The Michigan Linguistics Club will have its kick-off meeting in 403 Lorch on Monday, Oct. 5 at 730

The most important thing to know: there will be delicious rewards for the caloric expenditure required for ascending the many delightful flights of stairs to the Ling Department. (Or, you could take the sketchy elevator, not expend any calories, and still get the delicious rewards – we will never know…)

But seriously, what is the ling club? It is your forum.

Want to bake IPA cookies? Want to guess which facebook profile picture belongs which professor?

Maybe you don’t – maybe you think that’s silly. In which case:

What about attending linguistic related events in the community? Getting connected with other concentrators as well as professors and grad students? Talking about wacky languages and getting some advice about… gulp… applying to grad school or finding a job?

The ling club is at your service and we want to know what is fun and helpful for you! That means that we need you to come tell us just what that might be.

If you have any questions before our meeting, or just want to express your sheer excitement (yes, we know, it’s intense), direct your emails to Reed at: scipio@umich.edu.

Acrisio Pires and Jason Rothman have published:

Minimalist inquiries into child and adult language acquisition. (De Gruyter)
Acrisio Pires and Jason Rothman (editors)

This book includes original research about the acquisition (L1, bilingualism) and acquisition/ learning (L2 or L3) of Brazilian and European Portuguese. It includes studies exploring both empirical/experimental and theoretical aspects of the acquisition of syntax, and its interfaces with morphology, with semantics/pragmatics, and with language change, with a focus on Minimalist approaches to language acquisition.

John Swales has published “Incidents in an educational life: A memoir (of sorts)“  with the University of Michigan press.

From the publisher:

Incidents in an Educational Life explores the lessons Swales learned by teaching and by being taught. The story follows his gradual transformation from an English as a Second Language teacher to one of the leading international figures in his field, stopping along the way to tell the sometimes amusing, sometimes painful anecdotes that have made him the recognized educator he is today. His entertaining prose make this volume a must-read for anyone considering the field, or the many ways in which we all become teachers.

John also published “Telling a research story: Writing a literature review” with Chris Feak, also with  University of Michigan press.

from the publisher:

Telling a Research Story: Writing a Literature Review is concerned with the writing of a literature review…This volume progresses from general to specific issues in the writing of literature reviews. It opens with some orientations that raise awareness of the issues that surround the telling of a research story. Issues of structure and matters of language, style, and rhetoric are then discussed. Sections on metadiscourse, citation, and paraphrasing and summarizing are included.

From the National Science Foundation

High school students from across the U.S. won individual and team honors last week at the seventh annual International Olympiad in Linguistics held in Wroclaw, Poland. The results reflect U.S. competence in computational linguistics, an emerging field that has applications in computer science, language processing, code breaking and other advanced arenas.

The U.S. fielded two teams at the Olympiad, which featured competitors from 17 different countries, including Australia, Germany, India, South Korea and Russia. Rebecca Jacobs of Los Angeles took the highest individual honor of any U.S. competitor with a silver medal, while John Berman of Wilmington, N.C., Sergei Bernstein of Boston, and Alan Huang of Beverly Hills, Mich., each took home bronze medals. Morris Alper of Palo Alto, Calif., Daryl Hansen of Sammamish, Wash., Anand Natarajan of San Jose, Calif. and Vivaek Shivakumar of Arlington, Va. received honorable mentions for their work. Berman and Huang were also recognized for their solutions to specific problems.

The U.S. Red team, comprised of Alper, Huang, Jacobs, and Natarajan took home the gold cup in team competition.

This year’s U.S. teams were chosen from hundreds of students who competed in the third annual North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO) that took place this past winter throughout the country. NACLO, and the U.S. teams that competed this summer, are sponsored by the National Science Foundation, Google, Cambridge University Press, Microsoft, Everyzing, M*Modal, JUST. Systems, The North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), Oxford University Press, Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute, the University of Michigan, Brandeis University, and the University of Pittsburgh Linguistics Department.

Read the rest of the story

Carmel O’Shannessy published the book chapter, “Language variation and change in a north Australian indigenous community.” In James N.. Stanford and Dennis R. Preston (eds) Variation in Indigenous Minority Languages, Amsterdam/Philadephia: John Benjamins pp419 – 439

Abstract:
A new mixed language, Light Warlpiri, has arisen in a remote community in northern Australia, systematically combining elments of Warlpiri (mostly nouns and nominal morphology) and Aboriginal English or Kriol (mostly verbs and verbal morphology). Grammatical relations are indicated in the two source languages by differing systems – Warlpiri uses case-marking in an ergative-absolutive system and AE/Kriol uses
SVO word order. Both systems operate in Light Warlpiri to some extent. Ergative marking is variably applied to A arguments and word order is mostly SVO, but also varies. Both adults and children use the ergative marker quantitatively differently in each language, and children are adult-like in how often they apply it in the two languages. But children mark postverbal agents ergatively more often than adults to. In doing so the children are regularizing a pattern found in adult speech.

Rene’ Kager, Joe Pater and Andries Coetzee guest edited a volume of “Phonology” (Volume 26(1), 2009). The theme for the volume is “Phonological Models and Experimental Data”.  I had two contributions in the volume: (i) The introduction with Pater and Kager. (ii) And a single-authored research paper with the title “Learning lexical indexation”.

Here is a link to the TOC of the volume:

Abstract of Andries’ paper: Learning lexical indexation.
Morphological concatenation often triggers phonological processes. For instance, addition of the plural suffix /-en/ to Dutch nouns causes
vowel lengthening in some nouns due to the stress-to-weight principle ([xat] vs. [xa:ten] ‘hole’). These kinds of processes often apply only
to a subset of words – not all Dutch nouns undergo this process ([kat] vs. [katen] ‘cat’). Nouns need to be lexically indexed as either undergoing this process or not. I investigate how phonological grammar and lexical indexation are learned when learners are confronted with data like these. Based on learnability considerations, I hypothesise that learners acquire a grammar with default non-alternation, so that novel items are treated as non-alternating. I report the results of artificial language learning experiments compatible with this hypothesis, and model these results in a version of the Biased Constraint Demotion algorithm (Prince & Tesar 2004).

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

Carmel O’Shannessey’s paper (co-authored with Felicity Meakins) has appeared as an e-print in Lingua

Article title: Ordering arguments about: Word order and discourse motivations in the development and use of the ergative marker in two Australian mixed languages
Abstract:
Light Warlpiri and Gurindji Kriol are mixed languages which are spoken in northern Australia. They systematically mix the lexicon and morpho-syntax of a traditional Australian language (Warlpiri and Gurindji) and an Australian contact variety (Kriol), bringing systems from the source languages into functional competition. With respect to argument disambiguation, both Warlpiri and Gurindji use a case marking system, whereas Kriol relies on word order. These two systems of argument marking came into contact and competition in the formation of the mixed languages. The result has been the emergence of word order as the dominant system of argument disambiguation in the mixed language, the optionality of the ergative marker, and a shift in the function of the ergative marker to accord discourse prominence to the agentivity of a nominal.

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?”