Phonological Aspects of Language Contact Along the Slavic Periphery
1494 Addison St, Berkeley CA 94702
Victor Friedman, Lenore Grenoble, Salikoko Mufwene, Alan Yu
My dissertation research focuses on applying evolutionary models of language change to language contact along the Slavic periphery. I develop novel analyses of selected instances of contact-induced sound change from north Russia and the Balkans to argue that sound changes induced by language contact can be explained as an optimization process between the competing factors of social prestige, phonological groundedness, faithfulness to the innovating language, and mappability to other local languages. This process of optimization facilitates links between the study of language change and other fields that incorporate evolutionary modeling, such as biological evolution and computational models of language acquisition.
First Year Russian (RUSS 10100-10200-10300): 2009-2010, Autumn 2010, Winter 2012 Russian through Pushkin (RUSS 10400-10500-10600): 2010-2012 Second Year Russian (RUSS 20100): Autumn 2007 Fourth Year Russian (RUSS 21002-21102-21202): 2006-2009 South Slavic I and II (co-taught with Prof. Lenore Grenoble and Yaroslav Gorbachov) (SOSL 33100-33200) Intermediate Albanian: Summer 2010 and 2012 at the Criticial Languages Institute, Arizona State University Drill instructorships for Second Year Russian (2009-2010), First, Second, and Third Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (2008-2009, 2011-2012), and Fourth Year Russian (2007-2008). Writing intern in Language and the Human (HUMA 17000): 2010-2012 Writing intern in Human Being and Citizen (HUMA 12500): spring 2011 - 2012.
To appear. “XML Markup of the Novgorod Birchbark Letter Corpus: Etymology and Sociolinguistics.” To appear in Proceedings of FASL 21: The Third Indiana Meeting. Co-authored with Rafael Abramovitz, Quinn Dombrowski, and Anton Melnikov. To appear. “The Phoneme /o/ in Opoja Albanian: Albanian-Slavic Contact and the Slavic Jers.” Accepted for publication in the Journal of Language Contact. To appear. “Multiple Relative Marking in West Rumelian Turkish.” Forthcoming in the Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. 2012. “The Development of /th/ and /dh/ in Albanian Diaspora Dialects.” Studime për nder të akademik Rexhep Ismajlit për 65-vjetorin e lindjes. [Studies in honor of the Academician Rexhep Ismajli on his 65th birthday]. Prishtina. 2012. “Diachronic and Areal Aspects of Macedonian Hiatus Resolution.” Balkanistica 25:2.19-32. (=Macedonian Matters: Proceedings from the Seventh Macedonian-North American Conference on Macedonian Studies, ed. by Victor A. Friedman and Donald L. Dyer 2011. “Typologies of Literary Grammar: Medieval Slavic and Ottoman Turkish.” The Slavic Forum. http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/theslavicforum/slavic-forum-2011. 2011. Review of Klaus Steinke, Xhelal Ylli. Die slavischen Minderheiten in Albaniens (SMA) 3 Teil: Gora. Canadian Slavonic Papers 53: 636-637. 2010. "When is Orthography Not Just Orthography? The Case of the Novgorod Birchbark Letters." Forthcoming in the Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. 2010. “Vowel Harmony Loss in West Rumelian Turkish.” eLanguage, LSA Annual Meeting Extended Abstracts. 2010. “A Formal Approach to XML Semantics: Implications for Archive Standards.” In Proceedings of the International Symposium on XML for the Long Haul: Issues in the Long-term Preservation of XML. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 6 (2010). Co-authored with Quinn Dombrowski. 2006. “Towards a Typology of Participial Development: Evidence from Romance and Slavic.” LSO Working Papers in Linguistics 6 (Proceedings of WIGL 2006), pp. 26-38.