The Language Variation and Change workshop will host its first fieldwork recap session this Friday, November 17th at 3:30 PM in Rosenwald 301. Come learn where students are doing their fieldwork, their methods, and the challenges they face. This week we’ll hear from Hilary McMahan, Cherry Meyer, Kat Montemurro, and Adam Singerman! A small reception […]
Continue reading →Welcome back to another exciting quarter of talks from the LVC workshop! We’re kicking things off with a talk from postdoc Lilia Rissman. So come join us in Rosenwald 301 this Friday, January 13th, at 3:30 PM. A light reception will follow the talk. “Consistency and variability in the mapping from event concepts to event […]
Continue reading →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 […]
Continue reading →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 […]
Continue reading →Monday, October 7th @ 3 PM, Harper 140 Voice-specific lexicons: acoustic variation and semantic association Over the past twenty years, evidence has accumulated that listeners store phonetically- rich memories of spoken words (Goldinger 1996, Johnson 1997; Schacter & Church, 1992). These memorized episodes are linked to various speaker characteristics, including gender (Strand & Johnson 1996, […]
Continue reading →Tuesday, November 27th @3:30 PM, Harper 130 From “tall-issimo” to “game-issimo”: Subjectification and intensification in diachrony Abstract: Intensifiers are universally considered to be a productive field for investigating semantic change. However, diachronic work on such expressions mostly focuses on shifts from lexical words to functional ones (e.g., really/very) and treats intensification as a final stage […]
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