York Language and Linguistics Blog

Postgrad Graduation 2012

2012-01-24T02:47:00.010Z

Congratulations to our 2012 MAs and MScs who graduated this weekend, and to Rein Sikveland who was awarded his PhD.

Demand for elocution on the increase?

2012-01-23T10:38:00.003Z

Paul Kerswill is quoted in this Guardian article about a rise in demand for elocution lessons in the UK (on the back of the story about TOWIE's Mark Wright wanting to shed his Essex accent so as to help him fulfil his ambition for a career in acting).

BBfor2 Winterschool

2011-12-19T23:48:00.003Z

Phil Harrison, Erica Gold, Natalie Fecher and Dom Watt attended a three-day winterschool on applications of Bayesian statistical methods in forensic biometry - finger-/palmprints, faces, and speech - organised by BBfor2 network members based at IDIAP (the Dalle Molle Institute for Perceptual Artificial Intelligence) in Martigny, Switzerland. The next network event will be a summer school in Madrid in June 2012.

Workshop on the Production and Comprehension of Conversational Speech

2011-12-15T09:53:00.003Z

Richard Ogden and Beatrice Szczepek-Reed (Education), also both members of the Centre for Advanced Studies in Language & Communication, presented a paper on Phonetic Details as Interactional Resources at the Workshop on the Production and Comprehension of Conversational Speech in Nijmegen, 12-13 December.

The paper looks at some unexpectedly present glottal stops in English and unexpectedly absent glottal stops in German, and argues that these marked presences/absences are one resource for speakers to project an unexpected (unprojected) next action in the current speaker's talk.

Congratulations Antri

2011-12-01T00:05:00.001Z

Antri successfully defended her PhD On the syntax of Wh questions and its consequences yesterday. Her thesis is a syntactic and sociolinguistic study of wh-questions in Cypriot Greek, and draws some very intriguing consequences for the architecture of the grammar.

Study visit to Denmark

2011-11-23T21:30:00.005Z

Dom Watt and Nicholas Flynn were invited to spend several days on a study visit to the Danish National Research Foundation Centre for Language Change in Real Time (LANCHART) at the University of Copenhagen. With Anne Fabricius (Roskilde University) and Tyler Kendall (University of Oregon, Eugene) they ran a workshop on normalisation methods for vowel formant frequency data, which gave participants the opportunity to use Kendall's NORM normalisation and plotting suite to try out different techniques on data from recordings of spoken Danish they had themselves collected. Dom also gave a talk entitled A 'dialect island'? Phonological variation, social attitudes and perceptions of (r) on the Scottish/English border to the Copenhagen Sociolinguistics Circle, and attended seminars by and in honour of Professor Nik Coupland (Cardiff University), who was in Copenhagen for the conferment of an honorary degree. Pictured outside the Museum of National History in Hillerød are (L to R) Charlotte Vaughn (Northwestern University), Dom, Anne Fabricius, and Nicolai Pharao (University of Copenhagen).

new research grants for York

2011-11-04T15:48:00.004Z

Two new research grants have been awarded which will foster national and international collaboration in phonetic research.

1. Barry Heselwood and Leendert Plug (Leeds), along with Paul Foulkes, have been awarded an AHRC network grant to develop interdisciplinary research into rhotics. Read more on this project here: http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~lnplp/rhotics.html

2. researchers at MARCS in Sydney have secured a grant of $500,000 to study the effects of cross-dialect listening on speech perception. The Australian team is headed by Cathi Best and Jason Shaw. A team of international collaborators will also participate in the project: Paul Foulkes (York), Gerry Docherty (Newcastle), Bronwen Evans (UCL) and Jen Hay (Canterbury, New Zealand). http://marcs.uws.edu.au/?q=news/ARCGrants

Peter French on Australian radio

2011-10-04T11:25:00.003+01:00

Peter French was interviewed for ABC's 'The Law Report' programme on audio evidence in court cases, which was broadcast in late September. The programme (the producer of which is the appropriately named Erica Vowles) is available for download as an mp3 file here.

Study visit by leading sociophoneticians

2011-10-04T11:20:00.000+01:00

The Department hosted Tyler Kendall (University of Oregon) and Anne Fabricius (Roskilde University, Denmark) for a week at the end of September, during which they co-presented a workshop on sociophonetic methodology. The workshop, which was attended by York staff and students and colleagues from the universities of Leeds and Lancaster, included a demonstration of the SLAAP audio file management system, some results from Tyler's recent research with Valerie Fridland, an account of comparative work on vowel formant normalisation methods carried out by Anne Fabricius, Dom Watt and Nicholas Flynn, and some hands-on work using the NORM plotting and normalization suite.

Hot off the press

2011-09-15T13:30:00.000+01:00

One of the most striking trends across linguistic research in recent years has been the examination of the interfaces between the various subcomponents of the language faculty. Yet, approaches to these interfaces across different theoretical frameworks differ substantially. This volume pulls together research into Morphology and its interfaces from researchers employing a variety of different theoretical and methodological perspectives: Morphology is a diverse field, and rather than aiming to collect works sharing a particular approach or framework of assumptions, this collection instead captures the diversity and provides an overview of the state of the research field while also addressing particular empirical phenomena with up-to-date analyses. The articles collected provide case studies from a diverse variety of languages revealing properties of the interfaces that morphology shares with syntax, semantics, phonology, and the lexicon, while the volume’s inclusive cross-theoretical approach will serve to introduce readers to the findings of alternative frameworks and methodologies.
Catalogue entry here.

Working with the M-Set

2011-09-07T11:36:00.001+01:00

An article on Kim Witten's PhD research has just appeared in the latest issue of MeFi Mag, 'a collaborative and unofficial magazine created by members of the community weblog MetaFilter'. Kim is interviewed about her survey of MeFi members' pronunciations of the name of the weblog and related forms such as MeFite, the so-called 'M-Set'.

ICPhS XVII, Hong Kong

2011-08-26T12:00:00.000+01:00

There was strong turnout from staff and students of the department at the quadrennial International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS) XVII in Hong Kong earlier this month. A total of 9 papers were presented at the five day congress by the following staff and student members: Natalie Fecher, Nicholas Flynn, Paul Foulkes, Erica Gold, Christin Kirchhübel, Carmen Llamas, Lisa Roberts, Sukanya Thaitechawat and Dom Watt. Pictured here are the happy participants (minus Sukanya) just before the 9 course conference banquet, hosted in the same room as the Hong Kong handover ceremony in 1997!

The next congress will take place a little closer to home following a successful bid from our Scottish colleagues with ICPhS XVIII being hosted by Glasgow in 2015.

Peter French on Radio 4's 'Word of Mouth'

2011-08-25T09:46:00.002+01:00

Instalment of BBC Radio 4's long-running series on language, this week dealing with voice recognition, and featuring Peter French talking about the qualities of different voices and how they can be quantified. The programme is available on Listen Again here for another few days, after which a permanent recording will be held on archive in the department.

IAFPA 2011

2011-07-30T09:17:00.003+01:00

The 20^th annual conference of the International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics was held in Vienna this week (24^th to 27^th July). Hosted jointly by the Acoustics Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Bundeskriminalamt, this was an extremely busy event with very high quality presentations. As ever, our Department was very well represented with no fewer than 18 participants, if we include staff, affiliated staff, research students, MSc graduates and past visiting students of forensic speech science. The main meeting focussed mainly around issues concerning forensic speaker comparison and featured a special session and panel discussion on the Presentation of Evidence in Court. Erica Gold had the distinction of being an invited speaker and panel member in this session. Whilst all our student contributions attracted a high level of praise, Christin Kirchuebel won the annual prize for the best student paper. The main conference was followed by a one-day satellite event on LADO (Language Analysis and Determination of Origin).

The conference programme can be found here:
http://www.kfs.oeaw.ac.at/content/view/543/541/lang,8859-1/

LSA Institute (posting #2)

2011-07-25T17:34:00.003+01:00

I'm now back from an activity-packed week at the LSA's (Linguistic Society of America's) Summer Institute, at the invitation of Marianna di Paolo and Malcah Yaeger-Dror, whose recent edited volume 'Sociophonetics: A Student's Guide' formed the basis of a two-day workshop on sociophonetic methodology. As Kim mentioned in her earlier posting, I gave a joint presentation with Anne Fabricius (Roskilde University, Denmark) and Tyler Kendall (University of Oregon) on normalisation and plotting of vowel formant data as part of this workshop. Other talks were given by Katie Drager, Alicia Beckford Wassink, Eleanor Lawson, Michael Proctor, John Esling, Jerry Edmondson, Julie Roberts, Chris Cieri, Bill Kretzschmar, Naomi Palosaari, and Marianna and Malcah themselves. The accent during the Institute is on forging new research links and developing ideas, and there is a busy social programme to encourage this. The picture shows Malcah, Tyler and Anne getting ready for a hiking trip I took with them from a town called Nederland, high in the Rocky Mountains above Boulder.

LSA Institute

2011-07-25T09:50:00.007+01:00

As schools break for the summer holidays, academic life takes its own rhythm. Some members of the Department are in the USA for the LSA Institute. Kim Witten sends the following post.

Greetings from the LSA Institute at the University of Boulder, Colorado! First, the weather ... it is HOT, HOT, HOT! Then the skies open up each day around 4pm and dump massive raindrops. Oh, how I miss England rain! Dom Watt can attest to this contrastive climate ... with colleagues Anne Fabricius and Tyler Kendall, the three flew in to deliver an excellent presentation on Vowel Normalisation Methods at the Sociophonetics Workshop last Sunday, enthusiastically sharing the findings of Nicholas Flynn's work on 20 different normalisation methods, among other linguists' research. Professors from Leeds, Edinburgh, and beyond are also here at the Institute, representing linguistics from across the seas. It's been nice discovering these connections to back home.

This week is the halfway point. It's going by fast, but feels like a lifetime, too. There are multiple events planned every day – everything from a find-your-subfield's happy hour – the psycholinguists, phoneticians and sociolinguists have 3 nights of the week spoken for so far – to hiking excursions and impromptu workshops or computer coding groups. So much to do and see!

That's it for now...off to learn about experiments with syllables!

Graduation 2011

2011-07-14T17:50:00.011+01:00

Congratulations to all our finalists who graduated on 13th July - staff and students turned out in an array of finery to celebrate. Congratulations also to Marta Szreder (second from right in staff photo) who was honoured with a Vice-Chancellor's Teaching Award during the graduation ceremony.

'Mid-western' child phonology meeting comes to York

2011-07-05T12:54:00.001+01:00

An annual Child Phonology Meeting that began in the big state universities of the American midwest in the 1980s - recently renamed, more gloriously, the International Child Phonology Conference (ICPC) - took place here in York two weeks ago (June 15-18) - only the second time it has met in Europe in its 30-year history. The occasion drew a good deal more interest than anticipated; for a while we were unsure whether the 150 seats of the Berrick Saul auditorium would accommodate all the participants. In the event, we had nearly 90 submissions for talks, from which we had to select fewer than 50; just under 130 participants actually attended the conference (about half of them students), coming from as far as Australia and Brazil and several countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East in addition to both the US and Canada, along with a strong British presence.

By general consensus the conference was a great success. All sessions were 'plenary', so everyone heard all the same talks, making the short discussions that followed each talk particularly rich and wide-ranging. Talks on child speech production covered an unusually wide range of languages, including French, Catalan, Spanish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Slovenian, Lebanese Arabic, Cantonese and Mandarin, Malay (all on the first day, dedicated to cross-linguistic studies), Dutch, African American English and the phonetically challenging Zapotec, with its remarkable range of voice-quality distinctions (a variety of creaks and also whisper). There was a notable emphasis on connected speech processes, a number of experimental studies of perception (when do infants lose their 'universal listening' capacities? How do such features of the signal as tone and consonant length fit in with the timeline of changes in response to segments?), word learning and word recognition (in sign as well as oral language). And we heard about the efforts of both phoneticians and computer scientists to model the emergence of speech, complete with talking (and listening) robots.

Conference days were long, to accommodate all the interesting talks and also leave time for looking at posters. But we had still had the energy to have fun in the evenings, starting with a wine reception in the Treehouse in Berrick Saul on the first evening: Marta Szreder (York doctoral student from Warsaw), Maria de Fatima de Almeida Baia (a visiting doctoral student from São Paolo) and their friend Andreas Horber (from Switzerland) sang for us in English and Brazilian Portuguese, after which Natasha Zharkova (Queen Margaret College, Edinburgh) borrowed Andy’s guitar to treat us to an impromptu song in Russian. The next night about 60 of us enjoyed an elegant meal at the medieval Kings Manor in town and on Saturday a hardy 30-odd participants were still around for a tour of Fountains Abbey with remarkably knowledgeable volunteer guides (retired from completely unrelated areas of life - one of the two an ex-pharmacist with a fine sense of humour and of narrative pacing: We do recommend the experience!).

At the business meeting on the final day, which was mercifully brief, two important decisions were taken: We'll meet again in June next year, in Minnesota, where Ben Munson has agreed to host us – and within a few weeks a website will be (re-)established to which all of the presentations, whether talks or posters, can be sent for sharing. If you were at the conference, you'll want to go back and refresh your memory, find references, think more about what you heard. If you weren't there, you can get an idea of where the field is today - very diverse and amazingly dynamic!

Results day for UG finalists 2011

2011-06-29T18:11:00.010+01:00

Single honours undergraduate degree results were announced this afternoon - congratulations to all our finalists! Staff and students enjoyed a drink in the Berrick Saul Treehouse to celebrate their success.

Postgraduate Conference on Arabic Phonetics and Phonology

2011-06-24T17:56:00.004+01:00

The Department hosted the first Postgraduate Conference on Arabic Phonetics and Phonology, on June 10th in the Humanities Research Centre.

More than 30 staff and postgraduate researchers came, from across the UK, for a day long programme of invited talks, oral presentations and a poster session. The event was organised by Rana AlHussein Almbark and Ghazi AlGethami, PhD students in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science.

BBfor2 Summer School

2011-06-21T19:10:00.005+01:00

Members of the Marie Curie Initial Training Network Bayesian Biometrics for Forensics (BBfor2) group, plus four external participants, assembled in York last week for the Summer School in Forensic Speech Analysis, led by Prof. Francis Nolan (back row, second from right). There were four days of lectures and lab practicals, with guest lectures by specialists in the neurology of face perception, forensic text analysis and vocal tract imaging using ultrasound and electromagnetic articulatography (EMA), and an active social programme. The last day was devoted to presentations by the network's Early Stage Researchers, including Erica Gold and Natalie Fecher. The next network event is a Winterschool hosted by IDIAP in Martigny, Switzerland, in December. [Thanks to Hanna Feiser for the photo]

Vice Chancellor's Interdisciplinary seminar

2011-06-09T09:24:00.002+01:00

Kim Witten gave an excellent short talk on her PhD research at yesterday's VC's seminar on The Internet and Society. She talked about how pronunciation choices (often over phonotactically/graphemically weird words) intersect with aspects of social identity. A very impressive punchy short talk which found its place among an eclectic mix of talks!

Liederabend

2011-05-20T10:36:00.004+01:00

Sinéad Faherty is a former student of our Department. She did a degree in French and German (Language and Linguistics) before moving on to do an MA in Music and Performance, looking specifically at French and German art song. She's putting on a special evening of traditional German Lieder at the National Centre for Early Music on Saturday 12 June at 7.30pm.

Early 19th century Europe often saw groups of young people meeting for an informal, impromptu sing-song, to share stories and songs dealing with legends, heroes, morals, love and loss. Sinéad will be staging and performing a selection of Lieder, duets, partsongs and ballads by various German Romantic composers alongside nine other music students.

There will be beer/wine/orange juice (and maybe even some cake) on offer! Come and marvel at the slapstick German humour, as well as the terrifying myths of old, and pick at our German pronunciation (if you can).

Facebook event

New YPL issue

2011-04-07T09:42:00.000+01:00

The latest edition of York Papers in Linguistics, issue 11 (March 2011), is now available online and features contributions from staff, graduate students and associated colleagues of the Department.

Table of Contents:

Nicholas Flynn - Comparing Vowel Formant Normalisation Procedures

Luiz Guilherme Guidi - Old English Psych Verbs and Quirky Experiencers

Marianna Kaimaki - Sequentially Determined Function of Pitch Contours: The Case of English News Receipts

Catherine Smith - Variation and Similarity in the Phonological Development of French Dizygotic Twins: Phonological Bootstrapping Towards Segmental Learning?

Marta Szreder - The Acquisition of Consonant Clusters in Polish - A Case Study

Hidekazu Tanaka - Multiple Negative Fragmentary Answers

University Challenge

2011-04-01T11:47:00.002+01:00

Good luck to the York team in the University Challenge Final on Monday! On the team is Chris Caudwell, a student in Language & Linguistics.

The programme is on on BBC2, Monday 8pm.

Alumni Event (Friday 11th March)

2011-03-14T19:12:00.013Z

Many different career paths are open to graduates in Language and Linguistic Science. To prove it the Department invited alumni who are following a range of career paths, and who graduated as long ago as 1978 and as recently as 2007, back to York to meet with current students.

This was our first Alumni Event, held in the Berrick Saul HRC building, with a panel session followed by networking in the Treehouse room. A number of alumni were also interviewed for video profiles whch will appear shortly on our main Department website - offering their reflections on the transferable skills acquired from study of language and linguistics, as well as advice to current students.

Trudgill lecture

2011-03-11T20:23:00.005Z

Those attending Peter Trudgill's lecture on Monday 14th June on 'Languages in contact and isolation: mature phenomena and societies of intimates' might usefully follow this lecture first as pre-orientation:

http://www.sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1098171;jsessionid=CCF7602FF82A9B311BFD6B4B3507245C

Poster competition winners

2011-03-11T10:04:00.002Z

First and second prizes for the Humanities Research Centre's annual PhD project poster competition went to Richard Rhodes (who wins £150) and Stefanie Wichmann (£75). Very well done Rich and Stefanie!

Their posters can be viewed by clicking here.

BSix College forensic science taster day

2011-03-09T18:19:00.002Z

13 students from BSix (Brooke House Sixth Form) College in Hackney, London, participated in a forensic science taster day at York on March 3rd. Dom Watt led a forensic speech analysis session during which students got to grips with acoustic analysis software, had the opportunity to carry out some linguistic profiling, and attempted to identify the voice of a previously-heard speaker among a 'voice parade' recording of seven other similar-sounding voices. The day's other events, including a session focussing on DNA sample matching, were hosted by the Biology and Chemistry departments.

Peter French on Radio 4's 'The Call'

2011-02-24T10:51:00.002Z

BBC Radio 4's 'The Call' programme features Peter French next Tuesday (1st March), at 9.30am.

See http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00yyg1w

Programme summary:

Dominic Arkwright talks to Professor Peter French of York University about the art and science of forensic acoustics, including speaker profiling, voice line-ups, and sound enhancement.

Developments in new technology mean that sound recordings can be examined and prepared for use in extortion, blackmail and murder trials. Also, the proliferation of digital recordings in all walks of life mean that copies of recordings for evidential purposes can now be taken from mobile telephones, voicemail services, digital dictaphones, digital answer phones and other devices. So just how much information can be extracted from a phone call, and how much of ourselves do we reveal in conversation?

Biometrics workshop in The Hague

2011-01-30T17:41:00.004Z

Erica Gold, Natalie Fecher, Phil Harrison, Dom Watt and Peter French attended a three-day workshop at the Netherlands Forensics Institute (NFI), the latest of a series of training events organised by the Marie Curie Actions network Bayesian Biometrics for Forensics (BBfor2). BBfor2 brings together scientists from the academic, governmental and private sectors in seven European countries, and is focussed on developing and combining new methods in the analysis of fingerprints/palmprints, facial images, and speech recordings. The workshop, ‘Forensic Aspects of Biometrics: An Introduction to Criminalistics’, was a mixture of lectures, PhD student presentations, and hands-on practical sessions. Participants had the opportunity to attempt crime scene interpretation using NFI’s mock-up of a murder scene, and were trained to use fingermark analysis software. A BBfor2 summer school on forensic speech analysis will be held in York in June.

Graduation 2011

2011-01-28T12:17:00.004Z

Congratulations to all our graduands in January 2011! As you can see, some staff also had fun dressing up in a wide range of colourful robes and hats. A high proportion of our students and their families came for graduation on January 22. Students in this year's cohort came from all over the world, including the USA, Russia, Thailand, Norway, Luxembourg, Germany and the UK. It was great to see them all again, and to celebrate them getting their PhD, MA or MSc. Well done! We hope you will stay in touch and let us know where life takes you next.

Paper in Journal of Pragmatics

2011-01-19T13:29:00.002Z

Congratulations to one of our post-docs, Marianna Kaimaki. Her paper Transition relevance and the phonetic design of English call openings will soon appear in Journal of Pragmatics.

Here's the abstract:

Recent work at the interface of phonetics and Conversation Analysis has been concerned with the functional import of the phonetic design of talk. One particular challenge has been to understand how and if the phonetic design of talk affects its interpretation. This paper examines the impact of phonetic design on sequential structure and its role in signalling transition relevance. Focusing on call openings the paper examines whether different/same phonetics have different/same effects at different/same places in interactional structure. In order to do so, it considers the role of pitch contours and other phonetic features in first spoken turns (T1) in signalling transition relevance. It examines whether certain pitch-contour shapes deployed at T1 result in different uptakes by the recipient and producer of the second turn (T2). The analysis shows that:
- the function of turn-final pitch accents at T1 is to project possible transition relevance;
- at this place in interactional structure the choice between final rising and falling contours is constrained by the lexico-syntactic design of the turn;
- callers' actions at T2 are not conditioned by the prosodic design of T1.
These findings raise theoretical and methodological issues about the study of prosodic features of speech.

2011-01-17T15:07:00.003Z

New Publication by York Alumna

2011-01-17T14:45:00.005Z

Shahela Hamid’s new book entitled Language and Identity: the Sylheti Bangladeshis in Leeds is published this week with Peter Lang (ISBN 978-3-03911-559-4). The book is the first full length study on this subject and makes a significant contribution to sociolinguistics generally as well as to our knowledge of the linguistic practices and attitudes of the particular community.

Shahela completed her PhD in Linguistics in our department at York in 2007 with a thesis on this same subject. She has become the leading authority on UK Sylheti and for the past three years has acted as a consultant forensic linguist with JP French Associates, working on high profile cases involving recordings in Bangla and Sylheti.

University Challenge

2011-01-14T17:00:00.002Z

One of the Department's undergraduates, Chris Caudwell, is on the York team on University Challenge on Monday 17th: BBC2 at 8pm. Wish them luck!

2011 Linguistic Institute Fellowship applications available

2011-01-11T21:59:00.006Z

The following comes from an e-mail from the Linguistic Society of America.
Any student (in the USA or not, American or not) is eligible, on condition that they
join the LSA.  The Institutes are fun and very (academically) profitable, and come
highly recommended by everyone who has been to one!

Applications for the LSA's 2011 Linguistic Institute ("Language in the World"),
which will take place at the University of Colorado at Boulder from July 7 - August
2, are now available online.

The deadline for submitting applications is February 4, 2011; letters of
recommendation must be received by February 11. Fellowship decisions will be
announced in the second half of March 2011.

Current student members of the LSA may apply for a fellowship by logging into
the LSA website and clicking on the "submit or resume a fellowship application"
link.  Lapsed members must renew their membership before applying.  Nonmember
students may join the LSA in order to apply for a Fellowship (click the "Join
the LSA" link at the top of the LSA web page: http://www.lsadc.org).

More information about the Institute and about fellowships is available on the
LSA website at http://www.lsadc.org/info/inst-index.cfm.

Research Opportunities for York Linguistics Graduates

2011-01-08T10:39:00.001Z

The Faculty of Arts at the University of Gothenburg is announcing 30 funded PhD positions in subjects associated with the faculty, including linguistics. ‘Funded’ means a salaried position for the 4 years completing a thesis is supposed to take. The salary is fairly modest, but enough for support at a reasonable student level. The current minimum level is about £1800 per month (before tax so nearer 1300 or so after tax).

There is no requirement for students to know Swedish and supervision of foreign students is normally in English.

Deadline for applications Jan. 24, 2011.

Admission procedure details can be found at:

http://www.hum.gu.se/english/education/doctoral-studies/admission/

The following links and contact details are for subject information about various areas of linguistics represented at Gothenburg:

Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science

http://www.flov.gu.se/utbildning/forskarniva/

General Linguistics and Phonetics - Åsa Abelin +46 31 786 5233, abelin@ling.gu.se

Computational linguistics - Robin Cooper +46 31 786 2536 cooper@ling.gu.se

Department of Swedish

http://www.svenskagu.se/utbildning/forskarniva/

Natural language processing Lars Borin lars.borin@svenska.gu.se

Scandinavian languages - Elisabet Engdahl +46 31 786 5214, Elisabet.Engdahl@svenska.gu.se

Swedish as a second language - Sofia Tingsell +46 31 786 6410, sofia.tingsell@svenska.gu.se

New google tool for plotting words

2010-12-17T17:48:00.004Z

Google has a new tool that allows you to track the frequency of words in books from 1800 up to 2000. Here's the chart for the words 'linguistics' (blue), phonetics (red), philology (green)'. Note how 'linguistics' gets popular in the 1960s (not too surprising); but there's also an interesting blip around 1900. (If anyone knows why, do leave a comment.)

Hours of fun!

York Interdisciplinary Forensic Symposium (YIFS)

2010-12-14T22:30:00.001Z

Lisa Roberts, Colleen Kavanagh and Christin Kirchhuebel, curent PhD students, have organised YIFS, a half-day event, to bring together postgrads and researchers from a number of disciplines to discuss perspectives on interpretation and presentation of evidence.

YIFS takes place next Wednesday (week 10 - Dec 15th) in the Treehouse of the Berrick Saul building and starts at 2.15pm. Attendance is free and open to all. If you cannot make it to York in time, the entire event will be streamed live and recorded. You can find out more information at the YIFS website. It promises to be an exiciting and thought-provoking event!

The full programme is as follows:

2.15: Opening of YIFS

2.20 - 3.00: Matt Matravers: What's The Criminal Trial For?

3.00 - 3.40: Peter French: Turning Findings into Conclusions - Issues for Forensic Speech Science

Tea break

4.00 - 4.40: Tom Stoneham: How reliable is your evidence?

4.40 - 5.20: Rebecca Milner: Picking the right language: collaborative working with sexual offenders

5.20 - 6.00: Panel discussion

Wine reception

For more information:

http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~lsr501/YIFS

http://www.york.ac.uk/hrc/events/2010-11/autumn/yifs/

Congratulations Norman.

2010-12-13T16:33:00.000Z

Norman had his viva last Friday and passed with flying colours. The happy candidate can be seen here with his examiners (Hidekazu Tanaka and Anders Holmberg.

New blog in Brazil

2010-12-13T10:22:00.003Z

Stuart Brown, one of our PhD students, is doing fieldwork in Brasília. He's set up a blog which he will update weekly, telling about how his work's going and life there. It promises to be an interesting one to keep an eye on!

Camling 2010

2010-12-08T10:34:00.007Z

York has had a very strong showing in this year's Cambridge Postgraduate Conference in Linguistic Research (Camling), with three of our doctoral students and one of our MA by research students presenting, for a total of four presentations. No other university had sent more than two speakers.

The speakers (in alphabetical order) and their talk titles were as follows:

Rana Alhussein Almbark: Using an L1 allophonic contrast to discriminate an L2 phonemic contrast

Man Ki Theodora Lee: Overt quantifier raising: Neg-wh-quantifiers in Cantonese

Ji Young Shim: Superiority in Turkish, Japanese and Korean

Upsorn Tawilapakul: The application of optimality theoretic pragmatics to the
reappraisal of the role of lɛɛw45 in Thai

LADO workshop in Gothenburg

2010-12-03T16:50:00.003Z

Paul Foulkes, Kim Wilson, and Dom Watt attended the initial GoWLA (Gothenburg Workshop on Language Analysis) meeting in late November at the invitation of colleagues from the University of Gothenburg and the Netherlands Immigration and Naturalisation Service. The aim of the workshop was to bring together groups from the governmental, commercial and academic sectors who are working in the field of language analysis for the determination of origin (LADO), with a focus on stimulating empirical research relating to the analysis of the speech and language of individuals seeking asylum in European countries. Kim - now a PhD student in the department - presented her MSc dissertation research, in which she looked at the abilities of different listeners to discriminate between varieties of West African English after only minimal training.

Prosody in Interaction

2010-12-01T12:55:00.006Z

A new book is out this month called Prosody in Interaction. It contains papers in honour of Prof. Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, with significant input from people from the Centre for Advanced Studies for Language and Communication (CASLC), many of whom are also members of L&LS at York, and former students at York. Among these papers are: Prosodic constructions in making complaints (Richard Ogden), Repetition and contrast across action sequences (Traci Walker), Retrieving, redoing and resuscitating turns in conversation (John Local, Peter Auer and Paul Drew).

My favourite seasonal modal verb

2010-11-25T20:48:00.004Z

Today's snowfall took my mind back to Helsinki and a discussion I had with linguists working on the huge and exhaustive Iso Suomen Kielioppi (Big Finnish Grammar, to translate it literally) a while ago. (ISK is fantastic: and nearly all its examples come from real texts or conversations.)

Finnish has lots of nice modal verbs. As well several basic "being able to" verbs, there are plenty that are used largely in the negative form (which is an auxiliary verb in Finnish) and roughly mean "can't (because...)". Some of my favourites are...

en rohkene: I can't (because I'm not brave, rohkea, enough)

en ehdi: I can't (because I don't have time)

en jaksa: I can't (because I don't have energy/can't manage it)

en ilkene: I don't have the nerve/stomach for/can't bring myself to

en viitti: I can't be bothered to

But one of the most fun (and maybe culturally specific) is tarjeta. In the negative form (NEG + the stem tarkene), it means: can't (because it's too cold). Here's ISK's example:

Talvella se ei ole halpa huvi,

in the winter it NEG-3SG be cheap pleasure

koska ulkona ei tarkene kokoontua.

because outside NEG-3SG be-too-cold gather-INF

It's not a cheap pleasure in the winter, because it's too cold to get together outside.

Does anyone know any other exciting verbs like this?

The early word catches the bird

2010-11-25T07:59:00.002Z

I know I am not the only member of the department to have a shameful fondness for The Apprentice. It's what mid-week evenings were made for.

This year's has seen a wonderful crop of linguistic acrobatics. (Lord) Alan Sugar couldn't have foreseen what the economic crisis would do the linguistic skills of the crème de la crème of British business talent.

Last night the candidates were sent to Germany to sell new flavours of English crisps to innocent Hamburgers. It was pointed out that Germany is the UK's largest export market. So dismal, then, that their German was limited to "Sprechen Sie Englisch?" (said in English, obviously) and Stuart's general purpose "Das is wunderbar". He can count to twenty as well, which is pretty good for clinching that mega-deal.

On their return the suave Jamie was trying to remember "in his own brain" precisely how he had messed up by choosing a 1pm appointment over a 9am one; after all, as he admitted, "the early word catches the bird". Hm... rarely has a slip of the tongue been so memorable.

But my favourites come from Melissa, who seemed to have a special section in her brain for morphological overproductivity. Melissa said things like "sectionality", "comfortability", "to conversate", and "manoeuvrement". But best of all was her final curse as she bowed out of the show:

Karmically those people will be retributed.

Invited talk at Cambridge

2010-11-22T13:24:00.003Z

On 16 November, Damien Hall gave an invited talk at the University of Cambridge French Linguistics Research Seminar, entitled 'Is there a Regional French of Normandy?'. The audience of fifteen or so students and tutors received it enthusiastically, and there were some great questions!

(In case you were wondering, there probably is.)

Invited talk at Rice University, Houston

2010-11-15T09:43:00.003Z

Viktoria (Vica) Papp, a former student on York's MSc in Forensic Speech Science and currently finishing a PhD at Rice University in Houston, Texas, invited Dom Watt and Carmen Llamas to give a talk at Rice on findings from the AISEB project, shortly before last week's NWAV39 conference in San Antonio. Vica, pictured left, is about to defend her dissertation on source-filter interactions in speech with special reference to the effects of testosterone on the female larynx.

Pantomime before Berwick Kaler: highly successful HRC event

2010-11-10T11:15:00.004Z

Last night, I attended 'Pantomime before Berwick Kaler', a 'Humanities event' at the Merchant Adventurers' Hall in Fossgate.

http://www.york.ac.uk/hrc/events/2010-11/pantomime/

The 'event', which was the first in what will hopefully be a series of Merchant Adventurers' Arts Discovery Lectures in collaboration with the University, was based around a lecture by Prof. Jane Moody (English and Related Literature, and Director of the Humanities Research Centre); also interspersed in the lecture were performances of relevant vignettes and songs by members of the York Theatre Royal, by one of Jane's own postgraduates, and of course by the great man himself, suitably attired.

The whole event, which was superbly set off by the fifteenth-century Merchant Adventurers' Hall, was certainly (beautifully) different from the lecture that the capacity audience had probably been expecting. As the Arts Discovery Lectures are the latest in a long series of collaborative ventures between the Merchant Adventurers' Company and the University, it was introduced by the Governor of the Company, Richard Haynes, and the Vice-Chancellor of the University, Prof. Brian Cantor; Jane's beautifully-paced delivery was a pleasure to listen to; and the acting and singing expertly brought the subject to life (and included audience participation; it's not often that the handout for a lecture is called a song-sheet). A special word needs to be reserved for the man with his name in the title, Berwick Kaler, the pantomime dame at the York Theatre Royal for 31 years and counting: she [sic] stole the show (which was intended), while also showing a great deal of academic knowledge of the pantomime craft. Jane's commentary underlined how Kaler's craft not only fit into the centuries-old pantomime line, but also advanced it. An honorary Doctorate truly deserved!

An event like this really had to be seen to be believed, and happily it was video'd by Helen Weinstein and colleagues, so, hopefully, it can appear, once edited, on a screen near you.

I'd certainly encourage everyone based in Language and Linguistic Science to keep abreast of Humanities Research Centre events; this was only one of many!

http://www.york.ac.uk/hrc

Postcard from SLRF 2010

2010-11-09T18:50:00.005Z

Here's a snap from the Second Language Research Forum (SLRF), University of Maryland, 14-17 Oct. Pictured from L-R are my co-author Melinda Whong, Silvina Montrul, Bonnie Schwartz and me. The theme of the conference was 'Reconsidering SLA Research: Dimensions and Directions'. Melinda and I presented a paper (co-authored by Kook-Hee Gil) which addressed this theme through a case study on the L2 acquisition of the quantifier 'any'. The paper considered how the findings of generative SLA research could be integrated into language pedagogy and proposed avenues for interdisciplinary research combining pedagogy and theoretical SLA. We will be presenting further work in this area at a colloquium at the American Association of Applied Linguistics next spring.

J R Firth's grandchildren visit

2010-10-29T08:39:00.004+01:00

The Department houses collections of papers that relate to the work of J R Firth and his colleagues at SOAS between the 1930s and 1950s. Firth was the first professor of general linguistics in the UK, and the school of phonology that grew out of his work at SOAS was in many respects far ahead of its time, and is still quite radical. It has been very influential on the thinking of York phoneticians and phonologists.

The collection contains off-prints of papers, lecture notes on Firth's lectures, seminar handouts, personal letters and quite a bit of biographical information. Most of the material was put together by John Kelly, who retired in the mid-1990s; he had known several of Firth's colleagues, and organised seminars with them in York in the late 80s and early 90s.

So it was a delight yesterday to have two of Firth's grandchildren, Jane and Rupert, and one of his great grandchildren, Tom, to visit. They spent a few hours browsing through the material and looking into their family history, and then we went for dinner with Leendert Plug, who's a lecturer at Leeds now, but a former York student. Leendert wrote a biography of Firth, and did a considerable amount of original research towards it.

If anyone is interested in knowing more about the Firthian Phonology Archive, please contact Richard Ogden.

Monday's guest lecture

2010-10-22T17:17:00.003+01:00

On Monday October 25 our Guest Lecture will be given by Gerardo Ortega Delgado from the Centre for Deafness, Cognition and Language (DCAL) in London.

Gerardo has been looking at how hearing learners of British Sign Language acquire its phonological system: there is a difference of modality (speech vs. manual). What is the cause of errors in learning BSL? Is it perceptual or motor constraints? Lots of Gerardo's data has come from BSL learners in York. It should be an interesting talk.

The venue is the Treehouse in the Berrick Saul Building, 3.15pm.

congratulations to Daniel Redinger

2010-10-16T23:26:00.002+01:00

Daniel Redinger successfully defended his PhD on Friday 15th October. The thesis is entitled Language attitudes and code-switching behaviour in a multilingual educational context: the case of Luxembourg. The examiners were Professor Nik Coupland (Cardiff) and Paul Foulkes. Well done, Daniel!

Successful climb by postgraduate student

2010-10-14T13:23:00.005+01:00

Congratulations to Lisa Roberts who recently climbed Kilimanjaro! She reached the summit, Uhuru Peak (altitude 5895m), at 9:12am on 25th September after a 5-day ascent. The climb was not only the fulfilment of a lifelong ambition, but also in aid of two charities, Cancer Research UK and The Gurkhas. Both charities are of personal significance to her. Lisa is a current third-year PhD student in the department, studying the phonetics of distress. You can read her hiking blog here: http://lisashikes.blogspot.com/ You can still sponsor her by visiting either www.justgiving.com/LisaTanzania (Cancer Research) or www.justgiving.com/LisaTanzania2 (The Gurkhas). Well done Lisa!

The academic year begins

2010-10-12T17:13:00.002+01:00

This week is the start of the new academic year, and we're happy to welcome a record number of first year undergraduates, as well as new MA, MSc and PhD students to the Department.

Welcome!

Aarhus forensic phonetics workshop

2010-09-23T10:42:00.005+01:00

Paul Foulkes and Dom Watt were invited to give two of four presentations at a one-day workshop 'Forensic Phonetics - Problems, Limitations and Promises' at Aarhus University, Denmark, on September 17th. The event was organised by Mette Hjortshøj Sørensen, who was in York for a term last year on the MSc in Forensic Speech Science. Pictured are (from L to R), Jos Vermeulen (Netherlands Forensic Institute), Dom, Ocke-Schwen Bohn (Aarhus), Paul, Mette, and Anders Eriksson (Gothenburg University). Michael Jessen (Bundeskriminalamt Wiesbaden, Germany) was also present.

Magazine article about Daniel Redinger's research

2010-09-15T17:39:00.003+01:00

A quite lengthy interview (in German) with Daniel Redinger about his research on multilingualism in the Luxembourg education system has just appeared in a magazine called 'Télécran'. The article starts by placing the University of York in Scotland, but it otherwise seems to give an accurate account of Daniel's research.

The article is available online here.

Charity climb by 2010 graduate

2010-09-02T15:28:00.011+01:00

Congratulations to Harry Gompertz, who graduated in July with a BA in English Language and Linguistics and has just returned to York after successfully climbing to the summit of Kilimanjaro, which at nearly 20,000 feet (~5,900m) is Africa's highest mountain. Harry and friends took 6 days to complete the ascent following the 100 km Machame route, and were treated to spectacular views of the plains of Tanzania and Kenya from Uhuru Peak.

The climb was in aid of a charity called Cardiac Risk for the Young (CRY). CRY was founded in 1995 to raise awareness of conditions that can lead to Sudden Cardiac Death (SCD) or Sudden Death Syndrome (SDS, SADS), and aims to work with cardiologists and family doctors to promote and protect the cardiac health of young people by establishing good practice and screening facilities devoted to significantly reducing the frequency of SCD in the UK. Harry raised approximately £5,000 for CRY through the expedition.

"New" ideas in linguistics.!!!

2010-08-20T23:16:00.004+01:00

Is it just me or linguistics is getting a lot of press coverage these days? Is it just me or is this press coverage crassly ignorant and the stuff it covers bordering on plagiarism and rather low in quality? It will take me a few posts to get throught the things I have recently seen or heard but let me make a start. There was the interview in the observer by someone named Guy Deutscher where he presented the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as his bright idea. You can read this stuff here. Now, I just read the latest issue of the New Statesman which is a special issue on the "war on science" (there's some good bits in it) but then there is this 4 page things where we get 20 new ideas in science and towards the end we have: "Language is the the key to thought". This is of course trivially true in the sense that if nobody tells you what their thoughts are you won't know, but here is the quote in full:

Language is the key to thought

We used to think that all human languages arose from brain programming that existed, fully formed and ready for action, at birth. This idea, put forward by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s, is no longer unchallenged. Ethnographic research has thrown up so many exceptions to the "universal" rules of language that some researchers are rejecting Chomsky's dominance and suggesting that nothing is pre-programmed: instead, different cultures' ways of thinking and their languages are intertwined. It may even be that the restrictions of a primitive language are a barrier to creating complex thoughts.

OK, I know, the guy who wrote this is only journalist and there arespace constraints and what have you, I don't care, it is stupid and this should be pointed out. Let's go through it

1. That "We used to think that all human languages arose from brain programming that existed, fully formed and ready for action, at birth." Is just untrue. Nobody ever thought that . This is not an idea that Chomsky or anyone ever put forward.

2. That "Ethnographic research has thrown up so many exceptions to the "universal" rules of language " is a little bit like saying: "Sociological research has thrown up so many counter examples to quantum theory that it is no unchallenged. Sociologist have found that people cannot be in two places at the same time and whether a meeting is taking place or not does not depend on whether someone observes it. Furthermore they have also found that people cannot be entangled at millions of kilometers distance so that they, say, go to the toilet at the same time. All this research leads to question quantum theory" Bullshit right? well same here. The ethnographic research alluded to is of the worst kind that lacks in analysis and eschews scientific process in order to "challenge" strawmen.

3. "Some researchers are rejecting Chomsky's dominance and suggesting that nothing is pre-programmed". This is true, several people are suggesting that nothing is preprogrammed. Counterfactual reasoning is a good thing and for many disciplines, like History for example is as close as they ever get to experimental science. It does, however remain just that: counterfactual. In fact, in the context of the present article this stuff is even more interesting, another new idea according to the author is the following:

Humans are not special

So far, researchers have found only three genes unique to humans. The likelihood is that, in total, fewer than 20 of our 20,000 or so genes are not found in any other creature. Other primates have brain cells exactly like ours, and our seemingly unique mental capacities are, it turns out, more developed versions of tricks that other animals can pull off. Killer whales and dolphins show distinct cultural groups within their populations. Crows use tools and chimps display morality. Elephants show empathy, and even salamanders and spiders show a range of personalities. Though nothing in the animal kingdom is using what we think of as language, gestures used by bonobos and orang-utans come close. We are top of the class, perhaps, but not in a class of our own

put the two together and what you get is that language is a complete mystery. The complete failure of the most intensively trained animals to say anything as complex as "it's raining" becomes just utterly baffling. As for the gestures of bonobos coming close that's another piece of bullshit. In a recent article in Behavioural and Brain Science (the one about the WEIRD people not being representative of the Human species as a whole (sorry I am writing from holiday now and don't have the references handy)) there is a commentary piece where it is said that the gestures and other behaviours that trained chimps do are almost never found in the wild. So there you go.

4. "instead, different cultures' ways of thinking and their languages are intertwined." Ah well, I know, you're as young as you feel but this is new idea is very soon due a postcard from the Queen (I mean a second postcard). The dearth of ideas in some quarters must be such that I am thinking of organising an "Idea aid" we 'll get Bob Geldoff to do the opening remarks.

5. It may even be that the restrictions of a primitive language are a barrier to creating complex thoughts."
Hmmm! this is the Piraha story right? (interestingly, the only commenter on the new statesman site who picked up on this "new idea" got what this bit meant wrong) But if you read Dan Everett's work, and putting all controversy about recursion etc aside, it seems to me that what he says is that the cultural constrain on the primacy of immediate experience comes first, the structure of the language follows.

So there you go, a whole pile of crap. But there is a general pattern here which I find disappointing, the general tone of all the recent reports (and there's more than jsut the two I referred to above) is that there is a Chomskyan orthodoxy and it is being challenged by some young turks with very old, tired and for the most part demonstrably false ideas (the last bit is mine). The problem is that science is not advancing like this, it is a regrettable trend and hopefully one that will go away soon and rational, cooperative debate will replace it.

Christin Kirchhuebel

2010-08-13T17:14:00.007+01:00

Congratulations to Christin Kirchhuebel, who has been appointed PhD Abstracts Editor of The International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law. Christin, who graduated with a Distinction from the MSc in Forensic Speech Science in 2009, is presently doing a PhD in the Department of Electronics on the speech patterns of liars. She is the first phonetician to be appointed in this role to IJSLL since it began in 1994.

Experiment help!

2010-08-09T03:50:00.004+01:00

Are you a native speaker of UK English? If so, please take a few minutes to participate in an online survey focussing on perceptions of different kinds of sentences in UK Englishes. Here's a link to the study:

http://medusa.york.ac.uk/release/info.htm

Thanks!

Marie Curie Fellows

2010-08-06T22:56:00.007+01:00

Welcome to our new Marie Curie Fellows, Erica Gold (right) and Natalie Fecher (left). Both are starting PhDs as part of the FP7 network BBfor2 (Bayesian Biometrics for Forensics). Erica's project is Calculation of likelihood ratios using phonetic and linguistic features, supervised by Peter French & Didier Meuwly (Netherlands Forensic Institute). Natalie will work on Multimodal speaker recognition, supervised by Dominic Watt & David van Leeuwen (TNO - Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research/Radboud University, Nijmegen).

New international e-mail list on variationist sociolinguistics

2010-08-06T14:11:00.004+01:00

The Variationist List, a new international e-mail list on variationist sociolinguistics, has been set up recently by Damien Hall:

http://j.mp/VAR-L

It is intended as a scholarly but fairly informal discussion forum for anything to do with variationist / Labovian sociolinguistics. It was first publicised two days ago and already has 70 subscribers from across the world, discussing topics from normalisation techniques to the attractions for variationists of an international dialectology conference (Methods 14). The list will be aimed mostly at academic linguists but, as with other successful lists of this type, serious amateurs will also be welcome. If that sounds like your kind of thing, please subscribe!

AISB 2011 Convention

2010-08-03T16:16:00.000+01:00

The 2011 Convention of The UK Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour will in York from 4th - 7th and is organised by Dimitar Kazakov from the Department of Computer Science, and George Tsoulas.

More information about the convention which this year emphasises the links between AI and cognitive and social sciences can be found at the Conference's website. The Deadline for submission of proposals for symposia is september 7.

Diachronic Generative Syntax at Cambridge

2010-07-22T05:46:00.004+01:00

Ann Taylor and Susan Pintzuk gave a plenary lecture at the recent DiGs conference at Queen's College, Cambridge entitled "VO order, clause type and information structure in Old English". York was also represented by Bill Haddican, Daniel Ezra Johnson and Eytan Zweig, who gave a paper tracing the history of quotative 'like'.

congratulations to Vica Papp

2010-07-19T13:33:00.004+01:00

Many congratulations to Viktória (Vica) Papp on her appointment to a postdoctoral position at the Institute for Language, Brain and Behaviour at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Vica completed the MSc in Forensic Speech Science in 2007-8, and is now completing a PhD at Rice University.

IAFPA conference, Trier

2010-07-19T13:25:00.005+01:00

A team of 14 present and past Yorkies is currently attending the annual meeting of the IAFPA (International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics) in Trier, Germany. Papers are to be presented by: Colleen Kavanagh, Christin Kirchhübel, Phil Harrison, Paul Foulkes, Kim Wilson, Peter French, Erica Gold, Dominic Watt, Victória Papp, and Mette Hjortshøj Sørensen.

POSTSCRIPT Congratulations to Mette Hjortshøj Sørensen for winning the best student presentation prize!

ICCA 2010

2010-07-15T09:22:00.004+01:00

Last week was the International Conference on Conversation Analysis, ICCA10, in Mannheim in Germany. There was quite a crowd of us from York, both from Linguistics and Sociology. Richard Ogden organised a panel on the phonetics of talk-in-interaction, with invited speakers from several universities and countries; John Local was a discussant and Rein Ove Sikveland and Marianna Kaimaki presented their work there. Richard and Traci Walker also gave papers as members of other panels; Richard's was on 'intensifying emphasis' as part of a panel on affect and emotion; Traci's was on indirectness.

Barcelona workshop on forensic linguistics

2010-07-09T16:52:00.002+01:00

Paul Foulkes gave a keynote today on Current Issues in Forensic Phonetics, at the Second International Workshop on Forensic Linguistics, held at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona.

Congratulations to finalists...

2010-07-02T13:28:00.005+01:00

By the end of today all of this year's undergraduate degree results will have been announced, with a bumper crop of excellent results across the board, and a record number of recommendations for starred Firsts.

We enjoyed a drink with some of you on Wednesday (including a great turnout from the French 'Class of 2010', who all earned 2i or higher!) and look forward to congratulating all of our finalists at graduation on July 15th.

Applied Generative SLA Workshop

2010-06-30T13:51:00.005+01:00

Our workshop last Thursday on Applied Generative SLA Workshop was a great success. Around 50 people attended, and the theme of the workshop -- an exploration of how findings from generative second language acquisition research might be integrated with language pedagogy -- was discussed enthusiastically. This is a new area of debate within second language acquisition research, as, traditionally, the fields generative SLA research and language teaching have tended to ignore each other. We hope that the workshop will be held again next year.

Our guest speaker, Roumyana Slabakova, is pictured second from the right here, with workshop organisers who most readers will know: Kook Hee Gil, Heather, and Melinda Whong. No, the background is not the view from the Treehouse -- we took Roumyana to Brimham Rocks on Sunday before she flew home on Monday.

The workshop was funded by University of Leeds, University of York, University of Sheffield, and LAGB. Thank you everyone!

Congratulations to winners of the HRC's pogrgraduate project grants!!

2010-06-28T20:04:00.003+01:00

Congratulations to Lisa Roberts and Colleen Kavanagh, two of our PhD students, and Christin Kirchhuebel from Electronics. They have won one of the Humanities Research Centre's Postgraduate Project Grants for a seminar series looking at aspects of the criminal justice system in England and Wales. The proposal brings together people from Language & Linguistics, Electronics, Philosophy, Psychology and Politics (and no doubt others!) — an excellent, innovative way to link between departments.

Well done, and lots of success with the project!

‘Abnormal’ stressing of prepositions – phonetic, phonological, pragmatic?

2010-06-18T10:33:00.002+01:00

Jane Setter (University of Reading) posted the following question on PHONET, a phonetics e-mail list:

Does anyone know of any research done on the phenomenon often heard on UK TV programmes when reporters stress e.g. prepositions for no obvious reason? E.g., "lambing is now taking place IN the barn"; "there was no sign of him ON the 18:26 FROM Paddington".

I thought it was interesting enough to post about it here too.

I don’t know of any research on it, but I have written back to Jane, more-or-less as follows, that I think the phenomenon is both phonological and pragmatic:

I wanted to say that I think it is not just TV reporters who do this. I first
noticed it myself as part of a set of phenomena that seem to occur in some English
when the speaker or writer is trying to convey a 'doing-business', 'important',
'efficient' tone.  Another phenomenon in the same list is the use of reflexive
pronouns when they're not grammatically necessary:

"I'm still waiting for them to get back TO myself with those figures."

Regarding the unnecessary stressing of prepositions:  from a phonetic-phonological
point of view, perhaps it's something to do with avoiding too many Weak syllables
strung together with no Strong one to break the sequence? It strikes me that that
could be the explanation for at least one of your example sentences:

"LAMBing is now taking place IN the barn."

 S   w   w  w   w w    w     S  w   w

"LAMBing is now taking place in the BARN."

 S   w   w  w   w w    w     w   w  S

(Default, new-information stress on BARN, as the newly-introduced pertinent element)

As I say, the pragmatic implication for me of the sentence stressed as in your
example is 'OK, got that, it's accounted for, now what's next in the

schedule?'.

Any thoughts from readers of this blog? (Pragmaticians, I'm looking at you.)

NS articles of interest to forensic speech scientists

2010-06-17T11:08:00.003+01:00

The following articles appeared in New Scientist on 12th June. The first could be viewed as another example of the rather variable quality of NS's coverage of language-related stories, and has potentially more serious ramifications than Christine Kenneally's controversial article in NS a few weeks ago. The second, as far as I can tell, seems to be a reasonable summary of the original Sell et al. article.

Stress detector can hear it in your voice

A VOICE-BASED stress detector could identify which job candidates will perform better under pressure. So claims the detector's developer Bo Yin at National Information and Communications Technology Australia, in Sydney.

Normally we have full control over our vocal muscles and change their position to create different intonations, says Yin. "But when stressed, we lose control of the position of the speech muscles," and our speech becomes more monotone, he says.

Yin tested his stress detector in a call centre to identify which interviewees were more relaxed during recruitment tests. The number of new staff that left after three months subsequently fell from 18 per cent to 12 per cent, he claims. The detector was shown at trade show CeBIT Australia in May.

---------------------------------------------------------

Male voices reveal owner's strength

You can tell a lot about a man by his handshake, but his voice may give away even more. Both men and women can accurately assess a man's upper body strength based on his voice alone, suggesting that the male voice may have evolved as an indicator of fighting ability.

A team led by Aaron Sell at the University of California, Santa Barbara, recorded the voices of more than 200 men from the US, Argentina, Bolivia and Romania, who all repeated a short phrase in their native tongue. Sell's team also put the men through a battery of tests of upper body strength.

Do I sound strong?

When university students listened to the recordings, they accurately predicted the strength of the men, based on a seven-point scale from "weak" to "strong" – regardless of the language used. The voice analysis provided just as much information about a speaker's strength as photographs.

What aspects of voice we link with strength remain unknown, since there was no correlation between a man's strength and the pitch or timbre of his voice. That's surprising, says David Puts at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, since previous research showed deeper voices were rated as coming from stronger men.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2010.0769 (in press)

FirthDay at SOAS

2010-06-16T16:36:00.006+01:00

The title FirthDay captures the fact that the first professor of Linguistics in Britain, J R Firth, was born in June 120 years ago, and died 50 years ago, in 1960; and to celebrate this, there is a special event at SOAS in London tomorrow. There will be people talking and reminiscing, and there will be a presentation from Richard Ogden about how Firth's thinking has influenced current work on phonetics and conversation here at York. It's a joint presentation with John Local, Gareth Walker (Sheffield) and Leendert Plug (Leeds), who are both now lecturers, but did their PhD here with Richard.

The Department holds an archive of materials relating to the Firthian phonologists, and some of that material will be exhibited at SOAS.

One of the most significant of these is a paper which contains Firth's handwriting, claiming that the analysis in his 1937 paper, joint with B B Rogers, was the first non-phonemic analysis to be published. It remains a very radical, non-segmental account of Chinese syllable structure.

There are many reasons why Firth's thinking lost ground after the late 50s; but many of the linguistics departments set up in the 60s in Britain were populated by people trained in the Firthian tradition, including members of our own department. Ideas about how context is embedded in language (and how language creates context), how phonetic detail relates to different levels of linguistic analysis, the analysis of language in terms of systems and structures and the constraints between levels, and different 'modes of meaning' are all current topics in phonology; so it's nice to be able to celebrate the work of an original thinker.

Swearing and grammatical terminology

2010-06-14T01:27:00.002+01:00

There's been some debate in recent days about what kinds of "bad" words are acceptable on TV and radio and when. Not a particularly interesting issue. Now, in the observer newspaper there is a standard feature called the observer panel where three people give their opinions on various issues. One of these people is Mary Warnock (Baroness Warnock) whose opinions are usually interesting so I read them. This week it is on bad language and she says:

Swearing, or bad language, takes three forms: expletive as when you stub your toe; adjectival, as in "it's a fucking lie"; or vocative as in "you silly bitch".

Ok, but wait a minute: is fucking an adjective? I think not.
First, the following are ungrammatical:

(1) * a very fucking lie
(2) * a completely fucking lie
(3) * a fucking and barefaced lie

You do have A complete fucking lie, where complete modifies fucking lie rather that fucking alone.

Second, Fucking also does not appear in predicative positions:

(4) This is fucking

(4) is not ungrammatical but the meaning of fucking is not the same as what we have in (1) - (3).

Third, in compounds, fucking can be inserted between the two parts of the compound but not elsewhere:

(5) News-fucking-paper vs. *Newspa-fucking-per
(6) San fucking francisco vs. *San fran-fucking-cisco.

And so on.... an exception to the above rule is abso-fucking-lutely. Adjectives in general don't do this:

(6a) *News-big-paper

Fucking is probably best described as an intensifier (expressive) rather than an adjective. The moral of the story is that limited surface distribution is a poor guide to structure. (If you didn't get it : Compare This is a fucking lie, with: This is a big lie, big is an adjective)

But Baroness Warnock goes on to talk about the vocative use of bad language and the example is "you silly bitch". But even though this can have a vocative use its vocativeness is an irrelevant feature. It seems to me that (7) falls under the same category:

(7) I told that silly wanker to stop.

Nothing vocative here. If anything this would be the adjectival use. Consider also (8):

(8) They paid fucking Martin a huge bonus

(8) seems to be in-between categories.

I haven't quoted the whole text here but the status of (7) remains ambiguous. The point is: there are easier ways to make whatever point you want to make. If you are unsure about grammatical terminology, just don't use it. It confuses people.

Britain's Got Talent

2010-06-11T09:53:00.003+01:00

Many congratulations to Spelbound (sic!), the winners of BGT last weekend. One member of the troupe, Nick Illingworth, is a former York undergraduate in English Language & Linguistics. Watch their amazing winning routine on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-fZrB9t-gA

Symposium on interdisciplinary approaches to sociolinguistic meaning

2010-06-08T08:39:00.003+01:00

Richard Ogden was invited to attend a symposium on interdisciplinary approaches to sociolinguistic meaning, held at Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio this past weekend. It was an interesting and eclectic occasion, with contributions spanning semantics, sociolinguistics, anthropology, and phonetics. It was a very productive event, with lots of time for discussion. I presented a short version of work on intensifying emphasis in story-launches, and enjoyed taking part in discussions about how we can relate the 'micro' to the 'macro'.

Spinfest 2010

2010-06-02T16:25:00.004+01:00

The Department of Language & Linguisitic Science at York is proud to host the second annual meeting of Spinfest, the Semantics and Pragmatic In the North Festival. This is a small, informal workshop where researchers from Northern universities can present their ongoing research.

The meeting will take place on Monday, 14 June, in the Berrick Saul building seminar room BS007. A programme follows:

11.00-11.40 Ivan Garcia-Alvarez (Salford) "Quantification and Inclusion"

11.40-12.20 Eytan Zweig (York) "Distributivity Asymmetries and the Argument for Events"

12.20-14.00 Lunch

14.00-14.40 Eva Schultze-Berndt (Manchester) "Event classification and event decomposition"

14.40-15.20 Andrew Koontz-Garboden (Manchester) & Itamar Francez (Chicago) "Semantic consequences of morphosyntactic variation in the encoding of adjectival notions"

15.20-15.50 Coffee Break

15.50-16.30 George Tsoulas (York) "Double Subjects"

16.30-17.10 Martina Faller (Manchester) "Evidentials in a possible worlds semantics"

17.10-18.00 Wine Reception

18.00 Dinner

L2 phonology conference in Poznan

2010-05-25T10:03:00.010+01:00

Three members of the L2 Phonology Reading Group presented papers at the recent New Sounds 2010 conference on second language speech: Rana Alhussein Almbark and Sam Hellmuth from the Department, and Becky Taylor from Nagoya University who visited with us in York last year (click on the links to see abstracts of the papers).

Workshop on Applied Generative Second Language Acquisition

2010-05-18T15:30:00.002+01:00

This workshop will take place in the Berrick Saul Building on Thursday 24 June. The aim is to consider how the findings of generative second language acquisition research might apply to language teaching. Roumyana Slabakova is the guest speaker and will talk on 'Generative SLA meets Focus on Form'.

Registration for this workshop is now open, and it's FREE until 6 June (£5 from 7 June). See the workshop website for details of the programme and how to register. www.york.ac.uk/depts/lang/hosted/agsla/index.html.

Making Sense of the Impact Agenda: Mon 17 May

2010-05-14T09:42:00.003+01:00

What: PhD students' workshop, 'Making Sense of the Impact Agenda'
When: Mon 17 May, 3.15-4.45pm
Where: Berrick Saul Building, room BS/008

Attention all postgraduate research students in particular: on 17 May (next Monday), the Humanities Research Centre will be putting on the second instalment of 'Intersections', its series of interdisciplinary workshops for Humanities PhD students. This session is on 'Making Sense of the Impact Agenda'. An abstract is below. Damien Hall will be making a brief presentaton on impact in the Accent and Identity on the Scottish-English Border project. What's called 'Knowledge Transfer' in research-council-speak is more and more an integral part of the obligations for funded projects these days, meaning passing on the benefit of what we are learning to people outside academia. The AISEB project has just started its Knowledge Transfer activities, with a talk to the Berwick Civic Society on Wednesday 12 May.

Anyway, the Intersections event:

Jane Moody, with guest speakers Hannah Greig (History) and Damien Hall
(Language and Linguistics). Impact is a key concept in the 21st century
University. Basically, it's all about exploring ways of your research out of
the university to other people or 'users' whom it might benefit (whether
through activities such as exhibitions, in the school curriculum, through
public debates, in the creation of government policy, to give just a few
examples). Impact is also one of the ways in which research in Britain will
be judged in the next research assessment exercise (called the Research
Excellence Framework or REF). If you want to apply for a university job in
the future, or you're thinking of research grants which might be able to
support a project, it's vital that you understand what impact is. This
workshop will discuss examples of 'high impact' research in the humanities,
both at York and beyond, and suggest ways in which you might develop the
impact of your research.

2010-05-13T10:17:00.003+01:00

Dom Watt has been appointed to the Peer Review College of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The linguistics panel is a group of around 4o reviewers based in UK universities, who assess grant proposals and final reports for projects funded by ESRC. Tamar Keren-Portnoy has also been appointed to the College as a member of the Psychology panel. A list of the College's current membership can be seen here:

http://bit.ly/au1OUM

Successful PhD viva and job for Nanna Haug Hilton

2010-05-09T12:32:00.004+01:00

York PhD student Nanna Haug Hilton has two reasons to celebrate. She has recently been appointed Lecturer in Sociolinguistics at the University of Groningen (Netherlands); she will start that (permanent) position in September 2010, though she has been there as a researcher since August 2009. Secondly (chronologically at least), in early May she successfully passed her PhD viva; her thesis is on regional dialect levelling and the processes behind it, with specific reference to language variation and change in Hønefoss, a town in south-eastern Norway. Congratulations to Nanna on both counts!

Bank Holiday Talk

2010-05-02T21:14:00.002+01:00

Mary Dalrymple from the University of Oxford will give a talk on Monday 3rd of May at 2.15 in the Treehouse (note the unusual hour).

The title of the talk is : Classifiers and Plural Semantics

All welcome.

Forensics Research Group - Geoff Morrison

2010-04-28T18:35:00.003+01:00

Geoff Morrison (Australian National University) will deliver a tutorial on Bayesian approaches to speaker/voice identification on Friday 30 April in V/C/123, from 1.15 to 4.15 (maximum). It is designed mainly for those in forensics, but all are welcome. Dinner afterwards will be at 6pm, venue tbc. Please let me know if you'd like to attend ther the workshop and/or dinner.

York's Got Talent

2010-04-27T18:47:00.004+01:00

I'm sure readers all took time off from research and impact planning to watch Britain's Got Talent last weekend. The act that really wowed the judges - even Simon Cowell - was the gymnastic dance troupe, Spellbound, featuring our own Nick Illingworth (undergraduate 2004-2007).

They are among the bookies' favourites to win the whole competition. Watch the amazing routine on You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FF8LMPIV_Y

York Frameworks event - 4 May

2010-04-22T11:34:00.001+01:00

York Frameworks is a conferential event that will provide an overview of various different approaches to understanding language and syntax. The workshop hopes to facilitate a constructive dialogue between different theoretical syntactic framworks and promote theoretical diversity to a less-aware audience.

The event will cover the following frameworks:

Lexical Functional Grammar (Prof. Mary Dalrymple, University of Oxford)
Minimalism (Dr. George Tsoulas, The University of York)
Dynamic Syntax (Prof. Ruth Kempson, King's College, University of London & Dr. Ronnie Cann, The University of Edinburgh)
Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Steve Harlow, The University of York)
Combinatory Categorial Grammar (Prof. Mark Steedman, The University of Edinburgh

All are welcome to attend.

The link to the official website is: http://frameworks.zxq.net/

If you have any queries please contact Moreno (mm568) or Luiz (lg500).

article by Ulrikke Rindal (former MA student)

2010-04-20T09:31:00.005+01:00

Congratulations to Ulrikke Rindal, who has just published her first article, Constructing identity with L2: Pronunciation and attitudes among Norwegian learners of English. It's in the Journal of Sociolinguistics, 14(2): 240-261, and is a reworking of her MA dissertation carried out at York. Ulrikke is now studying for a PhD at the University of Oslo, but is co-supervised by Paul Foulkes.

Abstract
This study investigates L2 pronunciation and evaluation of American and British varieties of English among Norwegian adolescent learners. By integrating quantitative sociolinguistics and L2 acquisition, the article investigates stylistic practice in an L2 context. Results from an auditory analysis of four phonological variables and a matched-guise test are interpreted with reference to speaker commentary. Learners' self-expressed accent aims correlate significantly with accent use, but American English is the dominant pronunciation. Results show that both L1 and L2 speakers of English varieties are socially evaluated by the learners; British English is considered the most prestigious model of pronunciation, while American English is associated with informality. These evaluations seem to motivate learners' pronunciation choices. The data indicate blended use of the English varieties. Learners seem to exploit linguistic resources from English, and reshape and adapt the social meaning of the variables to a local construction of identity.

BAAP 2010

2010-04-10T08:50:00.002+01:00

The week before Easter it was the Colloquium of the British Association of Academic Phoneticians in London. York was especially well represented, with (if I counted right) 14 papers or posters, and 15 individuals affiliated with York. If we count former students as well, then it was a very high proportion of people there who count as "Yorkies". Our papers covered all sorts of things, including forensics, sociolinguistics, interactional data, and phonetic detail of various kinds.

paper by Catherine Byrne (former York u/g)

2010-04-05T13:56:00.005+01:00

Congratulations to Catherine Byrne on the publication of her Masters dissertation "From mathematics to language: A novel intervention for sentence comprehension difficulties in aphasia" in the Journal of Neurolinguistics (2010).

Catherine completed her BA at York before going on to her Masters at Sheffield, and is now a speech and language therapist in Stornoway.

The abstract is as follows:

We report an intervention for severe and chronic sentence comprehension difficulties that used the intact resources of one symbolic system (mathematics) to scaffold impaired capacity in a second symbolic system (language). The study evaluated the outcome of therapy for participant SO. SO retained the ability to understand structural principles such as reversibility in mathematics. The therapy attempted to link this awareness to language expressions in order to enhance his understanding of canonical active sentences. The investigation employed a single case study design, with multiple-baselines. Behaviour was measured prior to intervention, immediately post-intervention, and following an eight week no-therapy maintenance period. A four component therapy programme lasting five weeks was implemented. Untreated control behaviours displayed only minor change following intervention. The intervention resulted in significant and stable improvement in treated behaviours with increased scores for sentence comprehension, including the comprehension of spoken and written reversible sentences. There was generalisation of gains to untreated sentences, and also to sentences which shared the verb, but not the noun phrases of the treated sentences.

DCAL Deaf Open Day

2010-03-22T12:45:00.003Z

I was invited to the Deaf Open Day at UCL's centre for Deafness, Cognition and Language at the weekend. There were lectures and posters for the Deaf community (in BSL with English text) on the work they're doing there, which includes variation in BSL around the country, the study of specific language impairment, and work on many linguistic and social features of BSL. It's fascinating stuff.

The day ended with an evening of Deaf films and some live performances of BSL poetry. I understood little of the poetry, but it's wonderful to watch. It has its own rhythms and metaphors.

Here's an example of a collaborative poem; each signer picks up something from the previous one, and signs a fragment of seven signs. (I can't always count seven... so I'm not quite sure how they count, maybe they include also reduplications.)

Eytan's new paper

2010-03-18T00:27:00.000Z

Eytan's got a new paper coming out in Linguistics and Philosophy, it's called Number neutral bare plurals and the multiplicity implicature and it's got real cool stuff inside.

Ian Pears

2010-03-17T23:43:00.001Z

A Friend sent me a link (and I thought I should share) of a letter that Ian Pears wrote to the London Review of Books as a comment to an article by Ross Mc Kibbin called Good for business. It is all about Hefce, the REF, impact and so on. Pears' letter is disturbing reading, what am I saying, chilling is the word, because it rings so true.

O tempora....

One cheer for our forensicists

2010-03-17T23:33:00.002Z

Nature has an article about Science in Court where the talk is about academics and forensic scientists being at loggerheads and how more PhD programmes in forensics can bridge the gap. The authors say:

In the meantime, more research universities should establish forensic-science centres and PhD programmes in forensics, so that the next generation of forensic researchers will not feel so distant from their academic counterparts.

what more is there to say ?

Speakability

2010-03-11T17:18:00.003Z

Some of us from the Articulatory & Impressionistic Phonetics module went to a meeting of Speakability today. Speakability is a charity, and it works as a self-help group for people with aphasia. We all chatted with group members and heard how their lives had changed after having a stroke. Richard Ogden gave a talk about phonetics, and the students chipped in with comments and help. Most of the people there joined in with making sounds: clicks, vowels, playing with pitch, and playing with airflow through the nose and mouth. In return, we learnt something about the experience of people who have had strokes. With the loss of their ability to speak they had often lost a lot of confidence, and sometimes also their livelihoods. It was a really interesting afternoon, and we were grateful for the lovely hospitality and warm welcomes we received.

Read This

2010-03-10T22:01:00.001Z

The following are only two quotes from a brilliant blog post by Anthony Grafton from the The New York Review of Books blog:

"Universities exist to discover and transmit knowledge. Scholars and teachers provide those services. Administrators protect and nurture the scholars and teachers: give them the security, the resources, and the possibilities of camaraderie and debate that make serious work possible."

"Accept the short term as your standard—support only what students want to study right now and outside agencies want to fund right now—and you lose the future. The subjects and methods that will matter most in twenty years are often the ones that nobody values very much right now. Slow scholarship—like Slow Food—is deeper and richer and more nourishing than the fast stuff. But it takes longer to make, and to do it properly, you have to employ eccentric people who insist on doing things their way. The British used to know that, but now they’ve streaked by us on the way to the other extreme."

Read the rest of the post here. We are often told to focus on what we have to contend with at the present moment and "it is out of our hands" but points such as Grafton makes are not luxuries and ideals to cherish, they may be essential to survival.

Workshop on Applied Generative Second Language Acquisition

2010-03-04T22:29:00.004Z

This workshop, which aims to consider how the findings of generative second language acquisition rsearch might apply to language teaching, will take place in our very own Berrick Saul Building on Thursday 24 June. The guest speaker will be Roumyana Slabakova (University of Iowa), and the call for papers is now out. See www.york.ac.uk/depts/lang/hosted/agsla/index.html.

Make a note in your diary, and spread the word!

Computers find male voices 'harder to recognise'

2010-03-04T10:07:00.002Z

Men's hesitation markers - among other things - appear to make it more difficult for automated speech recognition systems to work out what talkers are saying.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/8548131.stm