A journey to/from Linguaglossa (‘tongue-tongue’/’language-language’)
Since the academic year of 2022/23, we have changed the way DLLD works. Instead of three different lecturers per semester, we now invite one lecturer per semester to give three lectures (two online, one on campus) on different aspects of their work. The focus is on the journey they take to find what they’re searching.
All lectures take place at 19:30 (CET).
Semester 1 2023/24 (In Dutch!)
Joachim Kokkelmans (Bozen/Bolzano): Fonetisch-fonologische variatie: van geluidsopnames tot universele typologieën
In deze lezingenreeks wordt er ingegaan op vragen over de taalvariatie op het gebied van de fonetiek en de fonologie: hoe kan men variatie in de uitspraak van individuen meten, daarmee generalisaties formuleren over het fonetisch-fonologische systeem van een bepaalde taal en zo de variatie in de talen van de wereld verstaan en verklaren? Waar houdt mogelijke taalvariatie op, dwz. waar ligt de grens tussen taalsystemen die mogelijks zouden kunnen bestaan en onmogelijke taalsystemen? Er wordt aangetoond hoe men aan de hand van geluidsopnames een fonetisch onderzoek opbouwt, hoe taalkundige theorieën fonetisch detail en fonologische categorieën met elkaar verbinden en hoe ze de variatie op het vlak van de fonologie modelleren om te voorspellen welke talen al dan niet mogelijk zijn.
- 9 November 2023: Fonetisch onderzoek
- 30 November 2023: Fonologische typologie
- 14 December 2023: Variatie in de fonetiek en fonologie (toegepast) (Auditorium 2 – Franz Cumont)
Semester 2 2023/24
Metin Bağrıaçık (Boğaziçi): When two tongues meet: linguistic investigation of contact situations
Languages are not spoken in a vacuum, and as far as we can trace them back in the history, they have always been in interaction with their distant or close kin across all possible borders, whether these borders are geographical, in minds or among societies. In this lecture series, we will delve into the study of this interaction, language contact that is, with an emphasis on case studies in Asia Minor. We will look at how we can identify contact-induced phenomena, what mechanisms lead to these phenomena, and what factors constrain the possible contact space.
- 29 February 2024: Contact with contact or an ode to Ammonians
- 21 March 2024: Finding data that are and that aren’t
- 25 April 2024: Making generalizations — big or small (Auditorium 2 – Franz Cumont)
Sneak preview: In 2024/25, Pritty Patel-Grosz and Silvio Cruschina will share their journeys to linguistic discovery with us at DLLD!
Programme 2022/23
Semester 1: Marieke Meelen (Cambridge): How to do historical linguistics with scarce data
In this lecture series we’ll dive into the challenges of diachronic linguistic research and how to address and overcome them. The first two lectures will be online through zoom and focus on methodology: how to annotate historical data and how to get more data to fill the gaps in transmission. In the third session, which will be in-person, we’ll look at how the presented methods can help us answer research questions about language variation and change.
- 10 November 2022: On getting more out of historical data: transforming state-of-the-art NLP techniques to effective historical corpus-annotation tools
- 24 November 2022: On filling the gaps: fieldwork on endangered languages in Nepal
- 13 December 2022: On answering diachronic research questions: Case Studies in the history of Celtic and Tibetan
Semester 2: Oliver Niebuhr (SDU Sønderborg, Denmark): The charisma journey
As a phonetics student, I was constantly asked two things: (1) What is that? And (2) what can you do with it later in life? Do you know that, too? Then you are exactly right in my lecture series. Well, you should roughly know the answer to question (1) in advance to participate. But then, based on that, we will together discover a series of answers to question (2). Some answers are more informative and conceptual in nature, as in the first lecture; Some are more application-oriented and go far beyond phonetics itself, as in the second lecture; and some you can experience interactively yourself, as in the third lecture. I look forward to your participation.
- 1 March 2023: The charisma journey – Research overview and how it all came about
- 29 March 2023: How phonetics/speech sciences can be useful in life
- 26 April 2023: Show & tell
Programme 2021/22
30-09-2021 Emiliana Cruz (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS), Mexico City): “Hiking to Document the Wisdom, Knowledge, and Memories of the Elders of San Juan Quiahije: An Interdisciplinary and Pedagogical Approach“
20-10-2021 Ashwini Deo (Ohio State University): “The emergence of split-oblique case systems: a view from the Bhili dialect continuum (Indo-Aryan)”
22-11-2021 Sali A. Tagliamonte (University of Toronto): “Mining for linguistic gold: The Ontario Dialects Project”
21-02-2022 Tamsin Blaxter (University of Cambridge): “What maps can tell us about grammar: enriching historical linguistics with evidence from geolinguistics and sociolinguistics”
21-03-2022 David Willis (Oxford): “Tweetolectology: Linguistic variation from Port Talbot to Port-au-Prince (via Portsmouth)”
09-05-2022 Diego Pescarini (CNRS): ‘Negation marking in central Romance: reviving some late 19th and early 20th century data’
Programme 2020/21
05-10-2020 Mathieu Avanzi (Paris VII): “Mapping dialectal variation”
19-10-2020 Artemis Alexiadou (HU Berlin): “Linguistic changes in heritage grammars”
23-11-2020 George Walkden (U Konstanz): “Can we predict future language changes?”
14-12-2020 Ailis Cournane (NYU): “Modal verbs in language development and language change”
08-02-2021 Roberta D’Alessandro (U Utrecht): “What microcontact tells us about language”
22-04-2021 Nino Grillo (U of York): “Local and Universal: On the interaction of universal parsing principles and grammatical variation.”
10-05-2021 Hae-Sung Jeon (U Central Lancashire): ‘Intonation: From Phonetics to Meaning’
Programme 2019/20
03-10-2019 Pritty Patel-Grosz (Oslo): Explorations in the semantics of dance [CANCELLED]
07-11-2019 W. Tecumseh Fitch (Vienna): The Evolution of the Neural Basis for Language: A Comparative Perspective
12-12-2019 Stefan Rabanus (Verona): Possessive constructions in Cimbrian: contact-induced or autonomous morphosyntactic change?
02-03-2020 Ianthi M. Tsimpli (Cambridge): Linguistic Complexity in Bilingual Children’s Grammars
30-03-2020 Chiara Gianollo (Bologna): Simply not? How negation is strengthened in discourse, and which effects this may have over time
29-04-2020 Ingo Feldhausen (Frankfurt): Focus, prosody, and word order: How new information is encoded in language and how one can investigate focus experimentally
Programme 2018/19
03-10-2018 Tjerk Hagemeijer (Lisbon): The formation of the Gulf of Guinea creoles: between languages, genes, and history
23-10-2018 Gerardo Mazzaferro (Turin): Researching (post)multilingualism: Translanguaging practices in an emergent superdiverse city, Turin (Italy)
03-12-2018 Beáta Megyesi (Uppsala): Decoding secret writings from the past – CANCELLED
25-02-2019 Daniel Gutzmann (Cologne): I lost my damn watch! The grammar of expressive adjectives. – CANCELLED
14-03-2019 Peter Alexander Kerkhof (Leiden): How bilingual Belgians reshaped the French language: Germanic-Romance language contact and Pippinid prestige
02-04-2019 Lutz Marten (SOAS London): Universality and variation in language: Comparing East African Bantu languages in the context of the world’s linguistic diversity
15-05-2019 Marjo van Koppen (Utrecht): Negation in the letters of P.C. Hooft: combining literary studies and linguistics
Programme 2017/18
26-10-2017 Roland Pfau (Amsterdam): Sign Language Negation: From Gesture to Grammar
30-11-2017 Maria Garraffa (Heriot Watts, Edinburgh): Mechanisms of language learning in children with developmental language disorder
04-12-2017 Beáta Megyesi (Uppsala): Decoding secret writings from the past – CANCELLED; moved to 3-12-2018!
19-03-2018 David Britain (Bern): Discovering dialect with mobile phone apps
26-04-2018 Gea de Jong-Lendle (Marburg): Forensic phonetics: Language identification from a foreign accent in German – Where does the kidnapper come from?
09-05-2018 Giuditta Caliendo (Lille): Legitimacy and Identity in the Time of Crisis: a discursive perspective on European integration
Programme 2016/17
18-10-2016 Birgit A. Ramussen (Copenhagen): Tracing the Indo-Europeans – their language and culture
07-11-2016 Tamara Rathcke (Kent): On the power of rhythm in language and music
14-12-2016 Francis Nolan (Cambridge): Intonation analysis: the ‘British’ school and the emergence of a phonology of intonation
23-03-2017 Ielka van der Sluis (Groningen): The use and effectiveness of multimodal instructions
27-04-2017 James Clackson (Cambridge): Ancient Etruscan – deciphering an unknown language
08-05-2017 Rob Truswell (Edinburgh): Bonobos, children, and fear of trees
Programme 2015/16
08-10-2015 Andrew Nevins (University College London): Tooth and Throat Singing: Mondegreens and the Decoding of Sound Structure
26-10-2015 Caroline Heycock (University of Edinburgh): Linguistic change in the North Atlantic: Investigating modern Faroese
07-12-2015 Marc van Oostendorp (Universiteit Leiden): Frans klinkt als een machinegeweer, Nederlands als morsecode
09-03-2016 Klaus Abels (University College London): What word order typology reveals about universal cognitive biases
25-04-2016 Ioanna Sitaridou (University of Cambridge): Continuity, Contact and Change: The Greek varieties (Romeyka) in Turkey today
03-05-2016 Antonella Sorace (University of Edinburgh): Bilingualism across the lifespan: language and general cognition