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 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 →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 →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, 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 →JULIA THOMAS (Linguistics, University of Chicago) Monday, November 29 @ 3:30pm, Karen Landahl Center “Styleshifting in African American English: Theoretical implications from a phonetic analysis of /aɪ/” Abstract: This work explores /aɪ/ monophthongization in the speech of 20 Chicago-area AAE speakers. A prior analysis by Craig & Grogger (forthcoming) found evidence of styleshifting within this […]
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