Featured Speakers

.

Marc van Oostendorp

Marc van Oostendorp is senior researcher in the Department of Variation Linguistics at the Meertens Instituut of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Phonological Microvariation at Leiden University. He holds the degrees of M.A. and Ph.D. from Tilburg University (The Netherlands). His research focuses on the phonology-morphology interface, the formalization of microvariation in phonology, the study of Dutch dialects, the interface between sociolinguistics and phonology, segmental structure and the structure of Optimality Theory. Van Oostendorp is the Editor in Chief of the five-volume Blackwell Companion to Phonology (2011) and is the author/(co-)editor of more than ten books, including Phonological Projection: A Theory of Schwa in Optimality Theory (Mouton, 2000), The Internal Organization of Phonological Segments (Mouton, 2005), and The Derivational Residue in Phonological Optimality Theory (Benjamins, 1999). His numerous articles have appeared in a wide variety of journals, as well as in many edited volumes.

.

Donka Minkova

Donka Minkova is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, as welll as a past Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh and a past Guggenheim Fellow. Along with countless articles in journals and edited collections, she is the (co-)author/(co-)editor of Phonological Weakness in English: From Old to Present-Day English (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), English Words: History and Structure (second ed., Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009), Studies in the History of the English Language IV: Empirical and Analytical Advances in the Study of English Language Change (Mouton, 2008), Alliteration and Sound Change in Early English (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), Studies in the History of the English Language: A Millennial Perspective (Mouton, 2002), and The History of Final Vowels in English: The Sound of Muting (Mouton, 1991), among others. She is also a co-founder of the SHEL conference series.

.

William A. Kretzschmar, Jr.

William A. Kretzschmar, Jr., (Ph.D. 1980, The University of Chicago) is the editor of the Linguistic Atlas Project, a national center for survey research on American English. He is a past President of the American Dialect Society, and he edited the Journal of English Linguistics for fifteen years. Among the books he has authored or (co-)edited are Handbook of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (Univ. of Chicago, 1993), Introduction to Quantitative Analysis of Linguistic Survey Data (Sage, 1996), The Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English (Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), and The Linguistics of Speech (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009). His ongoing projects include a long-term sociolinguistic field site in Roswell, GA, called Roswell Voices, a project that is the first (and so far only) North American member of the European Union's Living Laboratories network, which promotes public/private partnerships involving technology and innovation. He also administers a project funded by a major NEH grant to convert thousands of hours of audiotaped interviews to computer storage.