John Swales gave a plenary address at the Conference on Academic Discourse on Dec. 11 in Jato, Spain.

John also gave two lectures at Pampeu Fabra: “The L2 junior researcher in a globalizing research world” and “Telling a research story–Writing a literature review.”

Julie Boland presented the colloquium talk at Michigan State University’s Linguistics Colloquium series on Oct. 9.

Title and Abstract

Chinese Sentence Comprehension:  Recent Findings

Over the last several years, my colleagues and I have been investigating
syntactic processing in Chinese using self-paced reading, eye-tracking,
and ERP paradigms. I review our recent results in three domains: (i)
What cues guide incremental interpretation in the face is syntactic
ambiguity? (ii) To what extent are syntactic alternatives maintained in
parallel? (iii) Must semantic interpretations always be licensed by
grammatical structure?  I also compare our Chinese findings with results
from similar experiments done in English and other Indo-European
languages, with an interest in understanding what aspects of sentence
comprehension are universal and what aspects might be tuned by
language-specific properties.

San Duanmu presented the colloquium talk at the Michigan State Linguistics Colloquium on Sept. 25, 2008.

Title and Abstract

The limits of variation in syllable structure: The CVX theory and its implications

Many linguists assume that there is a wide range of syllable types across languages. A common approach to such variation is to assume a set of parameters. I argue instead that the variation in syllable types is far more limited than currently conceived. In particular, if morphological factors are taken into consideration, the maximal syllable size is CVX (CVC or CVV).

The CVX theory claims that a word has the general structure M(C)S(C)M, where M is one or more affix or affix-like consonants, (C) is one consonant, and S is one or more syllables whose maximal structure is CVX. The theory attributes extra consonants, M and (C), to morphology, in the sense that (i) M must be added regardless of whether a neighboring syllable is full, and (ii) an initial (C) is found only in languages that have V-final prefixes, so that (C) can serve as its coda, and a final (C) is found only in languages that have V-initial suffixes, so that (C) can serve as its onset. In non-edge syllables, apparent CC onsets (e.g. [kw, pl, pr]) can all form a ‘complex sound’; in contrast, CC onsets that cannot form a complex sound are not found medially (e.g. sp-, sm-, thr-). In addition, apparent VXC rhymes can also be accounted for in terms of complex sounds, e.g. VNC  ṼC, as in symptom.

I also discuss the implications of the CVX theory, including whether the syllable exists, its relation to metrical structure, the Weight-Stress Principle, the determination of syllable boundaries, the role of sonority, and the notion of parameters in the theory of grammar.

Marlyse Baptista was invited to organize and teach a workshop at the Caribbean Language and Linguistics Institute in July. The Institute was held at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica in conjunction with the Society for Caribbean Linguistics. The title of the workshop I convened and participated to is: Portuguese-lexified Creole Languages: Exploring the Papiamentu-Cape Verde Connections.

Deborah Keller-Cohen and Chris Odato presented the paper, “Talk too Much?:  Age and Speech Situation in Evaluating Others’ Seech:  Off-target Verbosity Revisited,” at the International Congress on Language and Social Psycoology on July 18, 2008

Robin Queen, along with Andrei Markovits, gave an invited lecture on their work concerning the involvement of women in canine rescue organizations.  The lecture was presented to the Fellows of the Human-Animal Interaction Symposium.

Marlyse Baptista, along with Viviane Deprez, gave an invited lecture at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique lab  on “Structures Formelles du Language”, Groupe de Recherche sur les Grammaires Creoles. June 16, 2008. Paris, France.

View the abstract.

Marlyse Baptista, along with Lisa Green and Tom Klinger, presented a keynote address at the Symposium on Louisiana Dialects and Cultures at Louisiana State University.

View the full program

Robin Queen gave a keynote address at the Indiana University Sociolinguistics Fest Workshop, entitled Language variation and social essentialism.  She explored the place of social and cognitive essentialism for understanding and explaining language variation, using data from a variety of sources, including the television sitcom, Ellen, and weblogs maintained in the voice of a family dog.

Andries Coetzee presented a keynote address at NAPhC  5 (The 5th North American Phonology Conference) at Concordia in Montreal.

Abstract

Many phonological processes apply variably. The likelihood of a variable process applying is determined by a complex interaction between both grammatical and extra-grammatical factors. Over the past decade, several formal models of phonological variation have been developed. These models are quite successful at accounting for the role that the grammatical factors play in phonological variation. However, they are purely grammatical and do not account for the potential influence of extra-grammatical factors on the application of variable processes. Extra-grammatical influences are often equated with performance factors, and if the goal of linguistics is to account for the competence of the language user, then these extra-grammatical factors fall outside the domain of linguistics.

In this paper, I argue for a broader understanding of linguistic competence, where it is taken to encompass all those factors that determine linguistic performance and that that are consciously or subconsciously under the control of the language user. This includes both grammatical and some extra-grammatical factors. A sufficient model of the linguistic competence of the language user therefore needs to incorporate both grammatical and extra-grammatical competence.

By reviewing the literature on English  t/d-deletion I demonstrate that this process is influenced by both grammatical and extra-grammatical factors, and that the language user has at least subconscious control over both of these. I then propose a formal model of the linguistic competence of the language user that integrates both of these components of linguistic competence in the framework of Harmonic Grammar.

Mike Marlo (now visiting assistant professor at UCLA) also presented a talk at the conference. The title of his talk was:  “Post-syntactic spell-out and post-syntactic phonology: evidence from Bantu”.