A Newsletter for UMW Faculty and Staff
Associate Professor of Linguistics Paul D. Fallon
Associate Professor of Linguistics Paul D. Fallon presented the paper “Lexical Innovation in Cushitic: Fictitious Family or Fragile Unity?” at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), Austin, TX, on Jan. 6, 2017. Using the strict criteria of Orel & Stolbova applied to Christopher Ehret’s reconstruction of Proto-Cushitic, he found that shared lexical innovation alone cannot be used as a diagnostic of Cushitic languages.
Associate Professor of Linguistics Paul D. Fallon presented the paper “Are the Agaw languages Cushitic?: A lexical analysis” to the 44th North American Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics (NACAL), held at the University of Texas, Austin on Feb. 13-14, 2016. His findings investigated the lexical innovations of the Cushitic language family, a linguistic group of East Africa ranging from Egypt to Tanzania.
Associate Professor of Linguistics Paul D. Fallon presented a paper titled “How the Cushitic languages came by their name” to the North American Association of the History of Linguistic Science (NAAHoLS) at its annual meeting held in Washington, D.C., Jan. 8-10.
Paul D. Fallon, Associate Professor of Linguistics, presented a poster at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, held in Portland, Oregon, from Jan. 8-11, 2015. His poster, “The Qualitative Lexicostatistics of Central Cushitic (Agaw)” applied a new method to analyze the layers of vocabulary and EthioSemitic borrowings in this language family of Eritrea and Ethiopia. As a member of the American Dialect Society, whose meeting was held concurrently, Fallon also participated in the voting of the ADS “Words of the Year” for 2014. The overwhelming winner of 2014 Word of the Year was #blacklivesmatter.
Dr. Paul D. Fallon, associate professor of linguistics, served as the pronouncer in the regional spelling bee sponsored by the Free Lance-Star on March 15, 2014 at the James Monroe High School, Fredericksburg.
Paul Fallon, Associate Professor of Linguistics, presented the paper “The Lexicostatistics of Central Cushitic (Agaw)” at the 42nd annual meeting of the North American Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics (NACAL), held this year at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands, Feb. 14-16, 2014.
Paul D. Fallon, Associate Professor of Linguistics, presented a paper at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, held in Minneapolis from Jan. 2-5, 2014. His talk, “The Tangled Web of Reconstructing Proto-Agaw Dorsal Consonants,” was about the historical reconstruction of the Agaw, or Central Cushitic, languages, which are spoken in the Horn of Africa.
Paul D. Fallon, Associate Professor of Linguistics, presented a paper at the 41st annual meeting of the North American Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics (NACAL), held at Yale University on 16-17 February 2013. His paper, “Appleyard’s Proto-Agaw vis-à-vis Ehret’s Proto-Cushitic” compared the historical reconstruction of the Agaw (Central Cushitic) languages of Eritrea and Ethiopia by two different scholars, analyzing 200 proposed roots and categorizing them. The paper contributes to the the study of Agaw and Cushitic linguistics by providing a critical assessment of two reconstructions of the same language family.
