Colloquia and Talks
Conferences and Calls for Papers
Fall Semester Reading Groups

Catapult Center workshop: Text Analysis Tools for Basic Exploration

The IU Catapult Center for Digital Humanities and Computational Analysis present this workshop by the Department of Linguistics' own Markus Dickinson. This workshop on basic text analysis will discuss getting a handle on patterns in text/corpus data by examining some freely-available tools on concordancing and word frequency counting, as well as making use of online search tools. These often form a platform for more complex analysis later on. If time permits, we may also discuss tools for textual annotation. The workshop will be run as a tutorial, so feel free to bring your own (plain) text data. To attend, please register at http://www.indiana.edu/~catapult/workshops.shtml.

Please note that this workshop will focus on basic skills and tools and is best suited for those with little knowledge of text and corpus analysis.

Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning Workshop: Statements of Philosophy: Critical Reflection about Teaching Practice

In this workshop for graduate students, Katie Kearns and Laura Carpenter of the CITL will share strategies for reflecting on teaching and will discuss the qualities of effective statements of teaching philosophy. Participants will read and analyze several statements and receive reflection guides for getting started. CITL also hosts a Teaching Philosophy Statements Writing Group at various meeting times. To register or find more information, visit the CITL Workshops registration page.

Second Language Studies Colloquium Series

The Department of Second Language Studies presents this colloquium series, which explores a wide range of topics related to second language acquisition.

• Febrary 1: Jeff Holliday presents "Exploring possible non-auditory influences on second language phonological acquisition."
• February 22: Miyuki Takeuchi presents "The Investigation of form-function mappings: Referential expressions and encoding of referential status in L2 narrative discourse by L1-English learners of Japanese."

For more information on these or future SLS Colloquia, please visit http://www.iub.edu/~psyling/SLSColloquium/Spring2013.html.

IULC Library Cataloguing

The IU Linguistics Club is continuing its efforts to catalog the IULC library this semester. This Saturday and next Saturday, volunteers are needed to help sort and log books in Weatherly Hall. Pizza will be provided. If you can, bring your computer and/or a friend to make it even more fun. If you have questions or need directions, contact Darcy Rose (darcrose@indiana.edu).

Department of French & Italian Student-Faculty Forum Series lecture: Barbara Vance presents "Old Occitan as a verb-second language: The state of the argument"

As part of its Student-Faculty Forum Series, the Department of French & Italian presents this lecture on the syntax of Old Occitan. The abstract follows.

One of the most far-reaching discoveries of late 19th-century Romance philology was the recognition that Old French (OFr), like Modern German, had a word-order constraint placing the finite verb in the second position of the clause. In the late 20th century, theoretical tools became available to explain this constraint in terms of verb-movement and, consequently, to account for the asymmetry between main clauses, which demonstrate the verb-second (V2) effect, and subordinate clauses, where the effect is largely blocked. It has traditionally been assumed that Old Occitan (OOc) is also a verb-second language because it shares many word-order patterns with Old French. However, demonstrating theoretically the V2 effect for Old Occitan is considerably more difficult than for Old French, for several reasons (e.g. OOc has a larger number of main-clause types that do not, strictly speaking, observe V2 order, and OOc lacks the atonic subject pronouns that mark the boundary between the basic (TP) and expanded (CP) areas of the clause in OFr).
In this talk I present two aspects of OOc syntax that lend support to a verb-second analysis of the language, despite some recent attempts to dissociate OOc, and in some cases Old French as well, from the V2 type instantiated by German. We will look at (a) the complex alternation between tonic and null subject pronouns, which makes sense only as a reflex of a V2 system and (b) the postposition of object pronouns, a phenomenon that not only suggests the presence of an asymmetric verb-movement rule similar to that of (V to C in) Old French but also declines during the 13th and 14th centuries in tandem with the decline of verb movement in French. These characteristics point to the value of continuing research on verb-second syntax as an areal phenomenon in western Europe, while also encouraging attention to the wide range of variation found among the languages at issue (Germanic as well as Romance).

Barbara Vance is Associate Professor in the Departments of French & Italian and Linguistics. Her interests lie mainly in the areas of French and Romance syntax and historical linguistics.

27th Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics

The Department of Linguistics and the Center for the Study of the Middle East will host the 27th meeting of the Arabic Linguistics Symposium from February 28th - March 2, 2013. Invited speakers are Sam Hellmuth (University of York, UK), Elabbas Benmamoun (UIUC), Mona Diab (George Washington University) and Atiqa Hachimi (University of Toronto). All talks will be held in the Georgian Room of the IMU. Click here to see the program and other links.

IULC Working Papers call for submissions

The Indiana University Linguistics Club Working Papers Online is now accepting submissions for Volume 13.
Undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty members from all departments are encouraged to submit original papers on any subfield in linguistics. Submissions resulting from outstanding term papers and independent research studies are welcome.
The IULCWP is meant to provide a gentle introduction to the world of publishing and a stepping stone to a full-fledged journal submission through the review and revision process. We appreciate faculty support in familiarizing our students with this opportunity and encouraging them to keep it in mind as they begin designing their final projects and papers.
Please visit our website for detailed instructions on submission and to view previous volumes: http://www.indiana.edu/~iulcwp
If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact us at iulcwp@indiana.edu.

Conferences of Interest

Many conferences of interest to IU Linguists can be found on the Linguist List Calls and Conferences page. Our own page for such announcements is undergoing revisions and will be linked shortly.

PHLEGME: Phonetics Reading Group

On Friday, February 1, Aaron Albin will lead a discussion of two articles: Gooden et al. (2009/2011), “Tone inventories and tune-text alignments” and Beckman (2006), “Tone inventories and tune-text alignments." Both articles can be found in the Resources section of the Oncourse page if you would like to read them in advance.

PHLEGME is an acronym for PHonetics Literature Enjoyment Group MEeting. As the name implies, this reading group gathers to discuss phonetics papers together in a casual setting. Anyone wanting to participate or find more information can contact Jeffrey Holliday (jjhollid@indiana.edu) to be added to the email list and Oncourse page.

CLingDing: Computational Linguistics Hour

CLingDing is a weekly computational linguistics discussion group, where students and faculty share in-progress research. CL students are strongly encouraged to attend.

• February 4 - Chung-chieh (Ken) Shan
• February 11 - Wren Thornton: Haskell + parsing scripts (tutorial)
• February 18 - Catapult Center for the Digital Humanities & Computational Analysis

Please see http://cl.indiana.edu/wiki/Spring2013ClingDing for the full spring schedule, or contact Markus Dickinson (md7@indiana.edu) for more information.

Syntax Reading Group

The Syntax Reading Group will kick off the spring semester on Monday, February 4 with Charles Lin leading a discussion of Koizumi and Tamaoka (2010), "Psycholinguistic Evidence for the VP-Internal Subject Position in Japanese."

The group will meet in Memorial Hall 401 this week and next, and will begin meeting in Memorial Hall 317A starting February 18. For more information or to join the OnCourse group, contact Yoshihisa Kitagawa (kitagawa@indiana.edu).