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.