Announcement

Talking Politics with Leah Sprain: Making Non-Answers Hearable

reku3206 — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 16:58:33 +0000

Talking Politics with Leah Sprain: Making Non-Answers Hearable reku3206 Fri, 01/31/2025 - 09:58

Tuesday, February 4, 2025 | 7 pm EST

A common view of politicians is that, when they are asked questions, they rarely answer them. Question evasion is deeply bothersome to publics, but experiments

show that audiences are not good at identifying dodging techniques. In this talk, Leah Sprain (��) explores

what debate moderators can do to make politicians’ evasion easier to notice—in other words, how moderators can make a non-answer hearable as a non-answer. This webinar offers practical theory that can moderators can use to make candidate forums and debates

more accountable to their publics through ground rules, formats, and goals.

Now <https://engage.squarespace-mail.com/r?m=67990d4e0912934390d6ab5e&u=https%3A%2F%2Fuchicagogroup.zoom.us%2Fwebinar%2Fregister%2FWN_IiqYw1ChR6iUqzOA8-eT_Q&w=66cd1841acc5c0073cf0925e&c=b_67990ae90912934390d68a60&l=en-US&s=Ui_w6FB1xKG5I6Lm-QXd4X42BP0%3D>

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Profs. Cowell and Gutiérrez Lorenzo in 3rd Annual 'Celebrating the Indigenous Americas'

Anonymous — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 17:13:21 +0000

Profs. Cowell and Gutiérrez Lorenzo in 3rd Annual 'Celebrating the Indigenous Americas' Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 03/05/2024 - 10:13

Linguistics Professors Andy Cowell and Ambrocio Gutiérrez Lorenzo will each be participating in roundtables for the 3rd Annual Celebrating the Indigenous Americas, hosted by the Latin American and Latinx Studies Center at ��. The program will be a week of virtual and in-person events happening March 11-15, 2024. Indigenous artists, advocates, community leaders, educators, scholars and allies will be hosted virtually and in-person at the University of Colorado from different parts of the Americas to celebrate the ever-renewed presence of Latin American Indigenous and Native American languages and cultures in daily life, activities and professions.

Prof. Gutiérrez Lorenzo will be speaking on the challenges of teaching Indigenous languages on March 12, and Prof. Cowell will be discussing what Land Back means for institutions of higher education on March 14.

Sponsorship is provided by U.S. Department of Education: UISFL Grant (International and Foreign Language Education), LALSC, CNAIS, University Libraries, WGST, the Museum of Natural History, the School of Education, ARMC, PWR, ETHN, CHA, GEO, CAW, A&S and LING.

All events for the program are free and open to the public.

Land Acknowledgment:
We acknowledge that the �� has developed and continues to operate upon Native land, within the territories of the Ute, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Peoples. Furthermore, we acknowledge the 48 Tribal Nations that are historically tied to what is today called Colorado. We also wish to recognize that this event takes place partially online and that our virtual spaces and technological devices have environmental consequences. We acknowledge that many of us join this event remotely from the lands of other Indigenous Peoples who, across regions and continents, continue to feel the daily effects of settler colonialism. We are committed to honoring Indigenous rights to land, and Indigenous languages, science, art, and governance in the Americas.

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Dr. Kate Lindsey gives LingCircle talk on April 26

Anonymous — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 20:22:33 +0000

Dr. Kate Lindsey gives LingCircle talk on April 26 Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 04/13/2023 - 14:22

The Department of Linguistics presented a LingCircle talk by Dr. Kate L. Lindsey (Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Boston University). Her talk, titled Ghost elements in Ende phonology, took place on Wednesday, April 26 at 4:00pm in CASE E351.

This is a hybrid presentation with the option to join in person or via Zoom. Click here to access the Zoom meeting for the lecture.

Included below is an abstract for Dr. Lindsey's lecture. We hope to see you there!

Ghost elements in Ende phonology
Kate L. Lindsey (Boston University)

Ende phonology exhibits several phenomena where partially underspecified segments seem to appear and disappear at the service of phonotactics, much like yers in Slavic. Following Zoll (1996) and Kiparsky (2003), I call such elements ghosts. I will present two types of ghosts in Ende and show how the interaction of these two patterns informs formal theories on the representation of underspecification in the input.

Ende floating nasals demonstrate alignment of an underspecified nasal segment to the leftmost non-initial obstruent in the word, much like how stress and affixes may be aligned to left or right edges of stems or feet (McCarthy & Prince 1993) or how tone patterns may spread to adjacent tone-bearing units. A phonotactic analysis of the Ende dictionary and corpus reveals that prenasalization is a contrastive feature of morphemes, much like nasalization in Máíhɨ̃ki (Sylak-Glassman 2013). Ende phonotactic reduplication displays semantically vacuous copying of segmental structure to repair verb roots that violate a phonotactic constraint on word minimality. Monosyllabic verb roots reduplicate in isolated forms, but multisyllabic verb roots do not. Curiously, morphological structure also seems to play a role.

Representing both ghost elements as subsegments in the input allows for straightforward constraint-based analyses of the phenomena independently. However, when the two ghost patterns co-occur in the same word, a ranking paradox arises. This puzzle is solved if the two types of ghost elements are represented distinctly in the input.

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Access Linguistics instructors: Spring 2023 office hours published

Anonymous — Wed, 08 Feb 2023 19:34:34 +0000

Access Linguistics instructors: Spring 2023 office hours published Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/08/2023 - 12:34

Old school office hours no more! Linguistic teaching faculty and leadership are more accessible than ever before, so don't hesitate to book time for class-related questions, pursuit of your interests, etc. Linguistics staff have published a complete list of Spring 2023 office hours for Linguistics teaching faculty: instructors and TAs. Many of our teaching faculty conduct virtual office hours and have automated sign ups via Calendly, so we're here when you need us!

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Dictionary Society of North America (DSNA 2023) to be held at CU May 31-June 3

Anonymous — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 18:30:22 +0000

Dictionary Society of North America (DSNA 2023) to be held at CU May 31-June 3 Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 11/18/2022 - 11:30

The Dictionary Society of North America (DSNA), founded in 1975, is an organization of lexicographers, scholars, publishers, and collectors, all with an interest in dictionaries. It holds a conference every two years at a university somewhere in North America for members and all other interested parties to network, socialize, and learn and talk about dictionaries. Past meetings have taken place at UC-Berkeley, Indiana University, University of Michigan, McGill University, and the University of Chicago, to name only a few. Next year, for the first time, the DSNA will meet for the first time at CU-Boulder. CU Linguistics is a major sponsor, and CU faculty are among the invited speakers.

If you have ever been curious about how dictionaries come to be, this is the place to find out. The world of lexicography and dictionary-making is surprisingly small, and very friendly. DSNA members are largely from North America but our conferences regularly attract people from all over the world, working in all languages, with an interest in dictionaries.

The Linguistics Department, thanks to chair Laura Michaelis, is the official sponsor of the conference. We expect 100 or more attendees and we very strongly encourage local participation! To that end, there will be special discounted rates for students to join the conference, and there will also be volunteer opportunities closer to the time of the conference, in exchange for free admission.

If you would like to make a presentation at the conference, there’s scope for that too! Here is a page about the conference on the DSNA website and it includes a link to the call for papers.

If you’re interested in pursuing a career in lexicography, there’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that there are very few jobs available of the old-fashioned kind: that is, writing definitions for standard English-language dictionaries. But the good news is, lexicographic work on under resourced, minority, and marginalized languages is a growing field that increasingly attracts funding. Computational linguistics has also expanded the field of dictionaries and lexicography greatly and presents many opportunities for innovation. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the DSNA conference represents the best networking opportunity to get your foot into the door of the dictionary world.

So save the dates: the conference will happen at the UMC starting May 31, 2023 and run through June 3.

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Talking Politics: Anthropologists and Linguists Analyze the 2020 Election

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Sep 2020 21:45:20 +0000

Talking Politics: Anthropologists and Linguists Analyze the 2020 Election Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/30/2020 - 15:45

How is the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election affected by language and culture? Experience and learn how anthropologists and linguists decipher political messages, and examine the words, gestures, tone of voice, and unspoken meanings that implicitly affect who we vote for, and why.

Talking Politics brings together anthropology and linguistics experts to share their distinctive analytic perspectives on political communication in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. Organized by graduate students in the University of Chicago Department of Anthropology and �� Program in Culture, Language, and Social Practice (CLASP), this interdisciplinary workshop series invites the public to experience and learn how language and culture shape real-world political communication.

This online forum features a series of webinars and a closing colloquium. Each Talking Politics webinar will feature demonstrations of the types of data and methods of analysis that anthropologists and linguists use in studying political communication. Each featured scholar will also engage in a conversation with invited guest discussants and members of the public. The series will conclude in December with a final colloquium featuring all the series’ speakers, moderated by Kira Hall, Professor of Linguistics and Anthropology at �� and President of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology.

The schedule of webinars is found below. All events are online, and are free and open to the public. Register now to receive updates and news on all upcoming webinars, as well as more information on invited speakers. All presentations will be recorded and made available after each webinar.

Persons with disabilities who require an accommodation in order to fully participate in this event should contact Velda Khoo at velda.khoo@colorado.edu.

"How Plausible is the Deniability?"| 9 Oct 2020, 6pm CT

Adam Hodges, Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Department of Linguistics at ��. He is a sociocultural linguist with research interests in how language impacts contemporary social and political issues, such as the collective enactment of racism or the role language plays in politics.

"Political Gesture in Presidential Debate" | 20 Oct 2020, 3pm CT

Michael Lempert, Associate Professor of Anthropology at University of Michigan Ann Arbor. A linguistic anthropologist with cross-disciplinary interests, he has trained in several fields and written on a wide range of topics having to do with social interaction, featuring political gesture and embodied communication.

"Communicating Crisis: Getting Back to Whose Normal?" | 30 Oct 2020, 5pm CT

Jonathan Rosa, Associate Professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. As a sociocultural and linguistic anthropologist, Jonathan Rosa's research theorizes the co-naturalization of language and race as a key feature of modern governance.

"Race and Gender Panics in the 2020 Trump Campaign" | 16 Nov 2020, 5pm CT

Janet McIntosh, Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. She is a cultural anthropologist with wide-ranging interests, including linguistic anthropology, narrative and discourse, whiteness studies, nationalism, and East Africa.

Norma Mendoza-Denton, Professor of Anthropology at University of California at Los Angeles. Her research focuses on youth, language, migration, politics, and identity.

Final Colloquium | 11 Dec 2020, 5pm CT

All invited speakers, moderated by Kira Hall, Professor of Linguistics and Anthropology at ��. Kira Hall’s research focuses on language and social identity in India and the United States, particularly with respect to hierarchies of gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic class. Her recent work has turned to diverse topics, including the role of gesture in Donald Trump’s entertainment appeal.

Talking Politics is proudly co-sponsored by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology (SLA), the Center for the Study of Communication and Society (CSCS) and Linguistic Anthropology Lab at the University of Chicago, and the Program in Culture, Language, and Social Practice (CLASP) at the ��

For more information on the Talking Politics online forum, please contact Wee Yang Soh at weeyangs@uchicago.edu, or Velda Khoo at velda.khoo@colorado.edu.

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Queer and Trans Sociophonetics Webinar

Anonymous — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 20:26:02 +0000

Queer and Trans Sociophonetics Webinar Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/29/2020 - 14:26

The sound of the queer voice has captured the intrigue of the popular and sociolinguistic imagination, spurring a wave of research investigating what makes someone “sound gay”. While much research has sought to uncover the phonetic markers of the (cisgender, White, male) “gay sounding” voice, only recently has a wave of research begun to investigate the myriad ways that queer speakers of other gender, sexual, and racial identities articulate their identities. This panel continues this trajectory, aiming to: (1) explore how understudied and marginalized queer identities— including transgender, non-binary, and non-White identities— are articulated using phonetic, variationist methods; (2) discuss the implications that the phonetic patterns of these speakers have on theories of sociolinguistic variation that are based on White, cisgender, heterosexual speakers and often taken for granted as if they apply universally; (3) to explore the consequences of the ways that dominant theories and methodologies in sociolinguistics don’t account for the full range of queer experiences.

Presented by: Linguistic Society of America Committee on LGBTQ+ Issues in Linguistics [COZIL]; Culture, Language, and Social Practice [CLASP] Program at the University of Colorado

When: Saturday, October 24, 2020, 3:00-5:00pm Eastern (1-3 MDT)
FREE Registration: https://cuboulder.zoom.us/j/95006248085

AGENDA (click here for abstracts)

Introduction to Queer and Trans Sociophonetics
Jeremy Calder, ��

Tran/s/gender: assessing the effects of the social construction of gender on speech. A focus on transgender /s/ realisations
James Parnell-Mooney, University of Glasgow

Variable vocal tract length as sociolinguistic feature
Lily Clifford, Stanford University

Pajara/s/ in wigs: bilingualism, latinidad, and gendered sociophonetics in Miami’s Queer Barrio
Christopher Mendoza, Florida International University

Ér-Change: shifting from “smooth operator” to “sexual modern” in Beijing Queer Media
Andrew Ting, ��

Normativity in normalization: Methodological challenges in the (automated) analysis of vowels among non-binary speakers
deandre miles-hercules and Lal Zimman, University of California Santa Barbara

Audience Q&A

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New Linguistics Tracks Enrolling for Fall 2020

Anonymous — Mon, 25 May 2020 02:05:27 +0000

New Linguistics Tracks Enrolling for Fall 2020 Anonymous (not verified) Sun, 05/24/2020 - 20:05

In addition to the general Linguistics major, CU Linguistics now offers four specialized major tracks for undergraduates: Language and Cognition, Computational Linguistics, Sociocultural, Anthropological & Interactional Linguistics and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). These tracks will allow students to tailor their major coursework to their specific interest(s) within the field of linguistics. Concentrated training within a specific subfield of the discipline will provide students with the in-depth knowledge and skills needed to pursue specific careers within the field of linguistics. In addition, it will provide a foundation for pursuing a focused area of study for those who continue onto graduate school. Build your own linguistic workspace here.

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Adina Williams gives computational linguistics talk on the association of nouns to gender classes

Anonymous — Fri, 14 Feb 2020 16:07:41 +0000

Adina Williams gives computational linguistics talk on the association of nouns to gender classes Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 02/14/2020 - 09:07

Adina Williams (Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research / New York University) gave a computational linguistics talk to CU Linguistics on the association of nouns to gender classes.

Wednesday, February 19th
4:00-5:30pm
MUEN D430/D28

Title: "Is the association of nouns to gender classes truly arbitrary?"

Abstract:

Debate has long raged in linguistics about the nature of the relationship between nouns and grammatical gender. How a language with a robust grammatical gender system chooses to gender its nouns appears at first glance largely unrelated to the meaning of the nouns. For example, one lexeme can take different genders in different languages: e.g., ‘table’ is feminine when translated into Spanish, but masculine when translated into German. In this talk, I present two approaches for measuring the arbitrariness of gender on inanimate nouns: the first approach measures how well gender correlates with word vector representations of meaning, and the second measures much information about grammatical gender (in bits) is shared between nouns and other words in the noun’s context. This work shows that state-of-the-art NLP systems trained on large-scale corpora from multiple languages can help us uncover new facts relevant to linguistic typology. These multilingual studies can also be viewed as an initial step towards a general methodological program that utilizes information theoretic approaches to shed light on traditional cognitive scientific questions about language structure and use.

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Sebastian Schuster gives computational linguistics talk on utterance interpretation

Anonymous — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 21:15:15 +0000

Sebastian Schuster gives computational linguistics talk on utterance interpretation Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/12/2020 - 14:15

Sebastian Schuster (Stanford University) gave a computational linguistics talk on utterance interpretation to CU Linguistics.

Monday, February 17th
4:00-5:30pm
MUEN D430

Title: "Modeling Utterance Interpretation in Context"

Abstract:

In communication, listeners are usually able to rapidly infer a speaker's intended meaning, which is often more specific than the literal meaning of an utterance. Previous experimental and theoretical work has highlighted the importance of contextual cues in drawing inferences in comprehension. However, the processes involved in the integration of contextual cues and in the learning of associations between cues and interpretations remain poorly understood. In my talk, I will present two computational models of utterance interpretation in context that allow us to gain insights into these processes.

I will first discuss how listeners integrate one contextual factor, the speaker’s identity, in the interpretation of utterances with uncertainty expressions such as 'might' and 'probably.' These expressions can be used to communicate the likelihood of future events but there crucially exists considerable variability in the mapping between uncertainty expressions and event likelihoods across speakers. I will first show experimental evidence that listeners deal with this variability by adapting to specific speakers' language use. I will then present a Bayesian computational model of this adaptation process couched within the Rational Speech Act framework, and I will discuss what model simulations can reveal about the nature of representations that are updated during adaptation.

In the second part of my talk, I will present a neural network model to predict the strength of scalar inferences from "some" to "some but not all." Recent experimental work has shown that the strength of this inference systematically depends on several linguistic and contextual factors. For example, the presence of a partitive construction increases its strength: humans perceive the inference that Sue did not eat all of the cookies to be stronger after hearing "Sue ate some of the cookies" than after hearing the same utterance without a partitive, "Sue ate some cookies." I will discuss to what extent a neural network model is capable of inferring associations between linguistic cues and scalar inference strength from statistical input, and what this can tell us about the learnability of cue-inference strength associations.

About the speaker:

Sebastian Schuster is a PhD candidate in linguistics at Stanford University and a member of the Interactive Language Processing Lab and the Stanford NLP group. His research focuses on computational models of pragmatic utterance interpretation. He is also a core member of the Universal Dependencies initiative, where he leads efforts to make multilingual dependency representations more useful for natural language understanding tasks. He holds an MS degree in Computer Science from Stanford University, and a BS in Computer Science from the University of Vienna.

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