The number of undergraduates in the department is expected to skyrocket after the success of the Undergraduate Major Night. 24 prospective linguists arrived to the dinner to hear talks from Tom Wasow and John Rickford on the Quotative ALL project, Nola Stephens on First Language Acquisition, and Phil Hubbard on teaching English as a Second Language.
Present and future linguists at Majors Night
Undergrads Edgar Navarro, Aya Inamori, and Josh Falk give testimonials to the power of Linguistics.
The event was organized in part by SLing, the newly-formed undergraduate Linguistics club.
Middy Pineda will inform us about “Phonetic adaptation in non-native speech: Insights from a distributional analysis of long-lag VOT.” from noon to one in room 50 today at Speech Lunch. See you there! Here is the abstract:
Speakers encountering long-lag VOT for the first time in their L2 produce VOTs between their L1 and L2 values. Native-like long-lag productions are conditioned by speaker competency factors such as age of acquisition and experience, showing significant production differences between late bilinguals, early bilinguals, and native L2 speakers. Thus far, analyses have focused on average VOTs across speaker groups. We investigate the full distributional properties of VOT in bilinguals (e.g. variation, skewness) in addition to averages to provide a more informative picture of bilingual acquisition. We collected VOT production data from French-English bilinguals (age of English onset 0-15 years) and conducted a distribution-based analysis. Our results show that while speaker groups differ predictably in mean VOT, our analysis discovers subgroups based on common production behaviors; eliminating the gross categorizations of early and late bilinguals and moving toward gradual and predictable shapes of VOT that are correlated with English schooling, time in an English-speaking country, and age of acquisition. Ultimately, we predict that these results will fill in some missing blanks between perception and production, and suggest, for example, that differences in perceived accent and comprehensibility diverge due to the degree of overlap with native L2 VOTs.
All are welcome to impose themselves on the upcoming Linguistics colloquium, where Don Winford (The Ohio State University) will hold forth on “On the Unity of Contact Phenomena – The Case for Imposition.” That’s 1:15pm in the Greenberg Room. Be there or be square:
The emergent field of Contact Linguistics faces a number of fundamental challenges, not least of which is to reach agreement on a unified theoretical framework for the study of contact-induced change. All of the frameworks that have been proposed recognize two broad types of cross-linguistic influence, which Thomason & Kaufman (1988) originally referred to as “borrowing” versus “interference via shift” or “substratum influence.” But there still remains a surprising lack of consistency or consensus about the classification of contact-induced changes and the processes or mechanisms that create them. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the literature concerned with so-called interference phenomena. They embrace a wide array of outcomes that have been referred to variously as cases of structural convergence, indirect diffusion, grammatical replication, selective copying, convergence intertwining, and so on. I argue here that all of these cases of structural diffusion are the result of a single mechanism of contact-induced change, which, following van Coetsem (1988, 2000), I refer to as imposition. This approach provides a basis for a unified treatment of various kinds of change found in second language acquisition, creole formation, situations of structural convergence, and gradual attrition of a native language under conditions of shift to a new primary language.
Get ready for CUSP, the 2nd California Universities Semantics and Pragmatics conference, this Saturday in scenic UC Santa Cruz. Here’s the website, with location and program information. Quite a few Stanford people will give talks:
- Jessica Spencer
A Game-theoretic Analysis of Copula Emergence in Saramaccan
- Cleo Condoravdi and Sven Lauer
Performing A Wish: Desiderative Assertions and Performativity
- Olena Andrushenko
Evolution of Instrumental Component Realization within an Intended Action in Middle English
And if you don’t want to travel all the way down to Santa Cruz, you can stay here and attend the Conference on Language and Power, also this Saturday in Cordura 100.
The pragmatics group will assemble again on December 2, 5:30 pm, in Cordura 110. The plan is to discuss sections 3.1 (’Game models revisited’) and 3.2 (’Epistemic lifting of signaling games’) of Michael Franke’s thesis.
Individualism, Identity and Bicycles in Northern California (N.Y. Times)
The women are only accidentally riding together, and, suddenly, through the group — nearly dispersing it — pedals a subcluster of young women on mountain bikes, agile, balanced, weight forward, utterly at home on two wheels. Behind them rides a young man wearing a King Tut headdress, glistening in the sun, churning furiously in a gear too low.
De-Stress
Sarah Palin was weed-eating her yard and accidentally cut off the tail of her cat which was hiding in the grass.
She rushed her cat, along with the tail, over to WAL-MART!
Why WAL-MART??
HELLOOOOOOOOO!
WALMART is the largest re-tailer in the world!!!
The Stanford Blood Center is reporting a shortage of type O and AB-. For an appointment, visit http://bloodcenter.stanford.edu/ or call 650-723-7831. It only takes an hour of your time and you get free cookies.