A c t i v i t i e s

Colloquium Series

The Department of Linguistics holds a weekly talk series throughout the academic year. Unless otherwise noted, colloquia take place on thursdays at 4:00 p.m. in Herring 125. Presentations are given by current doctoral students, university faculty and a number of distinguished visitors brought from outside Houston. A full schedule of upcoming colloquia can be found below.

The department has an e-mail list to facilitate the distribution of colloquium announcements and abstracts. Don't worry--there is no junkmail sent on this list, and generally only one message per week. If you wish to be kept informed of Linguistics colloquia at Rice, and to receive a weekly e-mail message containing an abstract for that week's talk, please subscribe to the distribution list at https://mailman.rice.edu/mailman/listinfo/lingcolloq-l

Colloquium Schedule for Spring 2008 Semester

The colloquium organizer for Spring 2008 is Michel Achard. Please contact him at achard if you would like to volunteer to give a talk or if you have any questions about the schedule.

1/8/08	Jim Hurford. University of Edinburgh	"A Parsimonious Begriffsschrift [Concept Notation] for Animals" Note: this colloquium is on Tuesday
1/17/08	Andrew Pantos, Rice University	"The Effect of Foreign Accent on Witness Believability"
1/24/08	Marja-Liisa Helasvuo. University of Turku, Finland	"Competing Strategies in Person Marking: Double-Marking vs. Economy" co-sponsored by the Rice Humanities Research Center
1/31/08	Elizabeth Gentry, rice University	"Forensic Implications of Foreign Accent Perception"
2/7/08	Katherine Crosswhite, Rice University	"Predicting Sonority"
2/14/08	Amy Franklin, Rice University	"Negation in American Home Sign Systems"
2/21/08	Sarah Lee, Rice University	"The tone system of Penang Hokkien, a contact Southern Min variety"
2/28/08	Vera Podlesskaya, Russian State University	"Pronouns and pro-verbs as hesitation markers: a cross-linguistic approach"
3/6/08	No Colloquium (Spring Break)
3/13/08	Claire Bowern, Rice University	"'Guessing is more fun'? Linguistic Prehistory Methods in Australia"
3/20/08	Michelle Morrison, Rice University	"Compensatory Lengthening and Pre-nasalization in Kibena"
3/27/08	No Colloquium (Rice Linguistics Symposium)
4/3/08	No Colloquium (Midterm Recess)
4/10/08	Chris Taylor, Rice University	"Symbolic and Political Economies of Hip Hop Subcultures"
4/17/08	Linda Waugh. University of Arizona	"Shifting Linguistic and National Identities in Conversational Interaction: Discursive Struggle, Power and Identity Acts"

Colloquium Schedule for Fall 2007 Semester

8/30/07	Rice Faculty	What faculty did over the summer
9/6/07	Rice Graduate Students	What grad students did over the summer
9/13/07	Sandra A. Thompson, UC Santa Barbara	"Fixedness in Japanese adjectives in conversation: Toward a new understanding of a lexical (‘part-of-speech’) category"
9/20/07	Jim Stanford, Rice University	"When your mother tongue is not your mother's tongue: Sui exogamy"
9/27/07	Michel Achard, Rice University	"impersonals and demonstratives: Some uses of French Il and ça"
10/4/07	Rice Students and Faculty	NWAV Practice Talks
10/11/07	Hubert Cuyckens, University of Leuven, Belgium	"The development of the for..to-infinitive and the emergence of new subjects in English non-finite clauses"
10/18/07	Fey Parrill, Case Western University	"Using the hands to see inside the head: Co-speech gesture as evidence for the embodied nature of human cognition" co-sponsored by the Rice Cognitive Sciences Program
10/25/07	Scott Paauw, SUNY Buffalo / University of Rochester	"Language Contact and Malay"
11/1/07	Gu-jing Lin, Rice University	"Restricted Adjuncts in Argument Structure"
11/8/07	Naonori Nagaya, Rice University	"Referentiality of Tagalog ang-phrases revisited: Referential, definite, specific, or none of the above?"
11/15/07	Anne-Marie Hartenstein, Rice University	"Northern Moldavian Hungarian Verbal Morphology"
11/22/07	No Colloquium (Thanksgiving)
11/29/07	Linda Lanz, Rice University	"Re-evaluating ergativity in Eskimo-Aleut: evidence from Iñupiaq"
12/6/07	Amy Franklin, Rice University	"Liar Liar Hands on Fire: What gesture speech asynchrony reveals about thinking"

Graduate Workshops

The department of Linguistics offers a series of occasional workshops on technology and professional development. These workshops are geared toward graduate students in the department, focusing on essential skills for success in grad school and beyond. Topics include: the use of specific software applications relevant for linguists, the use of audio and video equipment in field recording, and professional activities such as CV writing, abstract writing, and job interviews. To suggest future topics, or to volunteer to give a workshop, contact Suzanne Kemmer kemmer during the Fall 2007 semester, or Michel Achard achard during Spring 2008.

Experiments

To access the experimetrix site for experiments taking place in the Rice Linguistics Lab, visit http://rice-linguistics.sona-systems.com. Please contact Amy Franklin alf4 or Katherine crosswhite crosswhi with any questions.

Research Grants and Projects

Pama-Nyungan Languages and Australian Prehistory

Claire Bowern has received a grant from the National Science Foundation for her project entitled "Pama-Nyungan Languages and Australian Prehistory" (NSF award no. NSF BCS-0643517). The earliest detailed records of Australia’s indigenous languages date from approximately two hundred years ago, and therefore our only access to the prehistory of Australia’s indigenous past is through reconstruction in archeology and linguistics. While we know that humans have lived in Australia for more than 40,000 years, we do not know how speakers of the 250 currently attested languages came to live where they do today. This project uses linguistic evidence to trace the history of Aboriginal people in prehistoric times. Systematic similarities between words in these languages can be used to reconstruct various properties of prehistoric languages. These techniques will be used to determine the structure of the Pama-Nyungan language family, which will shed light on prehistoric population movements.
Australia’s linguistic prehistory is important for several reasons. It has been claimed that methods developed for Europe and the Americas do not work in Australia. If true, such a finding would be highly important, since these methods are based on properties of language change which until now have been assumed to be universal. However, preliminary work indicates that Australian languages show the same characteristics that we find elsewhere. Small speech community size, widespread multilingualism, and other factors have obscured relationships between these languages. These languages are an excellent laboratory for modeling what language change might have been like before the spread of agricultural communities. If we are ever going to be able to model accurately what prehistoric global language spread might have looked like, we need to understand how it operated in Australia.
For more information, visit the project's web site at http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~ppny/.

The Language of Bardi (BCJ) Precontact Narratives

Claire Bowern has also received funding from the NSF/NEH Documenting Endangered Languages Program for her project entitled "The Language of Bardi (BCJ) Precontact Narratives". Detailed linguistic fieldwork on the Indigenous languages of Australia did not begin in earnest until the 1960s. One of the few earlier sources is the manuscript collection of Gerhardt Laves, an American who went to Australia in 1928 and spent approximately 18 months doing linguistic research. He worked intensively on six languages, one of which was Bardi. Bardi is now spoken by approximately 25 elderly people in northwestern Australia. Laves’ Bardi records are extraordinary. They were written at a time before the full impact of European settlement had caused extensive language loss in Australia’s North-West and record a language and culture which has since changed significantly. Although the texts are legible and the language accurately represented, the materials are very difficult to read without excellent eyesight and a good knowledge of Bardi. This NSF/NEH-funded project will bring together a team of linguists and Bardi community members to work on the texts to produce an annotated edition, under the direction of Dr Claire Bowern. The linguists will digitize the texts, word process them, and provide rough translations on the basis of Laves’ notes and the Dr Bowern’s knowledge of the language. They will then work with Bardi speakers to refine the translations, discuss the grammar of the Bardi language, and work out the context of the stories. The result will be a book of the texts, with translations, annotations, and discussion.
This is an important project, linguistically and culturally, for Bardi people, linguists, and for science more generally. Linguistically, the Laves texts represent the earliest accurately recorded materials for Bardi, and preliminary work indicates that there have been subtle but numerous changes in the language over the last hundred years. We know little about variation and change in small linguistic communities like this, and within Australia the Bardi materials provide a rare opportunity to get accurate longitudinal information about language change. This in turn allows the study of change in languages with very complex inflection, which is both understudied and of wide relevance in linguistics. Culturally, the texts are very important. They provide information about pre-contact traditional law, mythology and everyday social interaction, and are a very detailed record of a way of life no longer practiced. Most of this knowledge is still held by the oldest people in the Bardi community but has not been written down, and work on describing and explicating the events in the Laves materials is a wonderful opportunity to study pre-contact culture. Finally, the texts themselves are an important language learning and cultural resource for Bardi people themselves, and repatriation of these materials is very important. The materials will likely figure prominently in future language revitalization programs. With so much of the world’s linguistic heritage in danger, this project provides a model of how early materials may be used to benefit both local communities and science.
For more information, visit the project's web site at http://www.ruf.rice.edu/%7Ebowern/laves/laves.htm.

Austronesian Voice Systems

Masayoshi Shibatani has received a research grant from the National Science Foundation for his project entitled "Austronesian Voice Systems: An Eastern Indonesian Perspective" ( NSF award no. BCS-0617198). The three-year project explores the empirical and theoretical issues of the Austronesian voice system from a unique perspective of the gradual attrition pattern of the voice morphology seen among the languages of eastern Indonesia. The fieldwork will be carried out in the archipelago stretching between Bali and Timor with the concentration on Flores Island. Please visit the East Indonesian Voice Systems web page for more details.

New Ways of Analyzing Variation 37

The department is pleased to be hosting the 37th annual New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) conference, which will take place at Hotel ZaZa, November 6-9, 2008. Please visit the confference web page at http://www.nwav37.rice.edu/ for further information.

Biennial Symposia on Linguistics

The Department hosts a biennial symposium on language and linguistics, bringing together distinguished researchers on current topics of intensive interest. The next symposium will take place in Spring of 2008 and is being organized by Masayoshi Shibatani on the topic of language complexity. For more information, visit the symposium's web page at http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~eivs/sympo

The 11th Biennial Rice University Symposium on Language was held March 16th-18th, 2006. The topic was "intertheoretical approaches to complex verb constructions". Fourteen speakers gave talks on a variety of approaches to elucidating the history and structure of complex predicates, including light verb constructions, vector verbs, and serial verbs. For more information about this recent symposium, click here .

The Tenth Biennial Rice Linguistics Symposium, entitled "Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity in Interaction", was organized by Professor Robert Englebretson, and took place March 31-April 3, 2004. Visit the conference web page for more information. A collection of papers based on this symposium entitled Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction was edited by Robert Englebretson and published Oct. 2007 by John Benjamins Publishing.

The Ninth Biennial Symposium entitled "Speech Perception in Context", organized by Prof. Nancy Niedzielski, was held March 14 - 16, 2002. The purpose of this symposium was to bring together researchers who investigate what knowledge systems are involved in the perception process and how these systems interact. Although the participants were from such different fields as linguistics, psychology, neurology, and electrical engineering, they shared an interest in examining speech perception as a phenomenon in a way that moves beyond mere phonetic pattern matching, and instead appeals to the entire range of cognitive systems involved in perceiving speech in more natural contexts. For the list please visit the symposium page.

The Eighth Biennial Rice University Symposium on Linguistics was held April 6-9, 2000 on "Causation and Interpersonal Manipulation in Languages of Central and South America". The papers from that symposium were edited by Masayoshi Shibatani, and the volume is in print (John Benjamins Publishers, 2001).

The Seventh Biennial Symposium was held March 26 - 29, 1997. Its focus was "On the Interface between Comparative Linguistics and Grammaticalization Theory: Languages of the Americas." Participants were Bernd Heine (Institut für Afrikanistik, Universität zu Köln), Marianne Mithun (UCSanta Barbara), T. Givón (UOregon), Terrence Kaufman (UPittsburgh) Aryon Rodrigues (Universidade de Brasília), Wallace Chafe (UCSanta Barbara), Sérgio Meira (Rice University), Alexandra Aikhenvald (Australian National University), and Spike Gildea (Rice University). A volume of the resulting papers edited by Spike Gildea and entitled Reconstructing Grammar: Comparative linguistics and grammaticalization theory was published by John Benjamins in 2000.

The Sixth Biennial Linguistics Symposium was on the topic of "Usage-Based Models of Language." The resulting volume of selected papers, edited by Michael Barlow and Suzanne Kemmer, appeared in May 2000, published by CSLI Publications (Stanford). Contributors to the volume include Ronald Langacker, Joan Bybee, Sydney Lamb, Brian MacWhinney, Connie Dickinson and T. Givon, Mira Ariel, Arie Verhagen, Douglas Biber, and Michael Barlow. For more information or to order the volume, go to Usage-based Models.

Funknet

The Department of Linguistics at Rice houses Funknet, an email discussion list for people who study various aspects of language, culture, communication, and cognition, and the interrelation of these. The list is dedicated to discussion and news about all aspects of functionally-oriented linguistics, broadly construed. For more information, to manage your subscription options, or to join the list, click here.

ICLA

The department also hosts the web site for the International Cognitive Linguistics Association (ICLA). Suzanne Kemmer is the web master of the ICLA site, and Martin Hilpert (Rice Ph.D. 2007) is the web editor and book review contact. For more information on this organization and about cognitive linguistics in general, visit http://www.cogling.org.

Rice Linguistics Society

As our name implies, RLS (the Rice Linguistics Society) is a student run organization of linguists at Rice, composed of grad students, undergrads, faculty, and anyone else interested in Rice Linguistics. We publish the Rice Working Papers series and organize the Annual Rice-UT Workshop on Linguistics. We host occasional parties, BBQ's, and other social get-togethers throughout the year. For more information about the organization and its activities, visit RLS home page.

Upcoming Events and News...

--Colloquium (Thursday, Apr. 17, 4:00pm, Herring 125):

LINDA WAUGH (U OF ARIZONA) "SHIFTING LINGUISTIC AND NATIONAL IDENTITIES IN CONVERSATIONAL INTERACTION: DISCURSIVE STRUGGLE, POWER AND IDENTITY ACTS"