Workshop on Immigrant Languages in the Americas 6: Uppsala, Sweden

Various UW folks have attended this workshop and recommend it highly. Besides, it's Sweden in September.

The 6th Annual Workshop on Immigrant Languages in the Americas (WILA6) will take place on September 24–26, 2015, at Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden. The workshop is hosted by the Department of English.

We invite abstracts for 20-minute presentations on any aspect of the linguistics of heritage languages in the Americas (e.g., structural, generative, historical, sociolinguistic, or experimental). Abstracts should be no more than one page in length, but may include a second page with diagrams, charts, and references. The abstract itself should be anonymous, while the accompanying email should contain author information and the title of the paper. Abstracts should be sent to Joe Salmons. 

Submission Deadline: June 15, 2015. Decisions on acceptance will be announced in July.

Conference website 

Heritage Language List

For further information, please contact Joe Salmons. 

Local Organizers 

Angela Hoffman Falk, Department of English, Uppsala University 

Merja Kytö, Department of English, Uppsala University 

Organizers of WILA6 

Birna Arnbjörnsdóttir, University of Iceland 

Janne Bondi Johannessen, University of Oslo 

Michael Putnam, Penn State University

Joseph Salmons, University of Wisconsin – Madison

Previous Workshops

The Fifth Annual Workshop on Immigrant Languages in the Americas, October 2014, UCLA 

The Fourth Annual Workshop on Immigrant Languages in the Americas, September 2013, University of Iceland

The Third Workshop on Immigrant Languages in America, September 2012, Penn State University 

The Second Workshop on Immigrant Languages in America, September 2011, University of Oslo 

Investigating Immigrant Languages in America, September 2010, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Linguistics news ... corpus linguistics MOOC and Journal for Historical Sociolinguistics

Busy times in linguistics. Just found out about a MOOC for corpus linguistics, offered by Lancaster University, available here. If anybody signs up for it, we here at Team Verb would be eager to hear how it goes.

That message came two hours after a message saying that beginning in the spring of 2015 De Gruyter will publish a new Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics. (See the Historical Sociolinguistics Network website, if you want to stay up on things in that subfield, though the journal isn't up there yet.)

4th Annual Workshop on Immigrant Languages in the Americas

Had never actually been to Iceland (beyond the airport) but am here now for the 25th Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics in Reykjavík. Amazing in every way ... and the weather has been mostly better than in Madison. I can't believe I'd never been to Iceland before.

In September, there will be another chance for some readers of this blog to come to this amazing place, namely the 4th Annual Workshop on Immigrant Languages in the Americas. The deadline for abstracts is coming up (May 31st), but it's a reasonably low-key event and lots of cool stuff was presented at all three of the previous ones. It'll be in the building pictured below, which really does look like that.

Be there or be square.

New fieldwork tool! iSLR Field Recorder

The Sociolinguistics Research Lab at the University of Victoria has just released a really nifty tool for fieldwork, especially sociophonetic fieldwork. It's an app for iPhone, iPad or iPod that …

allows you to record words or phrases prompted by your own text list (optionally randomized). Then, simply upload your recording session to your Dropbox account or Sync with iTunes. You can retrieve new wordlists from Dropbox, too!  

I saw a demo of an early version last year at NWAV by Alex D'Arcy (she developed it) and it was pretty slick then. I haven't tried it out yet, but can't wait.

Now, if they can develop an app that will get IRB approval for new projects, the future will be without limit.

Linguistics tattoos, etc.

Science Times now has an online slide show about science tattoos, here. The author of the piece, Carl Zimmer, long ago did something on linguistics tattoos, featuring a tiny glottal stop (here). A couple of years ago, a bunch of posts on lingua-blogs and elsewhere mentioned other linguistics tattoos, including an IPA vowel chart on the Log (here).

The slide show reminded me, though, that I occasionally hear people talk about linguistics tattoos and other graphics associated with our field. The image here is of a bowling shirt from a bowling team that some UW–Madison grad students started some years ago, The Gutturals. It's the IPA symbol for an epiglottal plosive, a prototypical guttural. (I don't know if they got a lot of gutteral reactions, though, or even guttural reactions.)

So, a question, gentle readers: Aside from t-shirts, what's your favorite image of linguistics in a non-linguistics context?

NSF Lingiustics Program under threat

Many readers of this blog are members of the Linguistic Society of America, so will have gotten this already, but it warrants posting, if only as a reminder. Just unbelievable, the depth of this attack on scientific research of all kinds: trying to eliminate the entire directorate for Social, Behaviorial and Economic Sciences at NSF.


Dear Colleagues,

The House Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice & Science (CJS) is considering changing the 2012 appropriation to eliminate the Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences (SBE) directorate at the NSF, which includes the Linguistics Program. The Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA), a coalition to which the LSA belongs supporting Federal funding for the social sciences, is encouraging its members to write to their House Representatives and Senators, urging the House to continue to support the human sciences at NSF. Having had the privilege of serving recently as one of the Assistant Directors of the NSF, heading up the SBE directorate, I want to endorse COSSA's request, believing that eliminating SBE would be disastrous for the human sciences in the US and for linguistics in particular.

So the LSA is now encouraging its members to write to their House Representatives and US Senators, ideally before the CJS Subcommittee meeting on 7 July, or before the full House Appropriations Committee meeting on 13 July, and at least before the floor discussion scheduled for the week of 25 July. You may want to copy Subcommittee Chair Frank Wolf R-VA and Ranking Member Chakah Fattah D-PA and perhaps other members of the Subcommittee (http://www.appropriations.house.gov/Subcommittees/Subcommittee/?IssueID=34794) and Appropriations Committee Chair Harold Rogers (R-KY) and Ranking Member Norm Dicks (D-WA) (http://www.appropriations.house.gov). You can find contact information for your representative using the “Write Your Representative” feature at https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml, and you will find a list of Senators, sortable by state, at http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm.

We all lead busy lives and if you prefer to send something more or less ready made I suggest something along the lines of the letter available at http://www.lsadc.org/info/NSFSBEletter.pdf. You may copy and paste the text from this letter (make sure the formatting has copied appropriately) and if you have the opportunity to elaborate and to tell your representatives something about our field, you may want to address one or more of the following points:

• a. some of us study language as a branch of biology (biolinguistics), in such a way that the field has become a lead science within the cognitive sciences more broadly and within emerging neuroscience.
• b. much work in linguistics feeds work on applied linguistics, which is the basis for the major worldwide industry of second language teaching.
• c. with the development of new communication technologies, work in computational linguistics has been playing an increasing role in the development of new technologies as we seek more effective automated techniques of text analysis, including machine translation.
• d. work in linguistics has become important in developing therapies for aphasia and language disorders in patients suffering from strokes, Alzheimer's and other diseases.
• e. study of language variation has been instrumental in thwarting the extermination of some endangered languages and in addressing social and political issues in matters of language use.
• f. work on the acquisition of language, both first and second language acquisition, has played a leading role in the learning sciences generally.
• g. linguists have been funded by directorates such as Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE), Education & Human Resources (EHR) and Engineering, large-scale cross-directorate programs like Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI), and more focused inter-directorate programs like CreativeIT and Social Computational Systems (SoCS); none of this would happen without SBE and the Linguistics Program.

Support will be particularly valuable if your representatives are from the Republican party. Furthermore, you might strengthen your argument by pointing to NSF-supported work being conducted at a university in the representative's area.


David W. Lightfoot, PhD
Past President, Linguistic Society of America
Professor of Linguistics,
Director, Interdisciplinary Program in Cognitive Science,
Director, Communication, Culture & Technology Program, Georgetown University

This is your brain on IPA.

Word going round is that your phonetics friends' brains are wired different than yours. Kudos for being special. In a brain science article with an amazingly low number of authors, Golestani, Price and Scott (Journal of Neuroscience, 16 March 2001, 31(11):4213-4220) may provide one reason why transcription training has waned in years from phonetics programs--and I thought it was due to the prevalence of open source phonetic programs (anyone heard of Praat?) or the dropping of prices of computing processing (anymore anyone heard of IBM?).

From their abstract:

Phoneticians were also more likely to have multiple or split left transverse gyri in the auditory cortex than nonexpert controls, and the amount of phonetic transcription training did not predict auditory cortex morphology.

This is evidence backing the annoying 'how many languages do you speak' question from nonlinguists--well, at least for the phoneticians (anymore anyone heard of syntax and semantics?) At least phonologists can justify those two obligatory weeks teaching phonetics at the beginning of the semester.

So what do they think is the source of the difference between phoneticians' and nonphoneticians' brains:

The transverse gyri are thought to be established in utero; our results thus suggest that this gross morphological difference may have existed before the onset of phonetic training, and that its presence confers an advantage of sufficient magnitude to affect career choices.

After reading these quotes from the abstract, the authors say this at the beginning of the last paragraph in the article:

In conclusion, our results demonstrate that extensive training with speech sound analysis, and maybe even with articulation- based approaches, can lead to plastic changes in Broca’s area. This has potential implications for training-related remediation for individuals with phonological difficulties (e.g., developmental dyslexia), and in the domain of second language learning.

So is it training or no training? I'm not brain guy (haven't used it in years) and look forward to digger further in this paper to figure out how one gets from results demonstrating that training doesn't matter to implications that training matters. I'll stop now, my brain really does hurt, and look forward to waking up to hear what the extra strength brain of Mark Liberman of Language Log has to say.

Praat 5.2

How cool is it to be a linguist? A really key piece of software is available free and constantly updated and refined by its creators. Yup, Praat. 5.2 has just been released.

The pink mouth with the thing below is it the icon. I thought for a time that the thing was a disconnected tongue but figure now it must be an ear. Maybe it's a cubist motif?

Zimmer on "quant(s)"

Wow, it is so nice to pick up the NYT Sunday Magazine on the "On Language" weeks and know that there will be a fine column in there by Ben Zimmer. This week, he tackles Quants, that is

experts in mathematics, physics and computer science who brought sophisticated quantitative approaches to the world of Wall Street.

The story of how increasingly advanced mathematical models shaped the markets — and led to serious problems — is everywhere today. In academia, it echoes longstanding complaints by non-quant social scientists about the dominance of quant stuff.

This is relevant for linguistics. The field is experiencing huge and amazing progress thanks to our own quants, in about every subbranch. (OK, anthropological linguistics is probably largely untouched by it, but ... .) The local linguists here seem to embrace this trend, but they talk a lot about the need to keep some perspective — to be sure that they know what they're putting into the model and how to interpret what comes out. Seems like the right way to go.

Image from here.

LINGUIST list challenge ... help historical linguistics!

If you read this blog, you almost surely use the LINGUIST list too. They are celebrating their 20th anniversary of serving our field — and anybody with internet access who has any vague or passing interest in language.

More immediately, they've embarked on a big fund drive to support their operations. This year, they're doing a Linguistic Subfield Challenge. Here's the current subfield snaphot:

Me, I'm a historical guy, and therefore deeply disturbed to see that we're lagging behind both syntax (now in the lead) and language acquisition. If you love language change, or reconstruction or dead languages, please help us boost our totals. Sure, phonology's just fine and I like morphology too, but we have to win this.

Please donate! And go, historical, go!

Why do accents trump skin color?

Scientific American has published a piece on work by Katherine Kinzler and colleagues showing evidence that kids, when presented with pictures/voices of other kids, identify the ones they would like to be friends with more by accent / language (namely, speaking English 'with a native accent') than by 'race'. That's not very surprising, I'd say.

A cliche has developed around here about articles in places like Nature, Science and PNAS — a view forged by people who haven't published in any of those places, I think — that the deal is that you have to do serious (or serious-looking) science up to the very end of the article and then you can go wild with speculation about broader ramifications that are highly improbable. This is being called the "Last Five Lines" principle.

So too, it seems, here. Here's the last paragraph:

Why was accent more important than race? “Race, as a psychological category, may be relatively modern in terms of human evolution,” explains Kinzler, now at the University of Chicago. In prehistoric times, “a neighboring group might have sounded different even if they did not look different,” she says. Preference for our own race might have developed later, after the more ancient preference for our own accent. The next step is to see whether living in bilingual or multilingual countries might change this early inclination.

I would have figured that kids just generally prefer the familiar to the unfamiliar, and that socialization of even relatively young kids has clued them in about who to hang out with. If so, going for deep evolutionary explanations is a massive stretch. I guess this is less surprising from Scientific American than the big general science outlets.

The most interesting followup might be not with 'foreign' accents, but rather with regional ones. Would you get the same results with Wisconsin, Alabama, Massachusetts, and so on?

History of Linguistics at Wisconsin: Edward T. Owen

This is quite possibly the weirdest little thread of stuff I've ever seen in the rich history of linguistic science at the University of Wisconsin – Madison: The Yale Daily News reports here (it was just covered on NPR's Marketplace too) that a Skull & Bones artifact is up for auction at Christie's, pictured here. The little flap on top is apparently hinged, possibly used as a ballot box.

It apparently was owned by "Bonesman Edward T. Owen 1872, a French and linguistics professor at the University of Wisconsin." I knew his name but not as a linguist: He donated the land for Hoyt Park, an amazing urban chunk of land on Madison's near west side. There's an Owen Parkway that I think is named for the family and an Owen Street there that may be. Linguistics (and French), it seems, didn't occupy all his time, skull collecting aside as this bit on the Parkway indicates:

Edward T. Owen (1850 - 1931) was an educator and real estate speculator, and was a driving force behind the Madison Park and Pleasure Drive Association, which purchased land for public parks and drives decades before the city saw such need. In 1892 he bought a fourteen-acre tract of what was then wooded land along a commanding height about a mile south of Lake Mendota, parallel to the northern boundary of Resurrection (then Calvary) Cemetery. He donated it to the city as a pleasure drive dedicated to the memory of his daughters.

But I was curious about him as a linguist ... he was here and alive when a lot of the early giants were … must have known Haugen, Twaddell, all those folks. He seems to have written this book:

Linguistic Aberrations in Particular, Differences Between Thought Intended and Thought Express[ed?] by Owens, Edward T., Emeritus Professor Of French And Linguistics, University Of Wisconsin

Off to the library to see this one!

"The first computer that speaks Viennese"

Hardly, of course, but that's what the story says. Readers who know German might still enjoy this link — A well-known Austrian actor, Hanno Pöschl (pictured on the left, image from here), has given his voice to science, or at least donated samples for use on "the world's first computer that speaks Viennese." If you scroll down a little on that link, you can hear the contrast between Pöschl actually speaking and Pöschl's synthesized voice.

Aside from being cute, it's a little reminder that speech recognition has to be able to deal with real-world linguistic variation in sounds, and it's even nice to have synthesized voices in varieties we prefer to speak/hear. Still, let's not think too much about how far this computer is from 'speaking', let alone producing actual Viennese.

"Facts" in linguistics

Last week, The Stranded Preposition (whose stranding is hopefully syntactic and not flood-related) passed along this quote from Raven McDavid's classic 1948 American Speech article on r-fulness/r-lessness in the American South:

It is a tradition among some schools of scientific investigation not to insist on facts and examples, and to ignore them when they conflict with previously formulated theories.

I was so inspired by this that I added it to the footer on this blog (scroll to the bottom). The quote is a footnote to a passage noting that conventional descriptions of American English claim that Southern dialects are r-less — a stunning oversimplification. How could the noted scholars cited have written/thought such things? Plenty of descriptions were available that showed otherwise and it's hard to know any Southerners without knowing r-ful ones.

This morning, reader E.G. called my attention to this post from LINGUIST, a review written by Madalena Cruz-Ferreira of this book:

Engh, Jan. 2007. Norwegian Examples in International Linguistics Literature: An inventory of defective documentation. Munich.

The book does something remarkable and deeply disturbing: It documents mistakes in linguistic analyses of Norwegian. Think about that: A whole book that does nothing but catalog and analyze errors in data from one language. As it happens, the 346 flawed chunks of data (published by 139 different linguists) are all from syntax. Engh apparently found no errors in the lit on Norwegian phonetics, phonology or morphology.

Here's the sobering conclusion the reviewer offers:

In scientific research worthy of the name, public retractions with apologies are the honorable step when honest mistakes are made, which Engh assumes to be the case for all of his examples, and exposed, which Engh does beyond reasonable doubt. The painstaking demolition of these and ''other results of lack of understanding'' (p. 147) can be summarized in one question: do linguists want to deal with facts or fiction? The scope of misinformation about Norwegian raises alarm bells far beyond the language in question. If, despite widespread availability of resources, both data and analyses concerning Norwegian end up mangled in the way described in this book because of inexplicable reliance on dubious sources, one is more than justified to feel unsettled about what may have happened and what may go on happening in reports about languages whose users are either dead or otherwise less accessible for consultation than Norwegians.

It seems like time for the field to develop some better fact-checking during the refereeing process. 

Note: The 5th comment on this post for key follow-up on the book. It seems to confirm Bill Idsardi's suspicion about the 'facts' in question. 

Syntactic flexibility

Well, I'll be danged. That sentence I posted about yesterday, and for which the poll is still running, struck me as profoundly ungrammatical. And Mrs. Verb, who knows as much about syntax as I do about phonology (see the opacity posts, where I was clearly way out of my depth, and admitted as much), agreed powerfully.

But almost half of the responses so far say it sounds fine to them. I assume that peevologists and even copy editors would pull their hair out over such a sentence, but there's only one vote for calling it irredeemable.

How much can you leave out?

Let's clear the palate from phonology with a lite syntax question: An NYT piece today on Bobby Jindal, Louisiana's Republican governor and a potential McCain running mate, has this quote:

“He has everything McCain is lacking,” said State Representative John LaBruzzo, a Republican, speaking of Mr. Jindal. “He’s seen as a true conservative, which McCain is seen as less than.”

English speakers seem to differ considerably in what they can delete, omit, let not surface, gapping, or whatever. I don't even care how this sentence connects to any or all of these topics: Ross violations, deletion under identity, subjacency, or whatever.

All I want to know is in the blog poll going up in just a minute: how good/bad this sentence sounds to you.

Boundaries and experiments

Just came across this paper, "Finding Words and Rules in a Speech Stream: Functional Differences Between Vowels and Consonants", in reading Cognitive Daily over at scienceblogs.com. CogDaily's summary is good, if you don't have access to the full article, with this being the core:

How do babies learn where one word ends and the next one begins? A group of researchers including Luca Bonatti, Marina Nespor, Jacques Mehler, and Juan Toro, believes it has identified a key pattern that works in a wide range of languages: language learners look to patterns in the consonants for information about where words start and end; they look to vowels to understand the role of words in a sentence.

I don't doubt their conclusion that "listeners look to vowels and consonants for different types of information", but I can already hear various colleagues screaming that the leap from this nicely-designed but small experiment to such fundamentals of language learning is way too big, even drawing on this group's earlier related work. I'll hear that this is squeezing a river of blood from one little dried-up turnip.

The question is, I suppose, how much weight you'd be willing to place on these results and what kind of work you'd want to see to bridge the remaining gap to early L1 acquisition of word boundaries in human language.

Image from this website. (No endorsement naturally, but it's a nice image.)

The observer's paradox

William Labov long ago famously captured a major issue in getting at how language is used in 'natural' settings. Known as the Observer’s Paradox, he described it this way (quoted from here):

the aim of linguistic research in the community must be to find out how people talk when they are not being systematically observed; yet we can only obtain this data by systematic observation.

It was interesting to read this morning over on scienceblog.com about the parallel issues in 'field psychology' (here). The post describes how much even relatively mundane experiments suffer from these kinds of effects. What's striking to me is that in our own lab work, linguists really have the very same issues.

This calls to mind a kind of meta-paradox that has been bugging me for a while: At times the observer's paradox seems to get overvalued in sociolinguistic work – the real difference between truly 'unobserved' speech and speech being recorded in a careful, low-key way is typically pretty minor, as far as I can tell. But the kinds of lab effects talked about in the post seem really and sometimes grossly undervalued in much linguistic work we do in the lab. I'm regularly surprised at how little discussion is given to these problems in such publications and in talking with people doing that kind of work. It's often fairly easy to do some kind of control — testing free speech versus reading tasks, for instance. Ideally, I want to be able to compare tightly-controlled data with more sociolinguistic data.

The image, from here, is called "The Observer and the Observed", by Lewis Wickes Hine. It's part of a collection done from 1908-1924 for the National Child Labor Committee.

April 1, 1887

Of course I have been thinking about an April Fool's post, but just lately I've been reading a fair bit of historical and comparative linguistics and you just can't make up stuff in that realm any more … any genetic relationship you can imagine has been proposed with a straight face, climatic and 'temperamental' causes of sound change too. So, we resort to reality to celebrate the day:

On this day in 1887, Leonard Bloomfield was born in Chicago, Land of Flat, but his connections to Wisconsin are very rich. His family moved to Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin when he was 9. He attended UW for two years and then of course worked on Menominee. Even if we don't buy his core theoretical positions today, he contributed tremendously to the development of our field in a lot of ways.

So, happy birthday, Leonard Bloomfield.

Pop quiz: The fundamentals of our science

No googling now! Who wrote these words?

Discussion of the fundamentals of our science seems to consist one half of obvious truisms, and one half of metaphysics; this is characteristic of matters whch form no real part of a subject … .