LVC is cosponsoring a meeting of the Semiotics Workshop, on November 3 at 4:30 PM in Haskell 101, which will touch upon language contact in Mesoamerica. “Notes on Mesoamerican ‘fashions of speaking’” Perry Wong with a brief addendum by Chris Bloechl For a copy of the paper, please email Perry Wong at perrywong@uchicago.edu or Briel Kobak at bkobak@uchicago.edu. For […]
Continue reading →Friday, April 1st at 3:00PM, location TBA Frames of reference in discourse: Spatial descriptions in Bashkir (Turkic) Tatiana Nikitina CNRS, Paris Cross-linguistic and individual variation in the use of spatial reference frames has been one of the central questions in the study of semantic typology (Pederson et al. 1998; Levinson 2003, inter alia). It is […]
Continue reading →Friday, December 4th @ 3:00PM in Rosenwald 301 Understanding Basque Differential Object Marking from Typological, Contact and Attitudinal perspectives Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Differential Object Marking (DOM) has enjoyed abundant scholarly interest insomuch as theoretical explanations of its key parameters (Aissen 2003; Malchukov and Swart 2008; Hoop and Swart 2007), language-specific constraints […]
Continue reading →Friday, November 13th @ 3:00 PM in Rosenwald 301 Language use in MOBA Gaming Communities Ross Burkholder University of Chicago In this talk I discuss a recent project investigating language use in Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games, focusing in particular on language use in the community surrounding the game DOTA 2. During the course […]
Continue reading →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 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, 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 →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 […]
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