| Abstracts
Rob Robinson, Watch
your Language
Professor Robinson will take you on a tour of
the American Dialects.
Who says "Mary", the same as "Merry" or "Marry",
what do you call
a bottle of soda, where do you stand in a line,
and who means
something unexpected when they say "anymore"
anymore?
Arnold Zwicky, Slips
of the Tongue
You mean to say
I see what you did.
but instead you say
I dee what you did.
or
I hear what you did.
or a bunch of other possibilities - but not
I gribness what you did.
What's going on?
From what goes wrong, we can learn something about
how things
work when they go right - what happens when we
talk.
Peter Sells, Language
and Advertising
I'll talk about some basic techniques of the use
of language in
print/magazine advertising, and base my presentation
around the
following questions:
(1) What aspects of language used in advertising
are effective, and why?
(2) How are advertisements structured?
(3) What is the relation between the language
and the images?
(4) What kinds of language (such as formal,
informal, highly
colloquial) are used in what kinds of advertising?
(5) Can advertising overstep the normal
bounds of language use?
(6) Is advertising considered (by consumers)
to be part of normal
communication patterns?
(7) How much of the message is actually
left out in advertising?
John Baugh, Beyond
Ebonics
This discussion reviews the Ebonics controversy
including a combination of linguistic,
educational and legal issues. Preliminary
discussion of comparable studies in South
Africa regarding English usage by Black South
Africans will also be explored.
Dick Schupbach, Action
in Synchrony
The fact that you can read this means, among other
things, that all of us
read the English language. How or where
we learned it, or the fact that
it is a "Germanic language" is beside the point:
it's what we share right
now that constitutes OUR language. Based
on this fact, many linguists
prefer to capture this common element, to analyse
language in a single
moment of its history, that is to say, in "synchrony".
The problem is that language is always changing.
These changes are the
result of processes that are constantly at work
in the system of individual
and collective grammar. How fast do these
changes occur? Can you possibly
capture them in "synchrony"?
Examples from English, Russian, and a man jumping
off the Empire State
Building are brought to bear on this question.
Time permitting, we will
proceed from the particular to the general and
then back.
Jim Fox, Deciphering
Ancient Mayan
The decipherment has been underway, and underway
for well over 100
years. Today we can read over 50% of the inscriptions.
Insights have
come through astronomy, art history, archeology
and linguistics.
Professor Fox will present a slide-illustrated
overview of the state
of the art and where we are headed.
Penny Eckert, Language
and Social Identity
People use linguistic resources to construct styles
as a way of placing
themselves with respect to the social world.
Styles such as "Valley
girl", "Surfer dude," and "Yeshiva boy" all involve
a combination of
resources, from clothing to moves to phonology.
This talk will discuss the
use of phonology to construct styles, focusing
on the social order of a
Detroit suburban high school.
Eve Clark, Children
and Language
What problems and puzzles face infants as they
start to learn language?
And what puzzles do we face in trying to find
out what they know? In
this session I will discuss some of the questions
(and a few answers)
that have intrigued researchers since Rousseau.
Geoffrey Nunberg, Prescriptivism
I'll talk a bit about the descriptive-prescriptive
battles, give some historical
background about the 18th-century grammarians
who shaped the
traditional dogmas, and talk some about my work
as usage editor and
usage panel chair for the American Heritage Dictionary
-- what kinds
of material we decide to put notes in for (from
traditional issues to
questions of sexist language) and how we deal
with them.
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