Monday, February 10th @ 4:30 PM, Harper 150 Language variation and change in two Palestinian Arabic varieties: Gaza and Jaffa While research in Arabic sociolinguistics has been on the rise in recent years, a number of regions are still under-investigated. Most varieties of Palestinian Arabic, though described by dialectologists in the traditional sense over the […]
Continue reading →Friday, January 31st @ 3 PM, Harper 150 (NOTE FRIDAY MEETING) Notes from the field: language and Gender in Huangshan China This Semiotics/LVC paper provides an ethnographic account on the current use of the Tunxi dialect in Huangshan City, Anhui, China. Tunxi dialect (Tunxi hua) is a member of the Xiuyi (Xiuning-Yi) subbranch of China’s […]
Continue reading →Monday, November 25th @ 2 PM, Harper 140 (NOTE TIME CHANGE) The Workshop on Language Variation and Change is pleased to offer a special workshop on language documentation taught by postdoctoral researcher Dorothea Hoffmann. The workshop will take place from 2-3:45 PM in HM 140 (note time change) Dr. Hoffmann has been conducting fieldwork on […]
Continue reading →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, 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, February 25h @ 2:00 PM, Location TBA Verbal acts in the songs of the old Greek underworld In this talk I discuss the discourse patterns that emerge in the lyrics of Rebetiko, an urban folk music genre that flourished in the port of Athens in the early 20th century. In the 1920s, a ghetto […]
Continue reading →Monday, December 3rd @ 3 PM, Harper 140 The role of multiple sources in the creation of novel formal categories in a new mixed language: Light Warlpiri as a case study Light Warlpiri is a newly emerged mixed language spoken in northern Australia, which combines elements of Warlpiri (Pama-Nyungan) and varieties of English and Kriol […]
Continue reading →Monday, November 19th @ 3 PM, Harper 140 Wild Sounds in Wolof Abstract: In this paper we describe a group of sounds and articulations that stand outside of the basic phonemic and/or lexical inventory of Wolof (Niger-Congo) but are a core part of the language’s communicative system. We call these wild sounds and words following […]
Continue reading →Monday, October 15th @ 3 PM, Harper 140 Amawaka Speakers’ Creative Uses of Morphosyntactic Variation in Cultural Context Abstract: The 250 to 300 remaining speakers of Amawaka reside in the Western Amazonian lowlands along either side of the border that divides Peru and Brazil. Residents of most Amawaka villages serendipitously juxtapose (1) a reified system […]
Continue reading →