Friday, June 03 @12:30 p.m., Karen Landahl Center for Linguistics Research Language contact in the Polish-American community in Chicago Abstract: Heritage speakers are individuals who were raised in a home where a language other than the dominant language of a given society was spoken. Heritage speakers are to some extent bilingual in both the language […]
Continue reading →Friday, May 27 @ 3pm, Karen Landahl Center for Linguistics Research “Modeling variation and change in radoppiamento sintattico“ Abstract: The external sandhi phenomenon of raddoppiamento sintattico (RS) in Italian has been a prominent topic in phonology for decades. While the existing theoretical literature treats RS as a regular phonological process, recent research has found that there is […]
Continue reading →Friday, May 13 @ 3pm, Karen Landahl Center for Linguistics Research “Sociolinguistic variation and implicit associations” Abstract: Sociolinguistic cognition is a long-understudied domain that is currently undergoing a flurry of exciting research. Technological, methodological and theoretical developments in formal linguistics, sociolinguistic variation, linguistic anthropology and social cognition have combined to facilitate the exploration of a […]
Continue reading →Friday, April 01 @ 3pm, Cobb 301 Origins of Metathesis in Batsbi Abstract: Blevins and Garrett (1998) investigate in detail the origins of CV/VC metathesis in a number of languages and identify two types of metathesis and a “pseudometathesis”. For them, “pseudometathesis” is a synchronic process that does not originate through the historical process of […]
Continue reading →Friday, March 04 @ 3 pm, Harper 148 Looking Beyond: What Indirect Evidence Can Tell Us About Universal Grammar Abstract: One of the most controversial claims in linguistics is that children learning their native language face an induction problem: the data in their input are insufficient to identify the correct language knowledge as rapidly as […]
Continue reading →Friday, February 18 @ 3:30pm, Harper 103 French infinitives in urban Wolof: an archaeology Abstract: Urban Wolof, a variety of Wolof spoken in Senegal’s cities, is characterized by extensive lexical borrowing from French as a consequence of Senegal’s colonial history. Far from being a new variety, urban Wolof emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries […]
Continue reading →Liquid phonology: A test case for the listener misperception hypothesis Abstract: The listener misperception hypothesis of sound change (Ohala 1981, 1993, 2003) has been a fruitful area of inquiry over the past several years, in part because it makes testable predictions. One prediction is that long-distance dissimilation such as liquid (lateral) dissimilation should be a […]
Continue reading →Monday, January 31, 3pm, Karen Landahl Center conference room Odessan Russian: Reconstructing variation Abstract: Odessan Russian (OdR) is a contact variety of Russian which emerged with massive immigration into the region which is currently Odessa, officially founded in 1794 under Catherine the Great. It was spoken in Odessa at the beginning of the 20th century […]
Continue reading →The workshop on Language Variation & Change presents ANDREW DOMBROWSKI (Slavic Languages & Literatures, University of Chicago) Friday, January 21, @3 p.m. (location TBA) Language Contact and Change in 13th Century Novgorod Abstract: The 1951 discovery and subsequent analysis of the Novgorod birch bark letters (BBLs) has revealed the existence of multiple features distinguishing the […]
Continue reading →Friday, April 1 – Alice Harris (U. Mass.) Friday, May 13 – Kathryn Campbell-Kibler (Ohio State)
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