Language shift and Traditional Medicinal Plant Knowledge, in Tilantongo, the Mixteca, Mexico

This thesis examines the relationship between traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) and language shift in the Mixtec community of Tilantongo in Oaxaca, Mexico. TEK recognizes the link between biological and cultural diversity, while in the discourses of endangerment, language has been put forward as the organic link between culture and environment. Studying what happens to TEK when a community experiences language shift will enhance our understanding of how the diversities (biological, cultural and linguistic) that make up life interact, potentially advancing the biocultural diversity theory and helping us formulate more informed responses to the endangerment crises that we are facing today. This thesis shows that when language shifts, medicinal plant knowledge shifts as well and while doing this it changes. The medicinal plant knowledge in Spanish is more prevalent in Tilantongo than that in Mixtec. As language shift entails the endangerment of the original language, medicinal plant knowledge shift entails the endangerment of the original knowledge framework. Some elements are transferred into the new language and the new medicinal plant knowledge framework, while others are not. This is related to the focus of the discourses that differ between the original and the new language, reflecting changes in the social and physical environment. This thesis focuses on medicinal plant knowledge as a conglomeration of several TEK domains. This reinterpretation has consequences for how we study and approach medicinal plant knowledge, TEK, and biocultural diversity. Medicinal plant knowledge is intrinsically linked to other domains of TEK related to cosmovision, illness etiology, religion and the hot cold system. The hot cold classification system is an integral part of how people think about their environment and the interactions it has with the human body, including medicinal plants and their use. I suggest that the hot cold classification system also constitutes a TEK system and that the key to understanding it is to situate it and study it within the framework of TEK

Universal and language-specific processing : the case of prosody

A key question in the science of language is how speech processing can be influenced by both language-universal and language-specific mechanisms (Cutler, Klein, & Levinson, 2005). My graduate research aimed to address this question by adopting a crosslanguage approach to compare languages with different phonological systems. Of all components of linguistic structure, prosody is often considered to be one of the most language-specific dimensions of speech. This can have significant implications for our understanding of language use, because much of speech processing is specifically tailored to the structure and requirements of the native language. However, it is still unclear whether prosody may also play a universal role across languages, and very little comparative attempts have been made to explore this possibility. In this thesis, I examined both the production and perception of prosodic cues to prominence and phrasing in native speakers of English and Mandarin Chinese. In focus production, our research revealed that English and Mandarin speakers were alike in how they used prosody to encode prominence, but there were also systematic language-specific differences in the exact degree to which they enhanced the different prosodic cues (Chapter 2). This, however, was not the case in focus perception, where English and Mandarin listeners were alike in the degree to which they used prosody to predict upcoming prominence, even though the precise cues in the preceding prosody could differ (Chapter 3). Further experiments examining prosodic focus prediction in the speech of different talkers have demonstrated functional cue equivalence in prosodic focus detection (Chapter 4). Likewise, our experiments have also revealed both crosslanguage similarities and differences in the production and perception of juncture cues (Chapter 5). Overall, prosodic processing is the result of a complex but subtle interplay of universal and language-specific structure