Language Log

Via the Language Typology mailing list:

From: Inna Kaysina <kaysina.fds@uni-bremen.de>
Date: Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 11:26 AM
Subject: Festival of Languages

The IAAS (Institut für Allgemeine und Angewandte Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Bremen) in cooperation with different other institutions is organising a FESTIVAL OF LANGUAGES which will be happening from 17 September to 7 October 2009 at various sites in the entire city-state of Bremen (Germany).

The main objectives of the FESTIVAL are to familiarise the general public with the idea of the linguistic diversity of our world and to emphasise the central role language plays in all aspects of human life.

The programme of the FESTIVAL consists of two major components, namely an academic part with a series of national and international conferences and a part which includes over 100 popular events and addresses the general public.

For more information, please, visit our website http://www.festival.uni-bremen.de/.

The LINGUIST List's annual fund drive is under way; the drive is about halfway to its goal of $60,000 (the money goes to support the student staff). From the list's site.

The LINGUIST List is dedicated to providing information on language and language analysis, and to providing the discipline of linguistics with the infrastructure necessary to function in the digital world. LINGUIST maintains a web-site with over 2000 pages and runs a mailing list with over 25,000 subscribers worldwide. LINGUIST also hosts searchable archives of over 100 other linguistic mailing lists and runs research projects which develop tools for the field, e.g., a peer-reviewed database of language and language-family information, and recommendations of best practice for digitizing endangered languages data.

LINGUIST provides a space for discussion, job listings, information on conferences, and much more. It also runs an Ask A Linguist service, where people can get answers to questions about language and linguistics.

The list is an incredible resource for linguistics, deserving of your support. Small donations are welcome, by the way.

(Information for donors is on the site, along with special features like a "linguist of  the day" writing about how they got into the field. So far this year these are: Brian Joseph, Sarah Thomason, Richard Hudson, Marianne Mithun, and Andrew Carnie. Sally is the fourth Language Logger to be honored this way in the four years LINGUIST has provided this feature.)

Facing a steep drop in revenue, Language Log plans to cut the pay of all employees by 10 percent and will place some writers on unpaid furloughs. There will also be additional budget adjustments, according to executive offices on the penthouse floor.

The reduced pay for non-union employees, including top executives, will become effective April 1. Several writers have been offered early retirement but at the time of this writing, management has not received responses from any of them. Anonymous sources say that the writers instead demand that the executives return all huge bonuses that they received at the end of the past fiscal year.

Allow me, if you will, to briefly pervert the general functions of Language Log to send a personal message to the Hong Kong readers of Language Log who have been asking me about my upcoming lectures in their city. The answer is, on Monday (2 March 2009) I will be doing two engagements at different universities in the city, back to back. From 2 to 3:30 p.m., a lecture called "English Grammar: The Lost Twentieth Century" at Hong Kong Baptist University, in room RRS905 in the Sir Run Run Shaw Building on the Ho Sin Hang Campus; and then (after a rapid transfer by limousine; I may arrive looking a bit harried) from 5 to 6:30 p.m. a lecture called "Language Studies: Bridging Science and Humanities", in the Inaugural Series for the new Faculty of Humanities at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, in room N003. Both, I believe, are wide open to the general public with no ticketing.

From Andrew Garrett, a shameless plug for this summer's Linguistic Institute:

Language Log readers may be interested to know that four LL authors — Adam Albright, Geoff Nunberg, Geoff Pullum, and Sally Thomason — will be teaching courses at the 2009 Linguistic Institute. Every other summer the Linguistic Society of America and a US linguistics department sponsor a Linguistic Institute. This year the host is the University of California, Berkeley; the dates are July 6 through August 13; and there are 92 scheduled courses in all, as well as special lectures and six major conferences that take place during the Institute. Students can apply for fellowship support from the LSA (the deadline is February 17), and non-students are welcome to attend as "affiliates" (the affiliate charge pays for fellowships). We encourage anyone interested in language and linguistics to attend.

As Arnold reported late last year, Language Log received the LSA's Linguistics, Language and the Public Award at the LSA Annual Meeting this weekend. I was there, but, sadly, only with a poor cell-phone camera. Ah well — for posterity, some photos below the fold.

More news from the Linguistic Society of America meetings, this time about the Language Log presence in the official doings of the society. In addition to the blog's receiving the Linguistics, Language and the Public Award (no doubt there will be photos), there were three elevations of our bloggers:

Roger Shuy was elected a fellow of the society (for his achievements in linguistics; Geoff Pullum was similarly elected last year);

Chris Potts was elected an at-large member of the Executive Committee of the society, to take office tomorrow; and

Sally Thomason was elected president of the society, also to take office tomorrow.

Roger's achievement is entirely an honor, without any accompanying responsibilities. Chris and Sally, in contrast, have real work to do.

The bloggers will gather around the award tomorrow in the rotunda at Language Log Plaza and perform the arcane Elevation Ritual.

This just in from Drago Radev: NACLO — the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad — will have a booth at this week's Linguistic Society of America meeting at the Hilton San Francisco from today until Sunday noon. Language Log readers who visit the meeting should drop by to hear about the North American teams' successes at the international 2007 and 2008 Olympiads, and about plans for the imminent 2009 Olympiad. Those of you who don't yet know about the Olympiad might want to find out: the problems (samples also available on the NACLO website) are fun to solve. They require talent, but no training, in linguistics.

Many (most?) of us Language Loggers are also at the LSA, and some of us, e.g. me, have also been involved in running NACLO test sites, so feel free to accost us at the meetings too if you want to talk about NACLO. But Drago and Lori Levin and their colleagues will have all the answers to your questions at their booth.

Like Arnold, I'm at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). You can see a .pdf copy of the program here.  (The one on the LSA's website seems to be restricted to members only, so I've made a bootleg copy for outsiders, in the spirit of the scriptural injunction "Is a candle brought to be put under a bushel, or under a bed? and not to be set on a candlestick?")

If you see a presentation whose title especially interests you, let me know, and if I have time, I'll see if I can find some additional information about it.  Of course, you could also try Google — thus the very first presentation on the program is Alejandrina Cristià and Amanda Seidl, "Linguistic sources of individual differences in speech processing in infancy"; and searching for the title turns up a one-page abstract.  In other cases, you may be able to find a set of powerpoint slides or even a full paper.

[By Margaret Sharpe and Doris Dyen]

Isidore Dyen, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Yale University, died on 14th December 2008, surrounded by family members, after one final bout of cancer. He became known in the 1960s for his seminal work on Austronesian languages, and on Proto-Austronesian, the ancestral language of languages from Indonesia to Madagascar and across the Pacific Ocean. Until a few weeks before his death, he was continuing his research in attempts to subgroup yet another collection of Austronesian languages.

For about thirty years, Professor Laurie Taylor (retired from the University of York) has been doing a humor column in Times Higher Education, a U.K. university administration magazine, in the form of a newsletter from an imaginary Poppleton University. This week it included a painfully awkward message from an equally imaginary Interfaith Chaplain, struggling to find some kind of contentful and seasonal greeting that couldn't possibly offend anyone of any faith:

You know, very soon we will be reaching that special time of the year when people who subscribe to certain religious beliefs rather than to others will be celebrating what they regard as a very significant event. May I therefore take this opportunity to wish all such believers a very happy special time of the year…

Language Log, however, is not quite so inclined to imagine that simple words of greeting will shock or disgust anyone; it seems to us that such worries are rather closely related to word taboo, with which we have little sympathy. So it has been our custom for some years to come out quite boldly and use the C word at this season. We love writing for you, and as time permits, in our odd moments of spare time between full-time university jobs or research projects, we will continue to do so. And whatever your religion or lack of it, we wish you a happy Christmas Day.

Everyone who's anyone in British higher education knows that today at one minute past midnight the results of the latest Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) were released. And as I believe I have occasionally mentioned here, in the small part of my life that is not devoted to Language Log, I moonlight as Head of Linguistics and English Language (known as LEL) at the University of Edinburgh. So you'll naturally want to know how well we did in the RAE. That's why I'm still up after midnight (Greenwich Mean Time).

Well, you can easily check the published details for yourself now, at the relevant RAE results web page, as soon as their server stops crashing (it was a bit over-excited just after midnight). So it would be silly for me to let my natural innate modesty hold me back. The truth is out there: LEL ranks absolute highest in the UK for the proportion of its work falling in the 4* "world-leading" category. And not only that, but its numbers are so strong that if you compute a sort of absolute volume of world-leading-research by multiplying the number of Edinburgh linguists considered in the exercise (36) by the percentage of their work that was considered world-leading (30%), you get a number (10.8) that cannot be matched even by adding together the figures for any two other departments of linguistics in the United Kingdom.

Just in time for the holiday season: The Linguists educational DVD! According to the announcement on the LINGUIST List, it "includes 30 minutes of DVD extras profiling endangered languages around the world and efforts to archive and revive them; and a discussion guide created by Dr. K. David Harrison and the Center for Applied Linguistics."

The catch, of course, is that this DVD was produced for educational purposes, which somehow makes the price a whopping $300. But c'mon, you know you want one.