Indiana University Department of Linguistics
The Linguistics Calendar is published by
the Linguistics Department to keep you informed of announcements of
interest.
To have an event posted in the Linguistics Calendar, email your
information to leviking@indiana.edu by
Wednesday of the week before your event.
Colloquia and Talks
Location: Wells Library Information Commons Cluster 1
Date: Friday, March 1
Time: 1:00 - 4:00 p.m.
The Catapult Center for Digital Humanities and
Computational Analysis of Texts will host an information retrieval workshop by
Xiaozhong Liu of the IU School of Library and Information Science. The workshop
is free, but registration is required at http://www.indiana.edu/~catapult/workshops.shtml.
The abstract follows.
With the exponential growth of the Web in the past decades, we are facing a flood of information. The success of GYM (Google, Yahoo and MSN) has shown that information retrieval is a key component to assisting users to access target information based on their needs. However, there is an increasing demand for knowledge creation, knowledge usage, and knowledge retrieval. We need some innovative methodology to better understand users, documents and the relation between them. In this presentation, we will cover some basic techniques used in information retrieval and then I will talk about some recent projects I'm working on and try to investigate the possibility for automatically extracting knowledge by using data mining and retrieval techniques.
Location: Ballantine Hall (BH) 215
Date: Fridays
Time: 2:30 - 4:00 p.m.
The Department of Second Language Studies presents this colloquium series, which explores a wide range of topics related to second language acquisition.
Location: Swain East 105
Date: Saturday, March 2
Time: 4:00 p.m.
As part of the FRIT Graduate Student Organization Conference, The Department of
French & Italian presents keynote speaker Annie Tremblay (University of Kansas)
for a lecture titled, "What did you say? Locating Word Boundaries in French as a
Second/Foreign Language." The abstract follows.
Recognizing words in continuous speech, a seemingly effortless task in the native language (L1), becomes strikingly difficult in a second/foreign language (L2), because different information signals the beginning and end of words in the L1 and in the L2. What type of linguistic cues do adult L2 learners use to recognize words in continuous speech? Does their use of these cues change as their proficiency in the L2 increases? Can high-proficiency L2 learners recognize words as efficiently as native speakers do? I will present two eye-tracking listening studies that examine how adult native speakers of English at different proficiencies in French use linguistic cues to locate word boundaries in French. I will focus specifically on liaison consonants as a distributional cue to word-initial boundaries and on pitch prominence as a prosodic cue to word-final boundaries in French. The results show an important asymmetry in L2 learners’ ability to use these two types of linguistic cues for locating word boundaries in French speech. I will discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of both the nature of the linguistic information that the adult brain can learn to use and the pedagogical interventions needed in French classrooms.
Location: Indiana Memorial Union (IMU) Oak Room
Date: Wednesday, March 6
Time: 5:30 p.m.
The Department of French & Italian presents a lecture by Liliane Haegeman (Ghent
University, Belgium), titled "An intervention account for the distribution of
Main Clause Phenomena." The abstract follows.
It is well known that certain fronting phenomena in English are by and large restricted to main clause domains. For instance, object fronting is by and large excluded from temporal adverbial clauses:
(i) *When this news I heard, I was very upset.
Hooper and Thompson (1973) and many accounts inspired by them (Bianchi and Frascarelli 2010) offer a mainly semantic/pragmatic account, claiming that Main Clause Phenomena (MCP) depend on ‘assertion’. They also challenge any attempts to provide a syntactic analysis for the ungrammaticality of (i).
In my presentation I will argue that a syntactic account for the distribution of (a subset of) MCP is possible, and I will explore two syntactic accounts for the distribution of Main Clause Phenomena. The ‘truncation’ accounts explore H&T’s own intuition that adverbial clauses – and other clauses that resist MCP - are structurally ‘reduced’ and display a deficient left periphery in which the landing site for the argument fronting is missing. Such accounts postulate a specialized landing site for CLLD which survives truncation in Romance. An alternative approach is to interpret the unavailability of MCP as the result of locality restrictions on movement. According to these accounts, adverbial when clauses, for instance, are derived by operator movement (Geis 1970). Assuming a movement derivation of an adverbial when clause, the unavailability of argument fronting is like the unavailability of argument fronting in interrogative when clauses. Likewise, the availability of CLLD in Romance adverbial clauses is parallel to that in wh- clauses. The movement account can be extended to clauses embedded under factive verbs which are also incompatible with MCP.
Conferences and Calls for Papers
Location: Indiana Memorial Hall (IMU) Georgian Room
Date: February 28 - March 2
Program: (Click here to
view the PDF)
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.
Location: Indiana Memorial Hall (IMU) Georgian Room
Date: February 28 - March 2
The 27th Annual Arabic Linguistics Symposium, hosted by the Center for the Study of the Middle East, will be held February 28th - March 2nd, 2013. We are currently looking for students who are interested in volunteering with CSME during the conference and are willing to help with registration, serve as information point people, and monitor the doors during individual presentations. Volunteers will receive free admission to the symposium and are welcome to sign up for multiple volunteer times (or volunteer for a partial shift). The available volunteer sessions are as follows:
Friday, March 1st, 2013 Session 1: 8:30am - 1:30pm Session 2: 1:30pm - 7:00pm Saturday, March 2nd, 2013 Session 1: 8:30am - 2:15pm
If you are interested in volunteering or have questions please contact Katie or Liese at csme@indiana.edu. You can also visit our website for specific schedule and program information at http://www.indiana.edu/~csme/.
Location: Swain East (SE) 105
Date: March 1-2
The French & Italian Graduate Student Organization is holding its bi-annual conference March 1-2, 2013. The theme for this year's conference is "Negotiation and Renegotiation." Following is the schedule for the French Linguistics talks, including the keynote address to be given by Annie Tremblay from the University of Kansas.
Friday, March 1, 2013Keynote speaker Annie Tremblay (4:05-5:20 p.m.): What did you say? Locating Word Boundaries in French as a Second/Foreign Language; see the listing under "Colloquia and Talks" above for more information.
If you have any questions about the conference or wish to see a full schedule, which includes the French literature and Italian talks, feel free to contact Eric Beurlein at ebeuerle@indiana.edu.
Deadline: Friday, March 8, 5:00 p.m.
Email: iulc@indiana.edu
The IULC is now accepting abstracts for our Annual Graduate Student Conference. The conference will be held on Friday, April 12th from 10:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m. Please submit abstracts by email to iulc@indiana.edu no later than 5:00 p.m. on Friday, March 8.
Website: IULC Working Papers
Online, Vol. 12
Indiana University Linguistics Club Working Papers Online is pleased to announce the release of Volume 12. IULC Working Papers Online is a peer-reviewed journal accepting submissions from the Indiana University community on topics ranging through the many varied subfields of linguistics and related disciplines. The Volume 12 Table of Contents, with links to abstracts and full text manuscripts, is available at https://www.indiana.edu/~iulcwp/contents.cgi?which=12.
Website: http://www.indiana.edu/~iulcwp
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.
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.
Spring Semester Reading Groups
Location: Memorial Hall (MM) 317A
Time: Fridays 10:00 - 11:30 a.m.
Contact: Jeffrey Holliday
On Friday, March 1, Jeffrey Holliday will lead the group in a discussion of Kreiman et al (2012), “Variability in the relationships among voice quality, harmonic amplitudes, open quotient, and glottal area waveform shape in sustained phonation.” The article is available on Oncourse if you would like to read it ahead of time.
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.
Location: Memorial Hall (MM) 401
Time: Mondays at 1:00 p.m.
Contact: Markus Dickinson
Website: CLingDing Page
CLingDing is a weekly computational linguistics discussion group, where students and faculty share in-progress research. CL students are strongly encouraged to attend. Upcoming presenters and topics are as follows:
Please see http://cl.indiana.edu/wiki/Spring2013ClingDing for the full spring schedule, or contact Markus Dickinson (md7@indiana.edu) for more information.
Location: Memorial Hall (MM) 317A
Time: Mondays, 4:00 - 5:30 p.m.
Contact: Yoshihisa
Kitagawa
The Syntax Reading Group meets each Monday to discuss syntax readings. On Monday, March 4, the group will discuss Yoshida (2012), available on the Oncourse site. For more information or to join the Oncourse group, contact Yoshihisa Kitagawa (kitagawa@indiana.edu).