Preface

We are pleased to present the 4th volume of the UGA Working Papers in Linguistics! We are excited to bring to you the latest UGA scholarship covering a variety of topics within the field of linguistics. In this volume you will find papers on language change in German verbs, methods in teaching English as a Foreign Language, reconstruction of Proto-Oceanic sounds, theoretical syntax, and regional variation in American English, reflecting some of the contributions that UGA students are making to the field. As this volume has some major differences from past those of years past, we feel a brief history of the Working Papers is in order to show where we have come.

The UGA Working Papers in Linguistics dates back to 2001 when Dr. Marlyse Baptista taught a course on Minimalist theory. Students from that course submitted some of their research into a special edited volume, and with Dr. Baptista and Lamont Antieau as co-editors; thus, the first volume of the Working Papers was born. The volume also involved a joint workshop on syntax with linguists at the University of South Carolina. Several years later, Dr. Baptista offered taught a course on languages in contact and a graduate seminar on noun phrases. Together with Alberto Centeno-Pulido as co-editor, Dr. Baptista produced the second volume of the Working Papers in 2007. A copy of this second volume can be found in the linguistics conference room in Gilbert Hall at UGA.

The regularity of the Working Papers volumes increased starting in 2012 thanks to the newly created Linguistics Society at UGA. LSUGA published two online volumes in 2012 and 20131 with Marcus Berger as the editor. Over the next few years, the Working Papers were put on hold as LSUGA prioritized the Linguistics Conference at UGA (LCUGA) and the Conference Proceedings volumes. After this hiatus, Rachel Miller Olsen and Karen Sesterhenn not only volunteered to resume the Working Papers, but took it one step further by asking UGA faculty to review the submissions before publication.

This year, our goal was to make the UGA Working Papers in Linguistics a legitimate venue for quality, scholarly work in the field of linguistics, drawing readership from within and outside UGA. To do that, several steps were made in order to make the journal more professional. First, the UGA library system now permanently hosts the documents in Athenaeum (https://athenaeum.libs.uga.edu), their online repository. The front end of the journal was expanded and moved from lsuga.com to the department webpage (http://linguistics.uga.edu/working- papers). A new LATEX-based stylesheet was established to provide a consistent look across the articles and volumes. Most importantly, we felt it was time to turn the Working Papers into a bona fide peer-reviewed journal by sending submissions to non-UGA-affiliated linguists for peer-review. We feel that the combination of these changes has helped us reach our goal of creating a full-fledged journal for linguistic research.

We graciously acknowledge time, expertise, and help of the reviewers for this volume. Academics already carry a demanding workload, so we are extremely grateful to the people who were willing to donate their time to a graduate-run working papers series at an institution to which many have zero connections. With their permission to print their names, we thank the following individuals for being reviewers for this volume:

Is a hallmark of the integrity and sanctity of the peer-review process that we could receive such detailed and useful feedback for each of the articles.

Finally, we would like to acknowledge help from some of the folks here at UGA. First, thanks to Joshua Bousquette and Chad Howe for being the faculty sponsors for the Working Papers. This was a learning process for both of us and their patience and training on how edit a journal has been most appreciated. We are also grateful to Ph.D student Jonathan Crum for developing the stylesheet for this journal and training us in using LATEX. We thank Lindsey Antonini for help with migrating to the new website and Marcus Berger for tracking down some of the older documents that accidentally got lost in that process. Finally, we thank Marylse Baptista, Lamont Antieau, and Alberto Centeno-Pulido, as well as the founding members of LCUGA, for starting this journal and providing current and future UGA linguists a venue for publishing their research.

Joey Stanley & Conni Covington

Co-Editors

March 25, 2019