The Linguistics Program is now hosting a Morphosyntax Reading Group (MRG, ‘merge’) devoted to significant articles on morphological and syntactic topics; the group’s organizers are Derek Legg and Gregory Stump.  Our plan is to meet every other Thursday from 1 to 2 pm in Room 201 of the Chemistry-Physics Building.

Our first meeting was on Thursday, February 18.  Hilaria Cruz led a lively discussion of Greville Corbett’s 2009 paper “Canonical inflectional classes”.

Our second meeting was on Thursday, March 3.  Derek Legg led a wide-ranging discussion of  Mark Aronoff, Irit Meir & Wendy Sandler 2005 – “The paradox of sign language morphology”.

Our third meeting was on Thursday, April 7.  Fabiola Henri led the discussion of Olivier Bonami 2015 – “Periphrasis as collocation”.

Our next meeting will be on Thursday, April 14, when Gregory Stump will lead a discussion of his 2016 ms “Rule composition in an adequate theory of morphotactics”.

Future papers that we will read and discuss:

Ian Schneider: Alice Harris 2009 – “Exuberant exponence in Batsbi”
Sahar Taghipour: Keren Rice 2011 – “Principles of affix ordering”
Malachi Oyer: Arnold Zwicky & Geoff Pullum 1983 – “Cliticization vs inflection: English n’t“

Contact Gregory Stump (gstump@uky.edu) for access to pdf files of these papers.

After the Summer 2013 “alpha” and the Academic Year 2013-2014 “beta” versions, and after a Summer 2014 period of assessment and upgrades, we are pleased to announce the “release” of LINCD Research v1.0 for the Academic Year 2014-2015.

The highlight of this first “full release” is our new administration profile that is designed to allow for more “agile” management for maintaining and enhancing LINCD programs. The original four program types have been retained – LINCD Sessions; LINCD Readings; LINCD Open Labs; LINCD Special – with some small adjustment to their goals and structures. The new administration profile consists of a Steering Group to maintain a more distributed oversight of the LINCD programs and their functioning, and to allow for more efficient and effective channels for their evaluation and improvement.

The initial Steering Group consists of the following members: Jennifer Cramer (faculty), Razia Husain (student), Ben Jones (student), Mark Lauersdorf (faculty), Sedigheh Moradi (student). The initial governing guidelines are intentionally somewhat open: Steering Group membership is voluntary; duration of service is not fixed; withdrawal from service is at the member’s discretion. The only constraints on the structure of the Steering Group are: an uneven number of members (3 or higher) must be maintained; student members must outnumber faculty members; membership is on a volunteer basis (i.e., not elected).

Be sure to check in regularly throughout the Academic Year 2014-2015 to see the exciting programming brought to you by the new LINCD Steering Group for our upgraded LINCD Research v1.0!

The new semester is quickly approaching, and we have a lot of excitement heading your way! I hope you have already seen the email Prof. Lauersdorf and I sent our earlier this week to announce that both LINCD regular sessions and the SRG will be meeting at 3pm on Mondays this semester. SRG is being directed by Ben Jones, and he has selected sociophonetics as our theme. He has already picked some readings, and the tentative list is posted below. Go ahead and check these out! Our first meeting will be an informational meeting on Monday, September 8 at 3pm in the RCH (no reading required). I’ll probably bring goodies to share! Tell your friends who might be interested – grad students, undergrads, faculty, staff, neighbor – to join us. This will be of special interest to students enrolled in the Sociolinguistics and Phonetics classes this semester.

Tentative Reading List

al-Rojaie, Y. (2013). Regional dialect leveling in Najdi Arabic: The case of the deaffrication of [k] in the Qaimi dialect. Language Variation and Change, 25(01), 43-63.

Carmichael, K. (2013). The performance of Cajun English in Boudreaux and Thibodeaux jokes. American Speech, 88(4), 377-412.

Freeman, V. (2014). Hyperarticulation as a signal of stance. Journal of Phonetics, 45, 1-11.

Freeman, V. (2014). Bag, Beg, Bagel: Prevelar Raising and Merger in Pacific Northwest English.

Koffi, N.E. (2014). The Acoustic Vowel Space of Central Minnesota English in Light of the Northern Cities Shift. Linguistic Portfolios, 3(1), 2.

Podesva, R. J. (2013, March). Gender and the social meaning of non-modal phonation types. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (Vol. 37, No. 1).

As part of our LINCD initiative, we’ve started a reading group for the sociolinguistically interested. In our meetings, which will occur approximately every other week on Wednesdays at 2pm in the RCH (see the lab schedule for details), our plan is to read and discuss state-of-the-art sociolinguistic research from some of the most prestigious journals, written by some of the field’s leading scholars. But since this group is designed with our MALTT students in mind, and since mastering digital/computational methods of analysis are a key component for success in this program, we will also take time in our meetings to test out the methods used by these researchers in conducting sociolinguistic analyses today. This process will acquaint students with the relevant technologies and give them a chance to explore how these methods might enhance their own research.

The readings for each week are listed in the lab schedule on the day that we will discuss it. The reading list for Fall 2013 is also below. If you are interested, please join us!

Reading list
Burkette, Allison. 2013. Constructing the (m)other: A-prefixing, stance, and the lessons of motherhood. Language in Society 42: 239-258.

Karrebæk, Martha. 2013. ‘Don’t speak like that to her!’: Linguistic minority children’s socialization into an ideology of monolingualism. Journal of Sociolinguistics 17 (3): 355-375.

Philips, Susan. 2013. Method in Anthropological Discourse Analysis: The Comparison of Units of Interaction. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 23 (1): 82-95.

Reyes, Angela. 2013. Corporations are people: Emblematic scales of brand personification among Asian American youth. Language in Society 42: 163-185.

Rickford, John and Makenzie Price. 2013. Girlz II women: Age-grading, language change and stylistic variation. Journal of Sociolinguistics 17 (2): 143-179.

Squires, Lauren. 2013. It don’t go both ways: Limited bidirectionality in sociolinguistic perception. Journal of Sociolinguistics 17 (2): 200-237.

Wagner, Suzanne. 2013. “We act like girls and we don’t act like men”: Ethnicity and local language change in a Philadelphia high school. Language in Society 42: 361-383.

The LINCD Research initiative began as a “corpus linguistics lab” for the students in the Spring 2013 graduate seminar on Historical Sociolinguistics. The research projects for that course required the use of historical corpus data, which necessitated, in many instances, the use of databases and tools that were not generally available to the students, but could be made available to them through a lab setting. The lab setting also provided an opportunity for the students to consult with one another and with me as they worked on research projects that shared similar questions, problems, and methods.

Of course, the usefulness of a facility that provides student access to tools, resources, and materials, as well as an environment for the exchange of information and ideas in linguistic research, extends beyond individual courses and assignments. Thus the LINCD Research initiative was born of the desire to provide a space (both physical and conceptual) in which students (and their professors) can:
– experiment with digital tools, models, methods, and resources;
– engage in collaborative practices, sharing their discoveries, insights, and materials with each other and with their professors;
– examine and discuss the work of their colleagues, their professors, and the field at large;
i.e., a digitally-enhanced research space where students and professors can come together to explore shared interests across the many domains of linguistic investigation.

The practical side in all of this is also not to be underestimated, as such a space facilitates:
– timely completion of student course- and degree-related research;
– the carrying out of independent student research;
– student participation in faculty research;
– sharing of sometimes complex, sometimes costly resources.

After an “alpha version” pilot phase with an “open lab” concept in the summer of 2013, the Linguistics Incubator for Collaborative Digital Research is entering into its “beta version” in the fall of 2013. The current plan is to establish a range of formats including “open lab” times, dedicated recurring sessions (whether disciplinarily thematic, specific-tool-oriented, presentation-driven, etc.), special ad hoc sessions for one-off events, and focused reading groups.

Check back with us for updates as the Fall 2013 “beta version” progresses.