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. The regular time and place for colloquia is Thursdays at 4:00 p.m. in Herring Hall 125. Presentations are given by current doctoral students, Rice faculty, visiting scholars, and a number of distinguished visitors brought from outside the university. The schedule for upcoming colloquia is below. The department has an e-mail list called lingcolloq-l which distributes colloquium announcements and associated talk abstracts. Graduate students are automatically subscribed to this list, and others interested can be added too. Don't worry--there is no spam 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 speaker, title, and abstract for each week's talk, you can subscribe to the distribution list at Lingcolloq-l. Colloquium Schedule for Spring 2009 Semester The colloquium organizer for Spring 2009 is Suzanne Kemmer. If you have schedule questions or would like to volunteer to give a colloquium presentation during that semester, please contact Suzanne at kemmer. The schedule below is under construction. All talks are on Thursdays at 4:00 p.m. in Herring Hall 125 unless otherwise indicated in the schedule. 0 1/8/09   LSA meeting in SF   No colloquium   1/15/09   Sydney Lamb, Rice   "Perceptual Neuroscience and Linguistic Neuroscience"     1/22/09   Viktoria Papp, Rice   "The Effects of Heroin on Speech and Voice"     1/29/00   Scott Paauw, University of Rochester     "TAM in the Malay Varieties of Eastern Indonesia: Some Interesting Developments"   2/5/09   Tatiana Nikitina, Stanford University   "The puzzle of S-O-V-X word order: non-local argument realization in Mande"   2/12/09   Christina Willis, St. Edward's University   "An argument for expanding the scope of inquiry for the category of evidentials: insights from Darma and other Tibeto-Burman languages"   2/19/09   Gabriela Caballero, SUNY Stony Brook   "Scope, phonology and templates in an agglutinating language: Choguita Rarámuri variable suffix ordering"     2/24/09   Laura Robinson, Rice University   "Dupaningan Agta, Negrito languages, and the linguistic prehistory of the northern Philippines"  NB: This talk is on a Tuesday, same time and place as the normal Thursday colloquia.   2/26/09   Graeme Trousdale, University of Edinburgh   "Formulaic language and lexicalization processes in English: A Construction Grammar analysis"   3/5/09   Midterm break   No colloquium   3/12/08   Peter Petré, University of Leuven/Rice University   "Be it as it is: On the development of the present stems of the verb be" (This talk is rescheduled from its earlier date due to job talk schedule.)   3/19/09   Ja-Yeon Jeong, Rice University     "The semantics of four Korean motion verbs of separation: A usage-based study".   3/26/09   Chris Schmidt   "Wangka, a Riung dialect in West-Central Flores"   4/2/09   Spring Recess   No Colloquium   4/9/09   No colloquium. The normal Thursday colloquium is postponed to following the following Tuesday due to speaker schedule     4/14/09   Susan Goldin-Meadow, University of Chicago/UCSD   "How our hands help us think". Note: This colloquium will be in HUMANITIES 117.   4/16/09   Nicoletta Orlandi, Philosophy, Rice   "Are sensory properties represented in perception?   Colloquium Schedule for Fall 2008 Semester The colloquium organizer for Fall 2008 was Michel Achard. 00 8/29/08   Welcome back   Student and faculty presentations   9/4/08   Professional Development Workshop (for grads, pre-grad students, and others interested)   "Papers, dissertation-writing, and grad school survival tips"    9/11/08   No speaker   Laura Robinson's colloquium, originally scheduled for Sept. 11, was postponed due to the approach of Hurricane Ike. The talk is rescheduled for October 23.     9/18/08   Mark Turner, Case Western University   "Forbidden fruit: Principles and origins of the modern mind". This lecture held in Humanities 117.   9/25/08   Ja-Yeon Jeong, Rice University   "The semantics of four Korean motion verbs of separation: A usage-based study". Postponed. To be rescheduled.   10/02/08   Dominique Willems, University of Ghent   "Weak Verbs Revisited"   10/09/08   Soyeon Yoon, Rice University "Testing the Usage-Based Model: Semantic Compatibility, Frequency and Ease of Processing in Constructions"   10/16/08   Professional Development Workshop (for grads, pre-grad students, and others interested)       "Articles and conference talks: Journals, meetings, and abstracts"   10/23/08   Laura Robinson, Rice University   "Double nominative constructions in Philippine languages"   10/30/08   Cassandra Pace, Rice University   "A third take on (ING)"   11/06/08   NWAV Conference in Houston - organized by Nancy Niedzielski   No colloquium   11/13/08   Suzanne Kemmer, Rice University   "New Dimensions of Dimensions: Experiential Domains, Frequency, Productivity, and the Usage-Based View of Language"   11/20/08   Professional Development Workshop (for grads, pre-grad students, and others interested)   "Jobs outside Academia"   11/27/08   Thanksgiving Day   No colloquium   12/04/08   Indranil Dutta, Rice University   "Multiple cue interactions and acoustic enhancement of phonological contrasts: Evidence from Hindi"

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. In 2008-2009, the workshops will be incorporated into the Colloquium schedule, and will thus take place on specified dates in the Fall 08 and Spring 09 schedules, in the regular colloquium room Herring Hall 125. To suggest future topics, or to volunteer to give a workshop, contact Michel Achard achard during the Fall 2008 semester, or Suzanne Kemmer kemmer for Spring 2009.

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 Dr. Claire Bowern has moved to Yale University although she is still associated with Rice as an Adjunct faculty member and continues to supervise her students. She has an NSF-sponsored project entitled "Pama-Nyungan Languages and Australian Prehistory". Project description: 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 brings together a team of linguists and Bardi community members to work on the texts to produce an annotated edition, under the direction of Dr. Bowern at Yale. 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 hosted the 37th annual New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) conference November 6-9, 2008. Nancy Niedzielski was the organizer, aided by the students of the Rice Linguistics Society. Co-Sponsors included the Rice School of Humanities and the Rice Humanities Center. Please visit the conference 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 last symposium took place in March 2008 and was organized by Masayoshi Shibatani on the topic of Language Complexity. For more information, visit the symposium's web page at 12th Biennial Rice Symposium on Language and Linguistics, where the program of talk titles and the associated abstracts are still accessible. 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 Brasilia), 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. Givón, Mira Ariel, Arie Verhagen, Douglas Biber, and Michael Barlow. For more information or to order the volume, see Usage-based Models.

Funknet The Department of Linguistics at Rice houses Funknet, an email information and discussion list for people who study various aspects of language, culture, communication, and cognition, and the interrelation of bthese. 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, go to Funknet.

ICLA The department hosts the web site for the International Cognitive Linguistics Association (ICLA). Suzanne Kemmer kemmer is the webmaster 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 the ICLA homepage.

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.