Spring 2014 Talks!

Date Time Speaker Title Room 14 April 3:00 PM Tony Woodbury UT Austin The emergence from tone of vowel register and graded nasalization in the Eastern Chatino of San Miguel Panixtlahuaca Pick 016 28 April 3:00 PM Laura Staum Casasanto UChicago Processing Difficulty and the Envelope of Variation Cobb 104 12 May 3:00 PM Rachel […]

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9th June: Andrea Beltrama (UChicago)

Monday, June 9th @ 3:00 PM, Cobb 104 From semantic to social meaning. The case study of intensifiers. The phenomenon of intensification is pervasive in natural language. Examples of such expressions, in English, include very, really, so, extremely. Linguists have addressed intensification with respect to two specific areas: intensifiers’ semantics, and intensifiers’ usage in the […]

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2nd June: Claire Halpert (UMinnesota)

Monday, June 2nd @ 3:00 PM, Cobb 104 Nominal Licensing and vP In this talk, I discuss aspects of nominal distribution patterns in several Bantu languages.  While Bantu languages have been claimed to lack case-licensing altogether (e.g. Harford 1985, Diercks 2012, a.o.), I outline a research path for investigating structural licensing of nominals in Bantu. […]

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12 May: Rachel Lehr (UChicago)

Monday, May 12th @ 3:00 PM, Cobb 104 Linguistics in a Challenging Environment Linguists choose to work on languages and in environments for a variety of reasons.   Choices may be determined by locations of interest, funding, mentors, prior experience, and urgent need. The choice to work in a conflict zone poses unique challenges. When attention […]

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28 April: Laura Staum Casasanto (UChicago)

Monday, April 28th @ 3:00 PM, Cobb 104 Processing Difficulty and the Envelope of Variation A longstanding problem in the study of syntactic variation is determining the envelope of variation. That is, what are the variants that speakers choose among when they speak? This problem is usually thought of in terms of semantic equivalency: are […]

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14 April: Tony Woodbury (UT Austin)

Monday, April 18th @ 3:00 PM, Pick 016 The Emergence from Tone of Vowel Register and Graded Nasalization in the Eastern Chatino of San Miguel Panixtlahuaca (based on joint work with John Kingston, University of Massachusetts, Amherst) The Chatino languages (Otomanguean; Oaxaca, Mexico) generally retain the conservative Proto-Chatino vowel inventory: */a, e, i, o, u/, with […]

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24 February: Carissa Abrego-Collier (UChicago)

Monday, February 24th @ 3:00 PM, Kent 107 Investigating phonetic variation over time in the U.S. Supreme Court Phonetic research over the past two decades has shown that individual speakers vary their phonetic realizations of words, phonemes, and subphonemic features. What we have found is that speakers show remarkable stability over time, while a small […]

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10 February: William Cotter (University of Essex) and Uri Horesh (Northwestern University)

Monday, February 10th @ 4:30 PM, Harper 150 Language variation and change in two Palestinian Arabic varieties: Gaza and Jaffa While research in Arabic sociolinguistics has been on the rise in recent years, a number of regions are still under-investigated. Most varieties of Palestinian Arabic, though described by dialectologists in the traditional sense over the […]

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31 January: Britta Ingebretson (UChicago)

Friday, January 31st @ 3 PM, Harper 150 (NOTE FRIDAY MEETING) Notes from the field: language and Gender in Huangshan China This Semiotics/LVC paper provides an ethnographic account on the current use of the Tunxi dialect in Huangshan City, Anhui, China. Tunxi dialect (Tunxi hua) is a member of the Xiuyi (Xiuning-Yi) subbranch of China’s […]

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25 November: Workshop on Language Documentation

Monday, November 25th @ 2 PM, Harper 140 (NOTE TIME CHANGE) The Workshop on Language Variation and Change is pleased to offer a special workshop on language documentation taught by postdoctoral researcher Dorothea Hoffmann.  The workshop will take place from 2-3:45 PM in HM 140 (note time change) Dr. Hoffmann has been conducting fieldwork on […]

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