The Undergraduate Club meets  Monday, November 9 at 7:30 for “Questions and Condiments”.

Bring some homework, questions, or anything interesting Linguistics-related, and the Club will provide some delicious snacks to doctor up your dilemmas.  We’d love to see you there!

“Questions and Condiments”
7:30 November 9
403 Catford Room

A workshop on Logic, Linguistics and Artifical Intelligence will be held in the East Conference Room in the Rackham Building on Friday, Nov. 6 and Sat., Nov. 7 in honor of Rich Thomason.

Speakers include: Charles Cross, Bas van Fraasen, Alex Lascarides, Leora Morgenstern, Barbara Partee, Robert Stalnaker, Matthew Stone and Frank Veltman.

Marlyse Baptista has been elected Vice-President (2009-2011) and President-Elect (2011-2013) for the Society of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics.  She was elected at the SPCL conference that took place in Cologne, Germany in August 2009.

Marlyse  presented a paper entitled “Evolution of verbal and nominal morphology in four Lusophone Creoles” at the SPCL conference in Cologne, Germany in August 2009.  She  also participated in a panel on Fieldwork Ethics at the same conference.

From Erica:

I attended the first three week session of the LSA Institute in Berkeley California with the intention of taking a number of courses on language acquisition and psycholinguistics. (I had initially registered for Prosody and Language Comprehension, Auditory Word Recognition, Infant Language Acquisition and Cross Linguistic Language Acquisition.) However, there were so many other interesting topics and lecturers, that I found myself sitting in on a lot of other courses just for my own edification. This wide exposure to a lot of varied subject matter was very stimulating and inspiring.

Living in the dorms allowed me to meet quite a few other students of Linguistics from all over the world, and we had quite a bit of fun during off-hours hiking in the Berkeley Hills, and seeing the local sites.

I wouldn’t hesitate the recommend participation in future LSA Institutes to anyone who is interested!

From the series:  Linguists in the Woods

From Joseph:

“This summer at the Linguistics Summer Institute, I was able to take courses in Prosody, Pragmatics, Intonational Typology and more. Furthermore, I was able to work closely with scholars from around the world on my discourse prosody research project, bringing perspective and insight into my current work and ideas for valuable follow-up studies. Particularly valuable were conversations with Delphine Dahan from Penn and Carlos Gussenhoven from the Netherlands. After talking with each of them, I was just flush with excitement!

The institute was a ton of fun. The people were super friendly and linguistics permeated everything. Where else would the average person know about glottal stops and conversational implicatures?”

1.  Sally Thomason was interviewed by CNN on the reports of the “millionth word in English.

2. Sally gave one of the four plenary talks at ICML XII, the 12th International Conference on Minority Languages in Tartu, Estonia.

WHAT IS LOST WHEN A LANGUAGE IS STANDARDIZED?

Abstract:

Enlightened governments all over the world are granting language rights to minority groups, a tendency that is presumably welcomed by everyone attending this conference.  The specific rights vary from country to country, from making one or more minority languages official to establishing a right to native-language instruction in schools.  An issue that arises very frequently concerns standardization: which variety of a minority language should be selected or (if necessary) developed for official purposes, including use as a medium of instruction?  The advantages of selecting a single variety are obvious, especially the financial advantages.  The disadvantages are perhaps less obvious.  The focus of this presentation is on the disadvantages of standardization, in particular the concomitant loss of dialect diversity.  The most important disadvantages are arguably sociopolitical; but the scientific disadvantages, from a linguist’s viewpoint, are nontrivial.  Understanding of the processes and results of dialect divergence and convergence contributes signficantly to our knowledge of human language as a social and psychological phenomenon. Moreover, some nonstandard dialects have unusual, and unusually interesting, structural features that are not found in the associated standard dialect.  I will not argue that standardization should not occur, but rather that nonstandard dialects should be documented as fully as possible while documentation is still possible.  Examples will be drawn from several European languages and from a gravely endangered Native American language which is currently undergoing standardization.

3. Sally also gave  one of the keynote talks at ISB7, the 7th International Symposium on Bilingualism, in
Utrecht.

Children vs. Adults as Agents of Contact-induced Language Change

Abstract:
This paper explores the relationship between bilingualism and contact-induced language change, focusing on the question of which contributions might be expected from children and which from adults. The issue is reflected in debates among historical linguists as to whether internally-motivated language change is initiated by children during first-language acquisition or by adults — or by both. In language contact studies, it is possible to identify changes, usually temporary ones, that are initiated by children, and it is also possible to identify changes that are initiated by adults. The conclusion, therefore, is that both adults and children are responsible for contact-induced changes, although perhaps not for the same kinds of changes: shift-induced interference, which is due to imperfect learning of a target language by members of a speech community, is likely to be almost exclusively an adult phenomenon, or at least not primarily initiated by young children during first-language acquisition. I will not address in detail the question of the role of adults vs. the role of children in the initiation and spread of linguistic changes more generally, but some implications of the results from contact-induced change will be discussed in the concluding section.

Marlyse Baptista received an award from the Center for World Performance Studies for bringing to campus the Cape Verdean sculptor, painter and sketch artist Ida Abreu.  Baptista nominated Abreu for a four-week residency at the University of Michigan during April 2010.   Abreu will offer exhibits of his art, as well as three campus lectures.  In addition, he and Baptista will visit several public schools in Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti and Detroit where they’ll discuss with students the connections between art, language and identity.

We are delighted to welcome Ezra Keshet to the Linguistics Department as a new Assistant Professor in Semantics beginning in Fall 2009. Ezra completed his PhD in semantics at MIT and has been a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department this year. Ezra’s work focuses on syntax, pragmatics and discourse.

His dissertation argues that possible worlds and times must be explicitly represented in the syntax of natural language and explains several constraints such representations must obey. He has also done research on scalar implicature, showing that an analysis involving alternative semantics solves several puzzles relating to the topic; and telescoping, including arguments that syntactic rules sometimes bridge multiple sentences, given the proper discourse environment.

Other interests of Ezra’s include singing, cooking, and computational linguistics.