In this talk, Dr. Richards will examine the conflicts as well as the multicultural policies that have developed in response to indigenous claims in Chile. She will argue that racism is paradoxically reinscribed by policies that on their face seem to be about diversity and acceptance of difference. Richards will bring attention to how the process of generating consent for the state’s construction of indigenous subjects in the context of neoliberalism is not only imposed from above, but also informed by competing worldviews at the local level. 

Sponsored by: Sociology Department and co-sponsored by the International Studies and Latin American Studies Programs.

[1] Samantha Dunn:

Impairments in Morphology Through the Lifespan.

An overview of how language, specifically morphology, develops and what it looks like when there is delay. Even when normal language development occurs, we are still at risk for language impairment due to brain damage. Often, a stroke can result in a language disorder known as aphasia. Aphasia results in a wide range of issues, but I will be focused on how morphology is affected following a brain injury that results in aphasia.



[2] Clare Harshey:

A Network Morphology Theory of Old Norse Nominal Inflection.

Network morphology is a framework which has proven useful and accurate for morphological analysis in a wide range of languages. Using computational notation, it models lexical information as a collection of interrelated nodes containing facts, drawing information from one another to generate the appropriate morphological forms. Using the KATR language to construct such a theory, Old Norse nouns can be modeled accurately and intuitively.

It seems perhaps unlikely that a language would maintain a single special alternative suffix, to be deployed just in case the word to be inflected has in its derivational history another particular kind of operation. Indeed such situations do arise, however, a notable case from Sanskrit being the gerund, also known as the indeclinable past participle, or the absolutive:

(1) General gerund formation:

√bhū- ‘be’: ger. bhūtvā ‘[after] having been’ or ‘[when X] had been’ (MacDonell [1927] 1986: 137)

√jñā- ‘know’: ger. jñātvā ‘[after] having known’ or ‘[when X] had known’

(Whitney [1885] 1945: 56)

√vac- ‘speak’: ger. uktvā ‘[after] having spoken’ or ‘[when X] had spoken’

(Gonda 1966: 78)

Specifically, the gerund form is created in the general case by suffixing -tvā to the so-called 'weak-grade' root. When the verb lexeme in question is the result of prefixing a(n etymological) preposition as a pre-verb (PV), by contrast, the formation of the gerund is systematically distinct, involving a potentially distinct stem and an unrelated -ya suffix instead:

(2) PV-prefixed gerund formation:

ger. nipatya ‘having fallen down’ (ni- ‘down, into’; compare √pat- ‘fall, fly’: ger. patitvā)

(Mayrhofer [1964] 1972: 103; Whitney [1885] 1945: 94)

ger. vimucya ‘having freed’ (vi- ‘apart’; compare √muc- ‘release’: ger. muktvā)

(Gonda 1966: 78; Whitney [1885] 1945: 122)

ger. pratyāgatya ‘having returned’ (prati- ‘reverse, back’; ā- ‘(un)to, at’; √gam- ‘go’: ger. gatvā) (Deshpande 2003: 122, 428; Whitney [1885] 1945: 34)

This choice among suffixes seems to depend on the presence or absence of a non-adjacent morphological boundary, and as such, the phenomenon's status between derivation and inflection, between regular and irregular, will inevitably force morphological theories into some potentially uncomfortable positions.

Of course, some frameworks are simply not up to the task, straining to minimize its theoretical significance, or playing fast and loose with fragmented stipulations that cover the facts, but miss the generalization(s). Rather than crowning one framework as uniquely suited to the descriptive task, however, the very process of rotating through the lenses of diverse morphological frameworks presents a clearer, and indeed more coherent picture of the Sanskrit gerund than any single approach can.