Eric Brown has received a grant from the International Institute to go to Cape Verde this summer to begin a project looking at Cape Verdean Creole phonology, variation and orthographic reform.
Congratulations, Eric!
Andries Coetzee taught a course on “Variation in gradience in phonology” at the 19th Linguistics Institute of the Associação Brasileira de Lingüística (abbreviated as ABRALIN, “Brazilian Association of Linguistics”) at the UFPB ( Universidade Federal da Paraíba, “Federal University of Paraiba”) in João Pessoa, March 2-4.
From Andries
The class was attended by about 30 people, both graduate students and professors. There was a good mix in the class of phonologists and sociolinguists of the variationist ilk, which made for very interesting and productive in class discussions. I was pleasantly surprised to see how active the phonology research community is in Brazil, and I have learned a lot from my interactions
with both faculty and students in the class.
Lauren Squires and Robin Queen have received a grant from the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching to assess the use of the Bluestream Media database, a collection of appromimately 800 video and audio clips that illustrate various sociolinguistic principles. They will be investigating the effectiveness of the database for teaching and learning core sociolinguistic and general linguistic concepts and principles.
The conference, Discourse Constraints on Anaphora, organized by Ezra Keshet (Department of Linguistics) and Eric Swanson (Department of Philosophy) will take place at the University of Michigan April 6-7.
Details on the conference, including a schedule and registration information, are available at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~ericsw/anaphora/. Below is the conference description from the website:
Much recent work in linguistics, philosophy of language, cognitive psychology and computer science focuses on questions about anaphora and discourse. However, some major questions about the structure of discourse and its interaction with anaphors remain unanswered. To this end, the majority of the Discourse Constraints on Anaphora Conference will consist of roundtable discussions of the following four questions:
The resulting conversations, between scholars with a diverse range of approaches, will serve as a snapshots of current thought on anaphora and discourse. We hope that they will also mark the next step towards answering these questions. Roundtable participants include Barbara Abbott, Alan Garnham, Hans Kamp, Craige Roberts, Hannah Rohde, Jason Stanley, and Matthew Stone.
