Tom Roeper writes:
The Rio Institute on "Recursion in Brazilian languages and Beyond" was a great success---in both English and Portuguese. It involved 16 different indigenous languages with representative native speakers of
Piraha, Wapachana, Kuikuro and many others. [A great set of pictures and brief descriptions of each talk are available on Facebook under "Recursion in Brazilian Languages".] And there was a great mix of faculty, visitors, and graduate students from Brazil and abroad. It was very well organized by Professor Marcus Maia, a UMass visitor last year.
The first section involved fieldwork with two Piraha speakers. It was a wonderful circus with loads of current and former UMass folks getting into the act: Luiz Amaral, Bart Hollebrandse, Uli Sauerland, and Ana Perez (I was good at keeping an eye on the experimental setups--but was hopeless in parsing the tonal sentences---Luiz somehow, magnificently, figured out how to do it.) Recursion in PP's, adjectives, relative clauses, and sentences were explored with pictures, and
most successfully acting out. The monolingual Piraha speaker resisted for an hour acting out PP-DP recursion (roughly: ``put the penny in the box on the chair on board on the floor'') but then spontaneously produced PP-PP cases "put the penny on the floor on the board on the chair in the box") and then comparable cases were easy. While the sessions were a bit chaotic (will be available on Youtube soon), they are really pilots for two talented graduate students who will go to the Piraha for a year in Sept.
The conference involved a variety of papers with presentation of PP and possessives-recursion experiments on a common model from half a dozen Indian languages, Portuguese, and Japanese. There was obvious pride among the Indians and researchers in having accomplished co-ordinated research on complex constructions.
Also from UMass: Suzi Lima made two terrific presentations (and she will be co-ordinating further research soon), Bart Hollebrandse, Ana Perez, Jon Nelson, and Luiz Amaral made presentations (and I gave a keynote). Terue Nakato's providing parallel experiments in child Japanese to the work in Wapachana and elsewhere made the common character of human languages stunningly clear.
Then courses: Ana Perez gave a very nice course on her recent results with recursion among bilinguals and across constructions, Luiz Amaral and I gave a bilingual course on Multiple Grammars, and Uli Sauerland did a Fieldwork course exploring a variety of structures with native speakers. Andrew Nevins gave a course exploring intonation and recursion.
Personal View: it was extremely gratifying to me to see acquisition methods extended to fieldwork in a coordinated fashion---very promising.In a letter to some participants I wrote:
" Altogether it was an amazing, inspiring, and historic Institute. It begins to fulfill the promise of linguistics I think. We are building--through a common event-- a community which reaches from sophisticated questions in mathematical linguistics, to linguistic theory, fieldwork, acquisition techniques, and pedagogical grammars. Questions remain alive in all these areas---but each domain benefits from the intermingling of ideas long before "established results" are available. Each area, and each person, should feel empowered to make the (provisional and reversible) decisions of how to borrow knowledge. Those in linguistic theory must be able to choose the version of mathematical recursion needed, the acquisition student chooses the version of linguistic theory he/she wants, the fieldworker sees what can be adapted to fieldwork, and the teacher envisions how it will work as pedagogy. Equal partners in each step of this process is what does and will make it work. This institute contributes to a responsible intellectual culture with a real ladder between theory and practice. It can be a worldwide model of how cooperation can proceed."
