Complementary indexicalities: gaze, pointing, and conversational scaffolding in an emerging sign language PROFESSOR JOHN B. HAVILAND UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO In this workshop presentation, I will introduce “Z” (Zinacantec Family Homesign), an emerging first generation sign language from a Tzotzil (Mayan) speaking community in Chiapas, Mexico, and the ways I have tried to study […]

Hello everyone! For the Spring 2015 quarter, LVC is pleased to announce the following talks. Please be attentive to start times and rooms. Friday, April 17th: Asia Pietraszko (Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago); joint presentation with the Workshop on Language, Cognition, and Computation “The morphology of compound tenses in Ndebele” Friday, May 8th: Professor […]

“Strategies of Literacy among the Dungan of Central Asia” Professor Cristoph Harbsmeier Thursday, March 12th, @ 4PM in Social Sciences 401. Discussions about literacy tend to be about the difference literacy makes to cultures. The present talk is about the crucial difference it makes not only what kind of alphabetic or syllabic writing system is […]

Dr. Pia Lane (University of Oslo) Minority language standardisation – methodological approaches I will investigate the standardisation of Kven, a Finnic minority language spoken in Northern Norway. Kven got recognised as a language in 2005. Influenced by the global focus on language revitalisation and the new status of Sámi and minority languages in neighbouring countries, […]

Professor Marianne Mithun (University of California, Santa Barbara) Language Variation and Change in Multilingual Contexts Most of the world is multilingual. There is now increasing awareness that language contact, the co-existence in one brain of multiple languages, can affect all aspects of those languages. Traditional language documentation has often been focused on ‘pure’ forms of […]

Hello everyone! For the Winter 2015 quarter, LVC is pleased to announce the following talks. Please be attentive to start times. All talks will be in Stuart 102 except for Professor Harbsmeier’s, which will take place in Social Sciences 401. Friday, January 16th @ 3PM in Stuart 102: Martina Martinovic (Dept of Linguistics, University of […]

Professor Patience Epps (University of Texas at Austin) Linguistic diversity and language contact in Amazonia: tracing multilingual interaction in prehistory While efforts to understand global patterns of linguistic diversity have explored a wide range of nonlinguistic correlates, associations with sociocultural patterns have generally tended to assume a correspondence between linguistic diversity and a lack of […]

Dr. Chiara Cappellaro (Oxford University Research Centre for Romance Linguistics & St John’s College) “Morphological variation in Romance third person pronouns” This paper discusses the significant variation in form (and paradigm structure) found in Romance third person pronouns – in both standardised and non-standardised varieties, cfr. Cappellaro (forthcoming). It investigates the origins of this variation, […]

Here’s the full list of fall quarter talks for the Language Variation and Change workshop. We’ll be in Pick 022 for each meeting (held on Mondays at 3 PM). October 20th: Zachary O’Hagan (UC Berkeley) “A Computational-phylogenetic Classification of Tupí-Guaraní and its Geographical Spread” October 27th: Chiara Cappellaro (Oxford) “Morphological variation in Romance third person pronouns” […]