This week we will be hosting Savithry Namboodiripad of the University of Michigan. Her work focuses on how language contact affects linguistic variation, in particular constituent order in the world’s languages. Her dissertation examined this question in Malayalam via psycholinguistic experimental methodology (you can read more here: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2sv6z8bz). Please see below for information about her […]
Continue reading →There will be a meeting of the Language Variation & Change workshop this Friday, February 2nd at 3:30 pm in Rosenwald 301. Our speaker will be Britta Ingebretson. See below for details. We hope you can make it! “Rhotic coda usage as stance-taking in Southern China” Britta Ingebretson (UChicago) Mandarin Chinese has two standard variations, […]
Continue reading →This week the Language Variation and Change workshop is co-sponsoring an event with Comparative Literature, who is hosting Isaac Bleaman of NYU (https://wp.nyu.edu/ibleaman/). Isaac will give a talk on “Hasidic Yiddish Syntax on the Internet: Competing Trends in Language Change” this Friday 1/19 at 12:30 PM in Classics 110. (Note the unusual meeting time for […]
Continue reading →LVC will host Tatiana Nikitina of CNRS – Paris at an unconventional time: this Monday, November 20th at 3:30 PM in Cobb 202. Information about her talk is below. As usual, there will be a reception after the talk and an opportunity to talk more with the speaker. Discourse reporting in narrative performance: A case […]
Continue reading →Please join LVC this Friday, December 2 at 3:30 PM in Rosenwald 301. It will be our last meeting of the quarter and our speaker is our own Jacob Phillips. Hope you can make it! “Retraction in Action: Examining phonological and prosodic effects on /s/-retraction in the laboratory” Jacob Phillips University of Chicago An ongoing […]
Continue reading →“Covering: Mutable Characteristics and Perceptions of (Masculine) Voice in the U.S. Supreme Court” Daniel Chen Institute for Advanced Study, Toulouse School of Economics Using data on all 1,901 U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments between 1999 and 2013, we document that voice-based snap judgments based solely on the introductory sentences of lawyers predict Justices votes. The connection […]
Continue reading →Friday, December 4th @ 3:00PM in Rosenwald 301 Understanding Basque Differential Object Marking from Typological, Contact and Attitudinal perspectives Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Differential Object Marking (DOM) has enjoyed abundant scholarly interest insomuch as theoretical explanations of its key parameters (Aissen 2003; Malchukov and Swart 2008; Hoop and Swart 2007), language-specific constraints […]
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, 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 […]
Continue reading →