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!