matar in passive periphrastics. The use of the participle muerto (from the infinitive morir ‘to die’) in the paradigm of matar has long been considered a textbook example of verbal suppletion in Romance; however, I offer an alternate explanation. The objective of this analysis is to demonstrate that these two participles are best considered to be allomorphs of the same archimorpheme /to die/. The general premise of my claim is that agentivity determines the distribution of forms: an agentive reading triggers the participle matado, while a non-agentive reading triggers muerto. The nature of this particular instance of verbal allomorphy provides insight into the origins and maintenance of irregular verbal forms in language.

The Chatino people from Oaxaca, Mexico, believe that the departed begin a new life that is parallel to the world of the living, known in the Chatino language as Jlya^G.  In order to reach Jlya^G, the recently departed must traverse on a treacherous path that goes through mountains, rivers, and towns. Jlya^G  is a metaphysical place that corresponds to an actual location in our plane of existence found towards the northern part of the Chatino region in the municipality of Zenzontepec (coordinates 16° 32′ 0″ N, 97° 30′ 0″ W). 

Prayers, stories, myths, place, and performance are crucial elements in the practice and belief of the Chatino concept of the dead. In the Chatino town of San Marcos Zacatepec, when an adult dies, family members call an expert to perform a speech called Ti^A Su^A Kna^A or ‘prayer to the dead.’ The Ti^A Su^A Kna^A is recited at the dead person’s wake. The goal of the speech is to guide the dead through the trail of the dead and to encourage them not to come back and taunt their family members, friends, and community members either by showing up in individual’s dreams or appearing as a ghost qu^B tiq^E.

The departed also need to demonstrate endurance, agility, and artistic skills. For example, when they reach a place called Sa^A tqen^A, located in the town of Cieneguilla, San Juan Quiahije (coordinates 16.3000° N, 97.3167° W), the dead have to dance. The dead men, in addition to dancing, must whistle or sing. Women only have to dance. Hence, Chatinos believe that artistic abilities such as dancing, whistling, and singing must be learned and practiced during the course of a person’s lifetime. This presentation will discuss these aspects of Chatino conceptions of the dead and describe the verbal art of the rituals involved as the recently dead move on to Jlya^G.

The first decades of the 20th century saw a massive migration of rural peasants to cities, a newly mobilizing working class threatened social order through political organization and unrest, and women gained new access to education and paid employment outside the home. These demographic shifts, accompanying the definitive implosion of Spain’s political empire, gave urgency to forging a renewed sense of national-liberal identity. Professor Ingram’s talk explores how cookbooks and other culinary discourses — attempts to represent in text the cooking labor of middle- and working-class women — respond to and shape this period of rapid change.



This lecture is sponsored by the Department of Hispanic Studies, the Graduate School and the Dean’s Office of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Kentucky.

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Don't forget to apply for the Zembrod Award for Study Abroad.  Check out the requirements and the application materials here.

https://hs.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/zembrod_award.pdf 

RICARDO PAUL-LLOSA: A BILINGUAL RECITAL

Translations into Cuban by Enrico Mario Santí



Wednesday, November 4

4-6 p.m.

Niles Gallery, Lucille Little Fine Arts Library

Ricardo Pau-Llosa is, far and away, the most prestigious Cuban-American poet writing in English today. With seven books to his credit, he has established himself as well as a prominent and sought-after art critic: http://www.pau-llosa.com/

Pau-Llosa, a Professor of English at Miami Dade College, and I have been collaborating on a bilingual anthology of poems translated, not exactly into Spanish, but into… Cuban. Part of the excitement of this event is that it will be the first public together reading of our experimental work.

“Pau-Llosa is a superb poet of memory…. He displays a consummate ability not simply to evoke, but to recreate the lost city of remembrance and to do so with a tragic depth rare in contemporary American poetry.” Eric Ormsby

Reception to follow

THE PUBLIC IS INVITED