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 →Please join us for the second part of this year’s Fieldwork Recap Session, which will take place in the Landahl Center on Thursday Oct 27 at 12 noon. We will be hearing from Betsy Pillion (discussing her planned fieldwork in Africa), Natalia Pavlou (Cypriot Maronite Arabic), Robert Lewis (Potawatomi), and Hannah McElgunn (Hopi). As always […]
Continue reading →Please join us for the first part of this year’s Fieldwork Recap Session, where students will talk about where in the world they’re conducting their research and the challenges associated with working and establishing contacts in different places. Our first group of presenters (along with the regions where they work) includes: Adam Singerman (the Amazon), […]
Continue reading →Friday, March 1st @ 3:00PM in Rosenwald 015 Shepu or Mandarin? Attention and second order indexicality in a Chinese yoga studio Britta Ingebretson University of Chicago In this talk, I will examine how the phonetic qualities of language become mobilized in processes of second-order indexicality in a yoga studio in Huangshan, China. Shepu, a portmanteau […]
Continue reading →Friday, February 12th @ 3:00PM in Rosenwald 015 “Is ‘huh’ really a universal word? Clicks, kisses & whistles in Cameroon” Betsy Pillion, Sarah Kopper & Lenore Grenoble University of Chicago, MSU, University of Chicago Cameroon, a linguistically diverse country of more than 240 languages, is host to a set of cross- linguistic communicative signals that […]
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 →Friday, November 6th @ 3:00PM in Rosenwald 301 Intrinsic and Contextual Cues to Tone Perception In Medʉmba (or: A How-To Guide for Doing Phonetics Experiments in the Field) Kathryn Franich University of Chicago In this talk, I discuss results of experimental work on tone perception in Medʉmba, a Grassfields Bantu language spoken in Cameroon. The […]
Continue reading →Monday, June 9th @ 3:00 PM, Cobb 104 From semantic to social meaning. The case study of intensifiers. The phenomenon of intensification is pervasive in natural language. Examples of such expressions, in English, include very, really, so, extremely. Linguists have addressed intensification with respect to two specific areas: intensifiers’ semantics, and intensifiers’ usage in the […]
Continue reading →Monday, May 12th @ 3:00 PM, Cobb 104 Linguistics in a Challenging Environment Linguists choose to work on languages and in environments for a variety of reasons. Choices may be determined by locations of interest, funding, mentors, prior experience, and urgent need. The choice to work in a conflict zone poses unique challenges. When attention […]
Continue reading →Monday, February 24th @ 3:00 PM, Kent 107 Investigating phonetic variation over time in the U.S. Supreme Court Phonetic research over the past two decades has shown that individual speakers vary their phonetic realizations of words, phonemes, and subphonemic features. What we have found is that speakers show remarkable stability over time, while a small […]
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