The UK Appalachian Center is proud to host a SWAP (Sharing Work on Appalachia in Progress) Meeting with our 2014 Summer Mini-Grant Recipients.  Dr. Robin Vanderpool is a faculty memeber in the Department of Health Behavior.  Dr. Kang Namkoong is faculty in the Department of Community Leadership and Development in the College of Ag.  Michelle Justus Talbott is a graduate student here at the University of Kentucky.  All of the applicants have research interests and focus in Appalachia.  This meeting will be held from 12 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. at the UK Appalachian Center on Thrusday, April 2, 2015.

The UK Appalachian Center is proud to host a SWAP (Sharing Work on Appalachia in Progress) Meeting with our 2014 Summer Mini-Grant Recipients.  Dr. Robin Vanderpool is a faculty memeber in the Department of Health Behavior.  Dr. Kang Namkoong is faculty in the Department of Community Leadership and Development in the College of Ag.  Michelle Justus Talbott is a graduate student here at the University of Kentucky.  All of the applicants have research interests and focus in Appalachia.  This meeting will be held from 12 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. at the UK Appalachian Center on Thrusday, April 2, 2015.

Although the functionally unmarked word order in Hittite is robustly SOV, many other word orders are well attested. In addition to some that are syntactically licensed and bear various discourse structure functions, there are also a number of quite puzzling configurations that involve discontinuous constituents and appear unmotivated in terms of discourse structure. Violations of well-known syntactic constraints suggest that these orders are phonologically motivated. Building on previous evidence that Hittite has “phrasal stress”, I will argue that many if not all such orders reflect: (1) that the primary accent in all Hittite phonological phrases (which mostly match syntactic phrases) falls on the leftmost constituent; (2) that some prosodically weak constituents (e.g., indefinite adjectives) require a phonological word as their immediate leftward host, while others (e.g., relative adjectives) require only a phonological phrase; (3) that the last two rules are violable, resulting in some “exceptions” to the dominant patterns. Further study is needed regarding what determines the “prosodically weak” status of some elements.

It is presently received wisdom that the click consonants in various Bantu languages of southern Africa reflect an uptake from a supposedly pre-existing substrate of Khoesan languages. The clicks in the latter very diverse languages are widely assumed to be of longstanding existence, and are postulated as original segments in current reconstructions for certain Khoesan families.

However: this paper reveals the presence throughout the Khoesan language families of click-initial words with a demonstrably Bantu-intrinsic identity. Successive sets are presented, and regularly repeated correlations are identified. Since many of these words have roots reconstructed for Proto-Bantu, it is possible to characterise the pathways by which various clicks have evidently emerged. These formulations even have a predictive power, in that they can in some cases also account for Khoesan words without click counterparts in a Bantu language.

The main discussion suggests various scenarios that might account for this previously unrecognised phenomenon, including the possibility that the various Khoesan language groups have perhaps descended from regional Bantu languages, and are therefore related not only to the latter but also to one another, even if perhaps as cousins rather than as sisters. (There is little evidence to support popular beliefs that the Khoesan languages are ‘ancient’, and that speakers of various early Bantu languages only entered the southern part of Africa in relatively recent times.) Although this paper is largely confined to demonstrating the abstract patterns that suggest these relationships, the evidence nevertheless points towards an actual mechanism likely to have been involved in the generation of clicks in both Bantu and Khoesan languages.

Wider implications of the findings are noted, not only for African linguistics but also for other disciplines such as archaeology and history. Future research directions are identified.

4:00-4:25 Dr. Adam Milewski, Assistant Professor of Geology, University of Georgia, "The Past, Present, and Future of Water Resources in the Middle East and North Africa Region"

4:30-4:55 Dr. Neda Zawahri, Associate Professor of Political Science, Cleveland State University, "Management of Transboundary Rivers in the Middle East"

5:00-5:25 Discussion moderated by Dr. Alan Fryar