Monday, November 4th @ 3 PM, Harper 140 Magical ideologies of language change: Connecting micro-level variation to macro-areal diversification In many respects, historical investigation of the Bantu language family serves as a model application of the Comparative Method to a genealogical unit outside of Indo-European. The close relationship of hundreds of languages occupying the greater part […]
Continue reading →Monday, October 21st @ 3 PM, Harper 140 Variation in fingerspelling: time, pinky extension, and what it means to be active This talk will look at two sources of variation in fingerspelling of American Sign Language: overall timing, and one aspect of hand shape. Reported fingerspelling rates have considerable variation (a lower bound of ~125msec […]
Continue reading →Monday, October 7th @ 3 PM, Harper 140 Voice-specific lexicons: acoustic variation and semantic association Over the past twenty years, evidence has accumulated that listeners store phonetically- rich memories of spoken words (Goldinger 1996, Johnson 1997; Schacter & Church, 1992). These memorized episodes are linked to various speaker characteristics, including gender (Strand & Johnson 1996, […]
Continue reading →Tuesday, May 28th @ 3 PM, Harper 103 Language Contact, the Ancient Near East, and the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: Bringing Data and Theory Together While the phenomenon of language contact in the ancient Near East generally and the Hebrew Bible (also called the Old Testament) specifically has long been acknowledged, only recently have Semitic linguists […]
Continue reading →Monday, May 13th @ 3 PM, Wieboldt 408 What are they?: Some Hidden Forms of the Copula in Old Irish It is uncontroversial that Proto-Indo-European *-nti# regularly becomes -t /d/ in Old Irish, as in berait ‧berat ‘(they) carry’ (< *bheronti). Nevertheless, my principal claim in this talk is that just in the copula, and […]
Continue reading →Monday, May 6th @ 3 PM, Wieboldt 408 An Overview of Nguni Verbal Reduplication with Special Reference to Ndebele Previous works on verbal reduplication in Nguni (isiNdebele, siSwati, isiXhosa and isiZulu) such as Downing (1996, 1997a) and Sibanda (2004) have not paid much attention to possible verbal morphology inaccuracies but have been concerned mainly with […]
Continue reading →Monday, April 29th @ 3 PM, Wieboldt 408 What Can We Do with High Frame Rate Ultrasound: Investigating the Phonetic Basis of the Back Vowel Constraint in Mangetti Dune !Xung Previously, the main articulatory field method used to investigate place of articulation was static palatography/ linguography. This method is invasive, and contact patterns are smeared […]
Continue reading →Monday, April 8th @ 3 PM, Wieboldt 408 Backchanneling in Russian: Form, Function and Occurrence Backchannels, otherwise known as listener response tokens, have been shown to occur quite frequently in the course of interactions between two speakers and they are considered to occur universally. However as shown by Tottie, there is some evidence for backchanneling […]
Continue reading →Monday, March 11th @ 12:30 PM, Social Sciences 302 The particular–characterizing contrast in Indo-Aryan copulas and the diachronic emergence of overt tense marking Several Indo-Aryan languages are characterized by (at least) two distinct copular expressions in both the present and the past tenses (e.g. hai and hota hai in Hindi or ahe/asato in Marathi). The distribution of these copulas in non-verbal […]
Continue reading →Monday, March 4th @ 12:30 PM, Kent 120 Sociophonetic perception: experience or stereotypes? The acoustic form of speech sounds vary systematically across different social groups. One of the most significant and influential findings in speech perception research in the last 20 years is that individuals appear to use their knowledge of socially meaningful phonetic variation […]
Continue reading →