Linglunch will feature two presentations on Wednesday, April 11 at noon down in the Landahl Center:
12.00 Andrea Beltrama – Italian-issimo: intensification at the semantic/pragmatics interface
12.30 Julia Thomas and Tim Grinsell – ‘Finna’ as a Socially Meaningful Quasi-Modal in African American English
Geoffrey Nunberg (School of Information, UC Berkeley) will give a colloquium talk titled “On Having a Word for It” on Thursday, November 3, 3.30 pm at the Franke Institute for the Humanities.
Abstract: What does it signify that a language “has a word for” such-and-such a notion? For the general public, it sheds light on the way its speakers think, often with political or ideological consequences. For linguists and psychologists, lexicalization chiefly bears on individual perception or cognition. For historians and other students of culture, it means a society has come into the possession of a new concept. It turns out that these perspectives rest on very different understandings of “concept” and “language”—and for that matter “have.” I’ll spell some of these out and show how there are certain misconceptions inherent in each. I want to focus in particular on the way the individualism of modern linguistics can obscure the social consequences of lexicalization, some of which have played an important role in recent philosophy of language. In general, having a word is a bigger deal than linguists generally suppose, and for reasons that linguists don’t often pay much attention to.
This talk is sponsored by the Franke Institute for the Humanities and the Department of Linguistics.
Several scholars are visiting the department this quarter. Please give them a warm Chicago welcome!
Another year, another colloquium series: today kicks off our fantastic 2010-2011 lineup. Join us for Annika Herrmann’s talk (link to abstract found below) at 3:30 p.m. in Cobb 201; all are invited to Tea immediately following in the department lounge.
Schedule for Autumn quarter
October 7: Annika Herrmann, University of Göttingen
The split nature of scalar focus particles in sign languagesNovember 11: Bart Geurts, University of Nijmegen
November 18: Silvina Montrul, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
December 2: William Idsardi, University of Maryland
The Workshop on Language, Cognition and Computation (along with our other graduate workshops, Language Variation and Change and Semantics and Philosophy of Language) is wrapping up another academic year. Please join us this Friday at a special time for the final LCC talk of the year, presented by the U. of C.’s James Kirby. He will be speaking at noon in the Karen Landahl Center on “A phonetics-phonology mismatch in Vietnamese” (abstract below). Join us afterwards for our end-of-the-year barbecue at Midway Plaisance Park just south of the Classics building. See you there!
According to phonetically-based phonological frameworks, functional constraints such as perceptual distinctiveness play a central role in shaping phonological behaviors (Boersma, 1998; Hayes et. al, 2004). This view is challenged by evidence of phonetically unnatural patterns active in synchronic phonological grammars (Anderson, 1981; Hyman, 2001). I consider arguments for the phonetic grounding of phonological features in Vietnamese tone, where it has been argued that, despite dialectal differences in the phonetics of tone production, phonetically grounded tone features are shared across dialects (Pham, 2001, 2003). From the results of a cross-dialectal perception study, I argue that the features relevant for the perception of tones no longer correspond to their phonologically active counterparts in any straightforward way, either within or between dialects. This result is discussed in terms of its implication for the notion of phonetically grounded phonological constraints, as well as for the relationship between subphonemic and categorical levels of linguistic structure.