2011 Hispanic Linguistics Symposium @ UGA

We are pleased to announce that the 2011 Hispanic Linguistics Symposium will be held at the University of Georgia, October 6-9, 2011. More information regarding the conference, including the Call for Papers, abstract submission, and event details, can be found at the conference website:  http://www.hls2011.uga.edu. For additional information regarding HLS 2011, please feel free to contact the conference organizers at hls2011@uga.edu.

This conference is sponsored by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts and the Department of Romance Languages.

RL Colloquium: Spring 2010

Below is a list of Romance Languages Colloquium events this semester (Departmental News).

(Fridays from 3:30-4:30 in 350K Gilbert):
January 22: Melinda Cro, “Acardia: Exploring the Pastoral”
February 12:  Tom Peterson (Title TBA)
March 5:  Carl Wise, “Shadow of the king: Poetics of Radiance in Mira de Amescua’s Prospera and Adversa Fortuna de Álvaro de Luna”
April 9:  Nicolás Lucero, ” ‘Memory Believes Before Knowing Remembers’: Juan José Saer Reads William Faulker”

Romance Languages Colloquium

Starting on Friday, September 25th, Romance Languages will host its first installment of the Departmental Colloquium with a talk by Prof. Elizabeth Wright entitled “Liberty via Latinity: the Epic Stratagems of Joannes Latinus, an African-Andalucian Freedman Negotiating an Age of Mass Enslavement.” For more information on this and other Colloquium-related events,  please visit the Departmental News page. The talk will be held at 3:30 in Gilbert Hall, room 360.

Here is a list of other RL Colloquium events this semester:

(Fridays from 3:30-4:30 in 360 Gilbert):
October 16 – Julia Barnes, “Reinventing Spanish Motherhood, the Family and the Nation in Malena es un nombre de tango by Almudena Grandes.“
November 13 – Francis Assaf, “Voltaire and Islam”
December 4 – Kenneth Widgren, “A Phenomenology of the Fantastic”

Loving languages is (not) enough

In a recent Language Log post, Prof. Mark Liberman discusses a NYT article written by Emily Finn, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Linguistics.” The article chronicles Emily’s academic journey that led to an undergraduate degree in linguistics at Yale (and, presumably, to subsequent entrance into graduate school). Prof. Liberman uses Emily’s story as a point of departure for describing his own process of linguistic discovery, having started, as many future linguists do, with the intention of majoring in math. The comments following the post provide an equally compelling view of the diversity of backgrounds that can lead one to studying linguistics.

For the past several days, I’ve been surrounded by some of the world’s most accomplished linguists who have been participating in the 2009 Linguistic Institute and the Eighth Biennial Conference for the Association for Linguistic Typology. Equally as impressive are the students attending these events, all of whom provide consistently coherent and insightful comments during talks and lectures. Clearly, linguistics attracts the best and brightest. Perhaps this is because, as a discipline, linguistics has tended to have a rather large canopy, accommodating a range of academic interests. Prof. Liberman notes that

“[a]s a “linguist”, you can work in areas that span the disciplinary spectrum: mathematics, natural science, social science, humanities, medicine, public policy, engineering…”

The LSA Summer Institute is quite possibly one of the most striking displays of this diversity (especially for someone like me who is used to working with “well-studied” languages). Thus far, the most significant take-home message from this experience has been that while being a language enthusiast, at some level, is a necessary condition for being a linguist it is most certainly not a sufficient condition.

This is a crucial lesson for would-be majors: Linguistics is a proper discipline with a rigorously defined set of theoretical and applied approaches and a constantly evolving and sophisticated range of methodologies. This observation is of course old hat for the majority of students and faculty both here at UC-Berkeley and in linguistics departments/programs around the world. Nevertheless, for me, as a practitioner and promoter of the discipline, I have to make sure that I don’t take this for granted.

[I should point out that I've borrowed the title of this post (with permission) from a book, Loving Trees is not Enough: Communication Skills for Natural Resourse Professionals, written a friend of mine, Dr. Brooks C. Mendell, who has also recently published a book that chronicles his final season on the M.I.T. baseball team, Beaverball: A (Winning) Season with the M.I.T. Baseball Team. Both are worth a read.]

“R” you experienced

It’s not everyday that the New York Times publishes an article about open-source statistical software. In today’s NYT, however, Ashlee Vance writes about R, the software environment used by researchers across numerous disciplines, including linguistics. Over the last several years, R has been lauded by a number of linguists as a comprehensive statistical package capable of handling complicated language-related data analyses. In fact, at least two books (and perhaps others) have been published recently that provide overviews for using R for language-related research. Prof. R. H. Baayen’s Analyzing Linguistic Data (2008, Cambridge University Press) and Prof. Keith Johnson’s Quantiative Methods in Linguistics (2008, Blackwell Publishing) are both excellent resources for linguistics students and researchers interested in quantitative methods in language research using R. Prof. Stefan Th. Gries at the University of California at Santa Barbara also has a book coming out soon concerning applications of R in corpus linguistics as well as a “Boot Camp” in August 2009 that will introduce participants to methods in quantitative corpus linguistics using R. As an R neophyte, this type of press is certainly encouraging.

Life by association

Until now, this site has been largely blog post-free, but with a new year staring, perhaps a few cyber musings would be welcome. In this morning’s broadcast of “Morning Edition“, there was a brief segment concerning the closing of the famous Rainbow Room in New York City. Reporter Ari Shapiro discussed some of the history surrounding this famed restaurant noting:

Frank Sinatra and Bob Dylan have both performed there [The Rainbow Room].  (01/05/09, emphasis added)

The (Present) Perfect in English (e.g. have performed) is said to presuppose that the agent is still alive at the moment of speech (sometimes referred to as the “Lifetime” effects). Thus, the famous “Einstein has visited Princeton” example discussed by McCawley (1971:106) is argued to be infelicitous if the subject is understood as the topic of the sentence.

Out of context, the Rainbow Room example might be considered odd, given that Frank Sinatra passed away in 1998 and, according to the Lifetime presupposition associated with the Perfect, is not a viable agent for a performance at the Rainbow Room. Dylan, on the other hand, could very well make an additional appearance there, perhaps after he returns from his Spring tour in Europe.

This sentence works in the NPR segment precisely because the Rainbow Room, and not Frank Sinatra or Bob Dylan, is the discourse topic. The pairing of these two agents, one alive and one deceased, poses an interesting testing ground for the family of observations regarding the interaction between verb tenses and life stages of human agents (see Mittwoch 2008 for a recent discussion). Of course, it could just be, despite any contextual assumptions, that being larger than life makes one immune to such mundane linguistic restrictions.

References
McCawley, James. 1971. Tenses and Time Reference in English. Studies in Linguistic Semantics, ed. by Charles J. Fillmore and D. Terry Langendoen, 97-114. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Mittwoch, Anita. 2008. Tenses for the living and the dead: Lifetime inferences reconsidered. Theoretical and Crosslinguistic Approaches to the Semantics of Aspect, ed. by Susan Rothstein, 167-190. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

[Update (01/06/09):  I've just listened to yesterday's broadcast of Morning Edition again and did not hear the sentence that I cited above. Now, my guess is that the segments on the website are edited and that this particular "perfect" gem ended up on the cutting room floor. Or, it could be that I hallucinated this example; it's been known to happen.]

News from NRG4

Brooke Heller just recently returned from the New Reflections on Grammaticalization 4 at the University of Leuven in Belgium where she presented a joint paper entitled “Raising parentheticals as discourse particles” (PDF). Unfortunately, I was unable to attend myself, but Brooke has informed me that the presentation was well-received. This research addresses the evolution of a set of clausal parentheticals similar to the Epistemic Parentheticals I believe and I think described by Thompson and Mulak (1991). Specifically, we’ve been looking at expressions like it turns out and it seems, which, like Thompson and Mulak’s Epistemic Parentheticals, take sentential complements and are used with metapragmatic functions (i.e. as comment clauses). One important distinction, however, is that members of the Raising Parenthetical Constructions (or RPCs) undergo various syntactic reductions that perhaps suggest a more advanced stage of grammaticalization. The most striking of these features is the omission of the expletive subject it, as in the following example (from the TIME magazine corpus, Davies 2007):

(1)  In four of the six movies he had roles in last year, Jude Law played the kind of man who cheats. Turns out they weren’t much of a stretch. (8/1/2005)

Any questions/comments are certainly welcome. We also appreciate all of the comments provided after the presentation in Belgium.

New Ph.D. Program in Hispanic Linguistics

The Department of Romance Languages is pleased to announce a new area of specialization in Hispanic Linguistics for the Ph.D. in Romance Languages. For more information, click here.

“For the Ph.D. degree in Romance Languages with an area of emphasis in Hispanic Linguistics a minimum of 20 graduate courses (including those taken at the M.A. level), preliminary written and oral examinations, a dissertation, and an oral dissertation defense are required. The three preliminary written exams are three-hour exams, taken within a period of three weeks. One of these exams must be on Spanish Phonetics and Phonology, Spanish Morphology and Syntax, or Spanish Semantics and Pragmatics. The other two examination areas must be selected from among the previous three areas or the History of the Spanish Language, Spanish Dialectology, Sociolinguistics, Language Variation, or Second Language Acquisition and Teaching. Upon successful completion of the three area exams, the student will write a take-home exam consisting of two essay questions dealing with: a. the dissertation topic and the specific linguistic theory to be used in the dissertation, b. the general area of linguistics in which the dissertation topic falls, or c. an area of linguistic research directly related to the dissertation topic. Within three weeks of completion of the take-home exam, the student will take an oral exam based on the take-home exam. The hours of credit of ROML 8000 which may be taken at the Ph.D. level are limited to 6.”

Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index

The Department of Romance Languages ranks in the top 10 in the Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index according to Academic Analytics.