Victor Golla (1939-2021)

Photo courtesy of the Lost Coast Outpost.

SSILA is saddened at the passing of Victor Golla, one of our founding members and the SSILA Secretary/Treasurer and Newsletter and Bulletin Editor from 1982 - 2007. He is the namesake for the SSILA Victor Golla Prize that honors SSILA members who have devoted their careers to linguistic scholarship and service to the scholarly community, just as he had done. We plan to have a memorial for him, and other long-time SSILA members, at the 2021 Annual Meeting online, January 21-23. In the meantime, here is the in memoriam for him that appeared on the LSA website, in colleagues’ own words. And here is a delightful tribute to his life from his hometown newspaper, the Lost Coast Outpost.

IJAL 87(3) Now Available

The latest issue of the International Journal of American Linguistics (IJAL) is available on the University of Chicago Press Journals website. A table of contents can be viewed below.

To explore the individual articles from this issue and to learn more about IJAL—including how to submit manuscripts and how to subscribe—visit journals.uchicago.edu/ijal.

Visit the website of IJAL’s editorial office at americanlinguistics.org.

International Journal of American Linguistics 87, no. 3 (July 2021)

ARTICLES

Verb Inflection in Tenango Otomi and the Typology of Grammatical Tone

Néstor Hernández-Green, pp. 303–337

How To Distribute Events: ʔayʔaǰuθəm Pluractionals

Marianne Huijsmans and Gloria Mellesmoen, pp. 339–368

 

Reconstructing Possession Morphology in Mayan Languages

David F. Mora-Marín, pp. 369–422

 

Nominal Classification without Grammatical Agreement: Evidence from Secoya

Rosa Vallejos, pp. 423–455

 

Announcements, p. 457

Call for SSILA Awards & Prizes 2021

SSILA is pleased to announce a Call for Nominations for our awards and prizes for 2021. Please go to the linked landing page for each to get further information about the award or prize, and for details about the nomination requirements and processes.  The awards will be presented at the 2022 SSILA Annual Business Meeting.

Mary R Haas Book Award, junior scholar for an unpublished manuscript that makes a significant substantive contribution about Indigenous languages of the Americas.

Ken Hale Prize, presented in recognition of outstanding community language work and a deep commitment to the documentation, maintenance, promotion, and revitalization of Indigenous languages in the Americas.

Victor Golla Prize, presented in recognition of a significant history of both linguistic scholarship and service to the scholarly community, with service that expands the quality and/or dissemination of such scholarship.

The deadline for receipt of nominations for the Hale and Golla Prizes and submissions for the Haas Award is June 15, 2019.

SSILA Archiving Award, highlights the importance of creating long-term archival materials that are accessible to all communities concerned, including heritage and language communities as well as scholarly communities. It is meant to encourage others in academia to value such work as more comparable to analytic research.

The deadline for receipt of nominations for the SSILA Archiving Award is October 15, 2021.

Please email secretary@ssila.org if you have any questions about the nomination processes.

Mary Linn, SSILA Secretary/Treasurer

 

IJAL 87(2) and April 2021 Supplement Now Available

The April 2021 issue of the International Journal of American Linguistics (IJAL) is now available along with the April 2021 supplement, “Texts in the Indigenous Languages of the Americas: Uto-Aztecan Narratives.” A table of contents for each can be viewed below.

Visit the University of Chicago Press Journals website at journals.uchicago.edu/ijal to explore the individual articles and to learn more about IJAL, including how to submit manuscripts and how to subscribe.

Visit the website of IJAL’s editorial office at americanlinguistics.org.

International Journal of American Linguistics 87, No. 2 (April 2021)

 ARTICLES

Grammatical Tone Patterns in Choguita Rarámuri (Tarahumara), Gabriela Caballero and Austin German

Descriptive Kinship Terms in Arawakan Languages: An Etymological Approach, Fernando O. de Carvalho

A Diachronic Account of Exceptional Progressive Nasalization Patterns in Guarani Causatives, Bruno Estigarribia

The Cabecar Relative Clause, Guillermo González Campos and Christian Lehmann

Mochica Pronouns: Their Internal Reconstruction and Significance for Worldwide Patterns of Paradigmatic Resemblances in Pronominal Shapes, Matthias Urban

 REVIEW

A Grammar of Upper Tanana, Volume 1: Phonology, Lexical Classes, Morphology. By Olga Lovick, Reviewed by Alessandro Jaker

Announcements

 

International Journal of American Linguistics 87, No. S1 (April 2021)

Texts in the Indigenous Languages of the Americas: Uto-Aztecan Narratives

ARTICLES

Introduction, Gabriela García Salido and Tim Thornes

Northern Paiute, †Ruth Hoodie Lewis and Tim Thornes

Nuwä Abigip: Kawaiisu Language and Cultural Center, Laura Grant and Jocelyn Ahlers

Pahka’anil (Tübatulabal): Two Texts, Lindsay Marean, Michael Ahland, Bethany Lycan, Sergio Sandoval Sanchez, and Nicholas Sinetos

Serrano, Kenneth C. Hill

Cupeño, Jane H. Hill

Hiaki, Santos Leyva, Maria Leyva, Meg Anna Harvey, and Heidi Harley

Sonora Yaqui, Lilián Guerrero

Choguita Rarámuri (Tarahumara), Gabriela Caballero, Sebastián Fuentes Holguín, and Bertha Fuentes Loya

Southeastern Tepehuan, Gabriela García Salido, Inocencia Arellano Mijarez, and Michael Everdell

Tlaxcalan Nahuatl (Malinche Mexicano), Jane H. Hill

References and Abbreviations

Call for SSILA Program Committee Member

The SSILA Program Committee (PC) is in need of a new member to serve for three years.

The PC is the body responsible for organizing the SSILA annual meetings.  It is made up of all the voting members of the elected SSILA Executive Committee, as well as three dedicated PC members who serve for three-year terms.  The chair of the PC is the member who is in their third year.  As the senior PC member this year, Verónica Nercesian will chair the PC as we prepare for the 2022 Annual Meeting.  Martin Kohlberger will continue to serve in his role as Program Committee Administrator, facilitating PC members in their tasks throughout the year.

We are seeking nominations for a SSILA member to serve as the newest member of the Program Committee.  The appointment will begin in February 2021 and conclude at the end of the 2024 Annual Meeting.

Volunteers for this position can expect the following yearly tasks:

  • Preparing calls for papers in mid-February and early May

  • Assigning abstracts to external reviewers in mid-July

  • Reading abstracts and making acceptance decisions in early May and late August

  • Preparing the program for the annual meeting in September

  • Making logistical decisions in October and November for how the conference will be run

  • Participating in the annual meeting in early January

Please nominate yourself or someone else by February 10, 2021.  Please give a brief explanation of why you or the person that you nominate would be a good fit for this position. If you nominate someone else, please confirm with them that they would be willing to serve on the committee for a three-year term.

Nominations should be sent to SSILA president Gaby Caballero (gcaballero@ucsd.edu), or to the SSILA secretary Mary Linn (secretary@ssila.org).

We hope to receive your nomination soon. Thank you for your support!

International Journal of American Linguistics 87, no. 1 (January 2021)

IJAL 87(1) is Now Available

 The latest issue of the International Journal of American Linguistics (IJAL) is available on the University of Chicago Press Journals website. A table of contents can be viewed below.

 Visit journals.uchicago.edu/ijal to explore the individual articles from this issue and to learn more about IJAL, including how to submit manuscripts and how to subscribe.

 Visit the website of IJAL’s editorial office at americanlinguistics.org.

 

International Journal of American Linguistics 87, no. 1 (January 2021)

 ARTICLES

Classifier Medials across Algonquian: A First Look, Jerome Biedny, Matthew Burner, Andrea Cudworth, and Monica Macaulay, pp. 1–47

A Comparative Reconstruction of Proto-Purus (Arawakan) Segmental Phonology, Fernando O. de Carvalho, pp. 49–108

Nominalization and the Expression of Manner in K’iche’, Telma Angelina Can Pixabaj and Judith Aissen, pp. 109–146

 Announcements, p. 147

Mary R. Haas Book Award - Winners Announced

The Mary R. Haas Book Award is presented to a junior scholar for an unpublished manuscript that makes a significant substantive contribution about Indigenous languages of the Americas. The award carries no financial stipend, but the winning manuscripts will be considered for publication under the Society’s auspices in the University of Nebraska Press series “Studies in the Native Languages of the Americas.”

SSILA received a large number of excellent nominations for the Mary R. Haas Book Award this year.  As a result, the committee chose to award one winner and three honourable mentions. Please join us in congratulating the following young scholars and their work!

Dr. Amalia Skilton (University of California, Berkeley) has been awarded SSILA Mary R. Haas Book Award for her thesis Spatial and Non-Spatial Deixis in Cushillococha Ticuna. This dissertation is an exquisite piece of work in both methodology and the theoretical contributions. The replicability of the several experiments –both with other Ticuna speakers and cross-linguistically– is a highly desirable feature in the context of the study of Indigenous languages. It also makes important theoretical contributions to the area of semantics and pragmatics of demonstratives, providing evidence that demonstratives encode visibility contrasts. This finding challenges the current dominant view that demonstratives carry information regarding distance but do not encode perceptual deictic content. The study also provides evidence that demonstratives do not contrast necessarily in terms of ‘distance’ between speaker/addressee and referents, but in terms of ‘peripersonal space,’ the space within reach of the speaker.

Dr. Geny Gonzales Castaño (Université Lumière Lyon 2) has received an honourable mention for Una gramática de la lengua namtrik de Totoró -  Lengua barbacoa hablada en los Andes colombianos. Her dissertation provides an extremely detailed, comprehensive guide to the Namtrik language as it is spoken in Totoró, a Colombian town within the Cauca district.

Dr. Kelsey Neely (University of California, Berkeley) has also been selected for honourable mention for The Linguistic Expression of Affective Stance in Yaminawa (Pano, Peru).  The committee praised this thesis for its comprehensive nature, consisting of both a grammar of Yaminawa with context-rich examples and a detailed study of affective stance, and for its potential broader impacts of the work, particularly with respect to language education.

And finally, Dr. Andrey Nikulin (Universidade de Brasília) and his thesis Proto-Macro-Jê: Um Estudio Reconstrutivo have been selected for honourable mention for the SSILA Mary R. Haas Book Award. His dissertation, drawing on a vast amount of published and unpublished sources, is a remarkable piece of scholarship, and it will serve as a reference for years to come to anyone interested in comparative studies and classification of South American languages.

The winners will be formally awarded at the SSILA Annual Business Meeting on January 9, 2021. SSILA wishes to thank all of the nominators.

Nominations for the Mary R. Haas Book Award are due June 15 every year.

 

 

Interpreter Jobs

Contract Position with The Language Conservancy

The Language Conservancy is accepting applications immediately for a project-based workshop in January 2021

Seeking to fill project-based contract positions for working as a transcriber in a two-week remote word-collection workshop for the Ute Mountain Ute language.  

All data collected will be used to create a dictionary database, online dictionary and app as well as language learning textbooks, apps, and other media projects in the future.

Work will include remote control of a word collection process with one to two speakers of the Ute Mountain Ute language using the Rapid Word Collection process through semantic domain association. 

Experience using Zoom, Google Drive, Audacity, Google Sheets, Excel, Tshwane-Lex are a plus. 

Please contact dorothea@languageconservancy or events@languageconservancy with a resume and brief cover letter as soon as possible.

Lev Michael Awarded the Victor Golla Prize

SSILA is happy to announce that Lev Michael, University of California, Berkeley, has been awarded the Victor Golla Prize.

The Victor Golla Prize is presented in recognition of a significant history of both linguistic scholarship and service to the scholarly community, with service that expands the quality and/or dissemination of such scholarship. The Prize, which bestows a life membership in SSILA on the recipient, seeks especially to honor those who strive to carry out interdisciplinary scholarship in the spirit of Victor Golla, combining excellent linguistic scholarship in one or more other allied fields, such as anthropology, education, history, or literature.

Lev exemplifies Victor’s virtues of scholarship grounded in an empirical practice that encompasses ongoing language documentation and text philology, pursuing answers to big-picture questions about areality and language change, and effectively integrated with service to a broad community. He excels in the area of South Americanist language documentation, linguistic analysis, and community language support.

His publications show depth and breadth in South American languages and families, as well as in extending to philology and history. They appear in IJAL, Journal of Language Contact, Language, Linguistic Typology, and Pragmatics and Society among other journals, and in volumes published by Benjamins, Cambridge, Oxford, and Routledge. His book A linguistic analysis of Old Omagua ecclesiastical texts (2016, co-authored with Zach O’Hagan) not only strengthens our understanding of the language, but shows clearly that Omagua crystallized before European contact. He is currently co-editing a Handbook of Amazonian languages for de Gruyter Mouton.

Lev has directed eight PhD dissertations and many undergraduate theses, and he has supervised half a dozen postdocs. His work with and impact on students and other younger scholars.

In impact to the field, Lev started the biennial Symposium on Amazonian Languages, which meets in Berkeley. In March of last year, SAL 3 had 21 talks by scholars from Brazil, Canada, and the US. Of course there are bigger events for Latin Americanists generally, but nothing comparable in North America for Amazonianists. He created SAPhon, the South American Phonological Inventory Database. This online resource contains information about phonological inventories for 363 South American languages, allowing users to view information about individual languages and sounds, with a map browsing function.

Lev and his research partner Chris Beier are absolutely committed to capacity building in the Amazonian communities where they work. This is a critical part of Lev’s pedagogy and mentoring of North American students, and shines through in his work. He does training and involves community members in the work he and Chris do, and makes sure there are results that benefit them. This includes (at least) dictionaries of Iquito, Máíhĩkì, and Muniche and pedagogical descriptions of Andoa, Iquito, and Muniche.

The committee found that Lev exemplify the spirit of this award through the breadth, quality, and availability of his research, his success in engagement with communities, and by the inspiration he brings to new generations of linguists.

Amalia Skilton wins the SSILA Archiving Award

The SSILA Archiving Award Committee is delighted to announce that Amalia Skilton, University of California, Berkeley, has been awarded the SSILA Archiving Award in Honor of Michael Krauss.

The  committee recognizes the Ticuna Archive, assembled and archived by Amalia and housed at the Survey of California and other Indian Languages. The archive stands out not only for the breadth of materials which it contains, but also for its meticulous organization and curation, which are documented in the guide to the materials, and published in Language Documentation and Conservation. In addition, the committee particularly notes the level of community-engagement exemplified by Amalia’s discussion of ethics and permissions associated with the collections and the level of accessibility of the collection. Amalia lives up to the spirit of Michael Krauss in creating high standards for documentation and archiving and at the same time as contributing to linguistic theory through her research on such topics as deixis, language acquisition, and Ticuna grammar.

 

New Committee Members Elected

Congratulations to our new Executive Committee and Nominating Committee members!

Jack Martin is the Vice President/President Elect for 2021-2022, and he will become the President at the 2023 Annual Meeting. Jack is Chancellor Professor of English and Linguistics at William & Mary. He began fieldwork on Muskogee (Creek) in Oklahoma during the 1980s. Since then he has worked collaboratively with the Seminole Tribe of Florida, the Coushatta Tribe, the Choctaw Nation, the Seminole Nation, and the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. For SSILA, he has served on the Nominating Committee, the Mary R. Haas Award Committee, and the Ken Hale Award Committee. For the LSA, he has served on the Ethics Committee and chaired CELP. At William & Mary he has directed Linguistics, chaired the English department, and served as President of the Faculty Assembly. He is the author, compiler, or co-editor of four books: A Dictionary of Creek/Muskogee (Nebraska, 2000); Totkv Mocvse/New Fire (Oklahoma, 2004); A Grammar of Creek (Muskogee) (Nebraska, 2011); and Creek (Muskogee) Texts (Berkeley, 2015).  

Susan Gehr, Karuk, is the in-coming Member -at-Large on the Executive Committee. She has a master's in linguistics from the University of Oregon and a master's in library and information science from San José State University. She’s been a member of SSILA since 2008, and has been on the Archiving Award Committee since May 2019. Gehr served as a linguist mentor at the Breath of Life Workshop held by the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival at UC Berkeley in 2004 and 2012. Gehr conducted an oral history for her MLIS thesis entitled “Breath of Life: Revitalizing California’s Native Languages Through Archives.” Gehr worked with other Karuk community language scholars who are involved in documenting and revitalizing their language to care for their materials with support from the National Science Foundation’s Documenting Endangered Languages Program. Gehr has co-taught several courses at CoLang and served as a co-convener of the CoLang Advisory Circle with Ewa Czaykowska-Higgins. 

Racquel-María Sapién will join the Nominating Committee. Racquel is an Associate Professor at the University of Oklahoma, Racquel works with speakers, teachers, and learners to document, analyze, and reclaim Kari'nja (Cariban) and Lokono (Arawakan) as spoken in Suriname.  In addition to the morphosyntax of Cariban and Arawakan languages, her research interests include a focus on methods and methodologies for community-inclusive field research.  She serves as a Co-Chair of the LSA Committee on Endangered Languages and their Preservation (CELP) and has taught courses at both the Northwest Indian Language Institute (NILI) and the Institute on Collaborative Language Research (CoLang).

Call for Native Literatures of the Americas and Indigenous World Literatures (NUP)

Dear SSILA:

I am series editor of the University of Nebraska Press NATIVE LITERATURES OF THE AMERICAS AND INDIGENOUS WORLD LITERATURES. Our latest volume is Suzanne Cook’s  XURT’AN (Northern Lacandon myths, stories, songs), 2019. SSILA members have contributed to and edited other volumes and I would like to invite members to send me queries, proposals, outlines and so on.

brian.swann@cooper.edu or swann@cooper.edu

Sincerely,

Brian Swann
Professor of Humanities, The Cooper Union

North East Linguistics Society 51 - Indigenous Language Special Session

Dear SSILA members,

This year’s NELS at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), to be held online Nov. 6-8, 2002, will include a special session on Indigenous languages, including talks on Blackfoot (Algonquian), Crow (Siouan), Cheyenne (Algonquian), Inuktitut (Inuit-Yupik-Unangan), Washo (isolate), and Chuj (Mayan), as well as a keynote talk on Algonquian languages by Will Oxford (U. Manitoba). You can check out the programme here:

https://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites/linguistique/en/nels51/

Our registration model includes free options for both staff and students.

Best regards,

Richard Compton

Associate Professor, UQAM

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CALL for SSILA EDITOR

,

The Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) is seeking an Editor. SSILA works to keep their membership informed and connected through the SSILA website, and minimally through Facebook. The Editor is responsible for content on these platforms and works in close collaboration with the SSILA Secretary-Treasurer to keep the website updated. The editorship has a term of three years. It requires minimally requires 5-8 hours of work per month but may take more depending on the vision and commitment of the editor to develop content. The Editor receives a $500.00 stipend at the end of each calendar year, but compensation may be adjusted to reflect added vision and time.

Responsibilities 

  •  Check Editor email (editor@ssila.org) regularly and respond.

  • Post relevant content to the website and Facebook that is sent to the editor by members.

  • Post any official SSILA content requested by the EC and the in Memoriam Editor, and email it to membership.

  • Ensure consistency of style, formatting, and accessibility throughout the website.

  • Put some amount of effort into monitoring news for items of interest (using a weekly news search result or some such), as well as posting items they happen to come across in their own social networks.

  • Update and maintain Facebook page, in accordance with guidelines and with other members delegated to post on Facebook.

  • Create a yearly report of website activities and attend the Executive Committee meetings (in person or by video) each year at the SSILA Winter meeting in early January, attend quarterly video meetings as needed, and report to and advise the Executive Committee on website and technical matters as needed.

Preferred Skills

Familiarity with the following services:

  • SquareSpace (the website platform)

  • MailChimp

If interested please contact the current SSILA Secretary/Treasurer at secretary@ssila.org. Please provide a letter of interest that includes links to a website or websites contributed to, or highlighting other editing or content development roles and the name, and the name and contact information for one reference.