Theme Semester 2012! And a special presentation from phonology professor Andries Coetzee!

"Multilingualism"

The website recently went up for the Theme Semester 2012 - Language: The Human Quintessence. I highly suggest you check it out. Some highlights include the MLK speaker Leanne Hilton from UC Berkeley talking about language revitalization, John Rickford from Stanford, a specialist on AAVE, and Robert Mankoff of the New Yorker talking about Language and Humor. There is also a film series, two conferences and so so much more! Your Ling Club Exec Board will hold a meeting to determine Ling Club's place in all of this, whether we should continue normal meetings, and I assure you we will try our best to get most of the speakers to come have breakfast with us, even though based on the calendar we may not be having many of them on our normal Fridays.
And if THAT wasn't enough excitement for you, please come to our meeting NEXT week (12/5) to eat FREE pizza and see our guest speaker, Andries Coetzee! He will be giving a basic overview of his major areas of research interest and how he ended up where he is:

My life in Linguistics
I started my college life at a small university in South Africa with a
focus on Hebrew and Greek, and I ended up in Linguistics at the
University of Michigan. In this presentation, I will review the
(mostly) academic route that I took between these two points. I will
focus on the different kinds of research that I have conducted over
the years as I traversed the route from rural South Africa to the big
city life of Ann Arbor! Over the years, my research has focused on:

(i) Biblical Hebrew: How to account for specific issues in the grammar
of Biblica Hebrew, using current linguistic theories.
(ii) Phonological Theory: My graduate education at UMass was very
strongly theory oriented -- with a focus on Optimality Theory. Much of
the research that I have done during grad school, and since then, has
been an exploration of the formal properties of Optimality Theoretic
grammars, and what we can learn from this about how language works.
(iii) Laboratory Phonology: Under the influence of colleagues here at
Michigan, I have also in recent years started exploring more how to
test linguistic theories in the phonology laboratory.

I will give short examples of each of these strands of my research,
and in the process, hopefully give an overview of the different types
of research that can be done in phonology.

Tonight: Meet 'n' Greet with EMU!

Hello again all! Sorry for the confusion about tonight's activity. Tonight is a Meet 'n' Greet with EMU, where we will have free coffee and tea. Please drop by and discuss language and linguistics with our friends next door.

This is their Ling Club blog.

Tonight: Christina Samurkas on Cape Verdean Creole!

Join us as our own Christina Samurkas informs us about Cape Verdean Creole, a Portuguese-lexifier language of Cape Verde!

Colloquium Breakfast TOMORROW (11/18)!

Please join us as we break our fasts with Diogo Almeida, a psycholinguist and syntactician from MSU!

Here's a summary (you might want to come to the breakfast to get a primer on what all of this means!):

One of the central problems for neurobiological theories of cognition in
general, and language in particular, is how to articulate and integrate
research, to borrow Marr's (1982) terminology, at the computational,
algorithmic and implementational levels of analysis. In this talk, I will
present results of behavioral and electrophysiological experiments that
attempt to uncover indices of information retrieval from the mental
lexicon. I will argue that these indices can be used to tie together
research from different domains of psychology of language (from perception
to comprehension) with research on theoretical linguistics, and can help
establish a mutually constraining relationship across the different levels
of analysis. Based on a series of electrophysiological experiments, I will
suggest that the temporal dynamics of visual word recognition reveal (1)
that access to actual linguistic information occurs at an earlier time
frame than previously thought, (2) how we can begin to tease apart early,
bottom-up lexical recognition from slightly later lexical integration
processes in language comprehension, and (3) that continuous access to
lexical level information over time can, in some circumstances, precipitate
the generation or fine-tuning of specialized forward models in the early,
putatively domain general, visual system.

Linguistics Humor Night!

Thanks so much to Marlyse Baptista for presenting last night! Her presentation was interesting and informative, and we had an excellent turnout!
Next week (11/14/11), we'll be having a "Linguistics Humor Night", where we will watch video clips of comedians talking about language. We did this last year, and it was a lot of fun! We have a lengthy list of clips, but if you have any others, please feel free to send them to us.

Meeting Tomorrow: Marlyse Baptista on Creole Genesis

Be sure to join us tomorrow for Linguistics department professor Marlyse Baptista's talk on "Creole Genesis: Out of many voices, one language." Marlyse specializes in the study of creole languages, so for anyone interested in Pidgins and Creoles or language change in general this is definitely a talk you won't want to miss (not that anyone should miss it)!
But wait, there's more! As this is our first meeting of the month, there will be FREE PIZZA! So be sure to show up at 403 Lorch tomorrow evening (11/7) at 7:30 pm to take advantage of both the guest lecture and the free food!

Halloween Special: The Linguistics of the Paranormal

I asked our resident expert on linguistic "weird stuff," Sally Thomason (remember our phenomenal 10/24 meeting? The very same!) for some Halloween-related linguistics, and she was kind enough to forward me an article she wrote about xenoglossy, a spooky process by which someone suddenly learns a language or accent without acquiring it naturally, supposedly (according to the psychiatrist who first described it) a language learned in a previous life. She also posted an article about the linguistics of channeling spirits in the Skeptical Inquirer called "Entities in the linguistic minefield", and if anyone is able to find it that would be great.

Sally Thomason's Article

And here's a sort-of-related Colbert Report video on Japanese phonetics robots and Foreign Accent Syndrome!

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Last Monday's (10/24) Meeting and Halloween

Thanks so much to Sally Thomason for a phenomenal talk on fieldwork! She shared with us tips and tricks, responses to other fieldworkers' advice, problems she encountered, and a slew of entertaining anecdotes, mainly about her work on Montana Salish. It was an excellent talk, and we look forward very much to our next guest lecture from Marlyse Baptista on November 7th.
Just a reminder that we have NO meeting on Halloween, and that tutoring is cancelled for that evening. We may post a fun linguistics- and Halloween-related post for the Holiday on the blog though, so keep an eye out!
Other upcoming events include our next Colloquium Breakfast on November 4th with psycholinguist Katherine Kinzler.

Tonight: Rescheduled Sally Thomason Talk

Just a reminders that Sally Thomason's talk is rescheduled to TONIGHT at 7:30. There will be FREE PIZZA! Here is the abstract once again:
"I'll talk about some of the pitfalls of linguistic fieldwork -- especially fieldwork on endangered languages -- and on how to avoid those pitfalls. For instance: how to collect lots of lexical data from speakers who haven't spoken their language regularly for decades; how to collect data on nonstandard dialects when everyone who goes to school gets taught the standard dialect; how to avoid offending your consultants; how to collect data on rare grammatical constructions; how to deal with speaker-to-speaker variation; how to keep cultural taboos from preventing data collection."
Be there or be square!

Meeting Tonight: Sarah Harper on Media Lengua

Come join us tonight as Sarah Harper gives a talk on Media Lengua, a mixed language of Peru between Quechua and Spanish!

Discussion Group Schedules

I'll let you in on a little secret not many undergraduates seem to know about (or at least, take advantage of): Discussion Groups. These are groups which are geared towards specific interests in Linguistics. Do you like Syntax? Sociolinguistics? Historical Linguistics? Phonetics? They're all here! And I have compiled a handy-dandy schedule for the Fall Term, so that you know when they all meet!
Here are general times and locations:
SoConDi (Sociolinguistics, Language Contact, and Discourse Analysis): Sociolinguistics Lab, on the mezzanine of the fourth floor. Times vary, which is why they are provided on the table
HistLing: in room 403 at 2:00
Psycholing: in room 3048 in East Hall (note: not Lorch Hall, like all the rest)
PhonDi: at 1:00 in the computer lab on 4th Lorch
Syntax: at 3:00 in 403 Lorch (the Catford Conference Room)
Colloquiums: they start at 4:00, but the place varies. Keep an eye out for Department emails

Announcement: Meeting Cancelled

Unfortunately, we had to cancel our Monday meeting due to the time restraints of the Ling Club Field Trip to see William Labov at MSU. Sally is still going to speak, but at a later date. You will receive more information on this later. If you would still like to join the Ling Club group going to see William Labov, please email me (amyhem@umich.edu) and let me know AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. Also, let me know if you have a car that you would be willing to drive.

Next Meeting: Sally Thomason! (plus free pizza)

Thanks to all who came to watch the Confederate States of America. We discussed how the film portrayed language: how the prestige dialect shifted to the Southern dialect, how certain lexical items which are taboo today might possibly be acceptable if slavery were still around, and how our own presumptions about prestige in a dialect made it harder for us to notice that the upper-class characters in the commercials were speaking a Southern dialect, because we index wealth with a more Northern way of speaking. The movie was fascinating and provided an interesting opportunity to discuss sociolinguistics in an entirely different context than we're used to.

Next meeting (Monday, October 3rd, at 7:30 in 403 Lorch), we have the distinguished Sally Thomason joining us! She is the head of the University of Michigan Linguistics Department, and has held high-status positions as a well-respected linguist in such large societies as the Linguistics Society of America, where she was once President for a term. She is best known for her work on Language Contact (for which she wrote the standard textbook), and she currently does fieldwork in Montana on Montana Salish, an endangered Native American language. Her talk will focus on this part of her academic career, and she will discuss with us some of the practical aspects of field work:

"I'll talk about some of the pitfalls of linguistic fieldwork -- especially fieldwork on endangered languages -- and on how to avoid those pitfalls. For instance: how to collect lots of lexical data from speakers who haven't spoken their language regularly for decades; how to collect data on nonstandard dialects when everyone who goes to school gets taught the standard dialect; how to avoid offending your consultants; how to collect data on rare grammatical constructions; how to deal with speaker-to-speaker variation; how to keep cultural taboos from preventing data collection."

In addition to her high status as a well-known linguist, Sally is also an excellent speaker and a delight to listen to. Please join us for this very special event! Also, we will be having free pizza. Hope to see you Monday!

U of M Linguistics Professor on NPR!

Go to this page to listen to our department chair, Sally Thomason, talk about Language and Politics! And then come see Sally Thomason in the flesh at our meeting on October 3rd!

Next Meeting: Confederate States of America

Tonight we watched the documentary about Genie, called "Secret of the Wild Child". Thanks to all who came! Join us next week as we watch the "Confederate States of America", a movie about history as if the South had won the Civil War. Afterwards, we will discuss the implications of the persistence of slavery and the victory of the South in how we as Americans speak.

Mass Meeting/Next Meeting

What you missed: a lovely cake by Reed Blaylock, a rousing game of MooT, and a chance to meet a great bunch of people interested in linguistics! But that's okay, because you can always join us next week and meet (hopefully) many of the same people and maybe even some new people in addition to that, when we watch "Secret of the Wild Child", about the infamous Genie, a little girl who was strapped to a toilet seat in an attic alone, thereby giving us more information about language acquisition. (You may have read about her in your Syntax classes). Hope to see you there!
Reed's cake:

(Vowel formants and "Ling Club" in IPA)

Festifall 2011

Come see our Linguistics Club table at Festifall, on Thursday, September 8th! We will have information about the Mass Meeting, Linguistics Fun Facts, fun NACLO problems, etymology trivia cards, free candy, and much more! Look for the kids wearing the "Michigan Linguistics" t-shirts! If you happen to miss us, we'll post Mass Meeting information soon. Hope to see you there!

Sociolinguistics: Gendered Language in Advertising

I stumbled upon this interesting set of word clouds used by toy ads for boys and girls respectively posted by Cory Doctorow on boingboing:

Upcoming Meeting, 4/11/11: David Medeiros

Here's the description for the talk to be given  at our next Linguistics Club meeting! (on Monday 4/11/10 at 7:30):

"We examine the relationship between phonological representations and  
articulatory planning, pursuing the hypothesis that speech errors  
during the production of a tongue twister are due not to motoric  
difficulty, but occur when dynamic aspects of planned proximal  
gestures overlap and interfere. We find that speakers produce  
relatively few errors when producing novel tongue twisters and  
comparatively more speech errors during subsequent productions in a  
masked self-paced reading task. This is consistent with the view that  
speech errors in a tongue twister task cannot be solely attributed to  
articulatory factors and supports a cascading activation model of  
speech production."

Did you know? - Discussion Groups

University of Michigan Undergraduates! You are in a really good linguistics department for an undergraduate student to be in. One word: variety. While many linguistics departments focus on one subfield (as those who attended Željko Bošković's colloquium lunch found out), ours has a wide variety of topics to choose from. This gives us as undergraduates the freedom to explore the entire field of linguistics to find out what we like. 
One way to take advantage of this opportunity is to take a wide variety of linguistics classes in many different subfields. However, a lot of us can't fit all the linguistics classes we want to take into our busy schedules. For those people, you should take advantage of Friday discussion groups in the department! They tend not to take a lot of commitment, and are welcome to everyone. Best of all, they give you an hour's worth of exposure to research in a specific subfield done by grad students and professors in our department. Or use the discussion groups to hone your already keen interest in a specific subfield! Here's a breakdown of the groups which meet (generally) on Fridays before colloquium lectures (some are more frequent). You can check the Linguistics Department calendar (we have a link on Links We Like) for more information:
Phonetics/Phonology  at 1:00 pm 
Syntax/Semantics at 2:00 pm
Historical Linguistics at 2:00 pm 
Sociolinguistics/Language Contact/Discourse Analysis at 3:00 pm
As of right now, only a handful of undergraduates take advantage of this awesome opportunity. Try it out!

Welcome!

....to the blog of the Michigan Undergraduate Linguistics Club!


We meet Monday nights at 7:30 in 403 Lorch (Next to Martha Cook and the Business School).

We love all things to do with language and share our studies in this field.

Our next event is  Monday, April 11th, at 7:30 at 403 Lorch.  On the agenda:
Professor David Medeiros will be presenting on Tongue Twisters, which are a fun mix of syntax and phonology!

We hope to see you there!