Abstract

October 31st

Ross Krekoski

(University nuhelot’įne thaiyots’į nistameyimâkanak Blue Quills, Canada)

Category in Dene conversation: when do we need to make a decision?

When we work with conversational data, as analysts, we may find ourselves spending some time trying to determine the grammatical category of words. Occasionally this is a simple task, and the relevant items find themselves neatly and unambiguously categorizable as 'noun', 'determiner', etc. Often however, we may be pleased to find ourselves with a collection of items whose precise categorization remains elusive. The presumption may be that these items have some discrete category and it is just a failing of the analyst or of available theory to determine their precise nature. An alternate view however could hold that sometimes items such as these are not only analytically indeterminate, but indeterminate in fact. In entertaining the latter possibility, interesting questions regarding the roles of determinacy and indeterminacy in conversation arise. In this data session we will explore the various uses of the 'demonstrative' eyi in Dene conversation alongside these issues.

Misumi Sadler (University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, USA)

Japanese negative suffix nai: Its structural fixedness and involvement effect conversation

Hongyin Tao (University of California, Los Angels, USA)

East Asian Studies Lecture

Social, Cultural, and Linguistic Dimensions of Creative Language Use in China’s Internet and New Media

Creative language use in the forms of neologism, borrowing, substitution, pun, script manipulation, genre innovation, and so forth, in contemporary China shapes and reflects sociopolitical development in an increasingly globalized Chinese society and with a linguistic and cultural favor that is distinctively Chinese. This talk details some of the creative language use patterns and explains why they can be viewed as the direct result of the interplay of globalization, identity negotiation, as well as political struggle, among other factors.