Guest speaker: Amalia Skilton (University of Texas at Austin/Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics)

As part of her graduate seminar on the semantics of indigenous South American languages, Suzi Lima (faculty) has invited Amalia Skilton (University of Texas at Austin/Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics) to give a talk; current departmental members are welcome. A postdoc in linguistic anthropology with the National Science Foundation, she has been making waves for boldly exploring the intersections of language documentation with methodology from adjacent subfields (e.g. variation, acquisition, and psycholinguistics). Her talk, "Understanding deixis in Ticuna: Experimental, observational, and L1 acquisition studies," will be taking place online on Tuesday, November 3, at 4:00 PM. To register, see the first of the two emails from Suzi and fill out the form.

This talk discusses three fieldwork-based studies of the meaning of demonstratives (equivalents to this/that and here/there) in Ticuna, an Indigenous Amazonian language. These studies illustrate the range of methods - from descriptive linguistics, psycholinguistics, and first language acquisition - which researchers can use to analyze semantics and pragmatics in a fieldwork setting. First, I discuss a mixed-methods descriptive study which examined perceptual meanings, or whether Ticuna demonstratives encode information about the speaker's mode of perception of the referent (e.g., whether it is visible). I show how elicitation, semi-experimental methods, and observational recordings of conversation converged to support the same analysis in this line of research. Second, I report on a quantitative study that examined the co-organization of demonstratives and pointing gestures in a video corpus of interviews. This analysis reached substantially different conclusions than either judgment-based or experimental research on the topic, illustrating one way that observational data can complement experimental work. Last, I discuss my continuing research on the L1 acquisition of Ticuna by children aged 1 to 4 years. I show how collecting a large, observational dataset of children's language production allowed me to ask novel questions about the interplay of frequency effects and cognitive/learning biases in the acquisition of demonstratives.