Monthly Archives: October 2008

Autumn 2008 colloquia are underway!

The Department of Linguistics was pleased to host Georgetown University’s Paul Portner last Thursday at our inaugural colloquium of the 2008-2009 series. This week, we will be having Diane Brentari of Purdue University giving a talk on tracking phonological emergence in sign languages.

We eagerly anticipate the scheduled speakers for the Autumn colloquia and invite you to join us for the remaining sessions, which generally commence at 3:30 p.m.

October 23: Paul Portner, Georgetown University

Two Problems about Permission

October 30: Diane Brentari, Purdue University

When does a system become phonological? Grammatical regularities at the interfaces

November 4: Matthias Brenzinger, University of Cologne

Changing roles for African languages in the past, present, and future

*Note special date, time and place: 4-5:30pm, Harper 103

November 13: Duane Watson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

November 20: Luis López Carretero, University of Illinois at Chicago

December 4: Alicia Wassink, University of Washington,

The Development of Sociolinguistic Competence in Children

See you there!

Dahlstrom at Algonquian Conference

Amy Dahlstrom presented a paper last weekend in Minneapolis at the 40th Algonquian Conference, an international meeting for researchers working in Algonquian studies from anthropology to ethnobotany and including, of course, linguistics. Amy’s paper was titled “Pattern and presentation: Highlighting syntactic and rhetorical structures in texts” and delivered in a special session on Problems and Strategies in the Analysis, Redaction, and Presentation of Native Texts. Click here to view the full program for the conference.

Mufwene wraps up a prolific year

Salikoko Mufwene recently returned from a short trip to Paris, where he gave the keynote address at the CNRS-LACITO Workshop on Ecology and Language Evolution. His October 23 talk, “Humans as the ecology of language(s),” is the latest in a series of over a dozen papers presented by Salikoko in 2008.

In addition, several of his articles entitled “Creoles,” “Pidgins,” “Koinés,” and “Lingua Franca,” plus several other shorter ones on specific creoles and pidgins, were recently published in Encyclopedia Britannica Online, wrapping up a year of several such publications on topics related to language evolution and creole-related phenomena.

LSA announces new Web-based project

After almost two years of work, the Undergraduate Programs Advisory Committee of the Linguistic Society of America is excited to announce the launch of the Linguistic Academic Depository, a new feature on the LSA website that allows linguistics faculty and instructional staff to exchange handouts, syllabi, and other course materials.

UPAC member and UChicago grad student Nassira Nicola encourages members of the department to both browse the materials currently offered and contribute their own fabulous ideas, at https://lsadc.org/e-learning/.  (Note: Access requires LSA membership.)

It’s here!: CLS 45 call for papers

From CLS 45:

The 45th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society will be held April 16-18, 2009 at the University of Chicago. 

The theme of this year’s conference is “Locality in Language.” The conference will include a general session as well as a parasession devoted to the theme.

Main Session

Invited Speakers:

  • Paul Boersma,University of Amsterdam
  • Lenore Grenoble, University of Chicago
  • Anna Papafragou, University of Delaware

We welcome papers from all major linguistic subfields and frameworks as well as from related cross-disciplinary areas. Papers relating to the theme will be given preference.

Parasession: Locality in Language

Invited Speakers:

  • Kyle Johnson, University of Massachusetts
  • Ivan Sag, Stanford University
  • Rachel Walker, University of Southern California

The panels in this parasession will explore issues of locality in various areas of linguistics, including but not limited to phonology, syntax, semantics, and processing.Presentation Format: Each talk will be given 20 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for questions. Presented papers will be published in the CLS Proceedings.

For submission guidelines, please see the CLS abstract info page for details. See you in April!