UC, Santa Cruz is hosting the ninth meeting of Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas on May 6-8. UMass is represented by:
Alumna Amy Rose Deal, who is giving the talk “Legacy Documentation: What can we learn?"
Seth Cable, who is giving the talk “Negation and negative antonyms in Tlingit."
Alumna Suzi Lima, who is giving the talk “On the interpretation of object denoting nouns in Yudja"
For more information, go here.
John Kingston writes:
Tony Woodbury will present his joint work with Stephanie Villard on tone in Zacatepec Chatino in Sound Workshop on Friday 26 February 1-2 in ILC N451.
The Linguistics Department of Swarthmore College and Haverford College will host a 5-week Linguistics Field School consisting of two weeks at Haverford College and three weeks of community-based work in Mexico (with Prof. Brook Danielle Lillehaugen) or in the Navajo Nation (with Prof. Ted Fernald).
Host Institutions: Swarthmore College and Haverford College. In Oaxaca: Biblioteca de Investigación Juan de Córdova and Centro de Estudios Tecnológicos, industrial y de servicios (CETis) #124. In the Navajo Nation: Navajo Technical University (NTU)
Dates: May 23 through June 25, 2016
Locations: Haverford, PA; Oaxaca, Mexico; Crownpoint, New Mexico
Description: The program will recruit a cohort of 12 undergraduates who have shown a strong interest in and commitment to linguistics, digital tools, and/or related fields. Students will being the program at Haverford College, where they will receive ten days of intensive training in linguistic field methods, digital recording, data analysis, field ethics, and allied disciplines. Students will then join local community language revitalization projects in Oaxaca, Mexico and the Navajo Nation for three weeks (6 students at each site), where they will work closely with language activists and scholars on a variety of projects. For the Navajo project, students will work on programming and testing a web-based application for generating Navajo verbs. The last 5 days will take place at Haverford College where students will receive follow-up training and process their field data.
Interested students may find the NSF REU Linguistics Field School Facebook group useful in getting a sense of the experience. The Twitter hashtag is #LingFieldSchool.
Funding: All travel and living expenses will be covered, and students will also receive a generous weekly stipend.
Qualifications: Applicants should be currently enrolled undergraduates who have completed at least one year of college level studies. Students who will complete their B.A. by June 2016 are not eligible. We especially welcome applications from students of community colleges, tribal-affiliated colleges in the US, and institutions where no linguistics major is available. Fluent or heritage speakers of Zapotec or Navajo are especially encouraged to apply. This project is funded by the National Science Foundation's Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program (grant #1461056), which limits applicants to US citizens or permanent residents. Students should have experience (such as course work) in at least two of the following areas and demonstrated interest in others: linguistics, languages indigenous to the Americas (including Zapotec and Navajo), programming, web design, and digital humanities. For Oaxaca: applicants must have a valid passport at the time of application; competency in Spanish is necessary and programming experience with Android apps or iPhone apps is an asset. For the Navajo Nation: an introductory computer science course or data structures course is desirable, or programming experience with Python or a web framework like Django.
Application Instructions: The application is available here. Applications will require one letter of recommendation which must be emailed directly from the recommender to linguistics@swarthmore.edu by the application deadline. The selection process is highly competitive and detailed letters that address the student’s potential for success in this type of program will be most helpful in determining the final cohort.
Application deadline: February 15, 2016.
Abstracts are invited for papers on any aspect of linguistic analysis, language documentation, and revitalization of American Indian languages.
Special Session: Language Revitalization Strategies in the Americas: Challenges, Success and Pitfalls
The special session will be devoted to papers focusing on language revitalization methods.
Parasession: Documentation, Description & Theory
The parasession welcomes papers on language documentation (especially those that make use of digital technologies), and descriptive and/or theoretical work that draw their data from fieldwork.
All papers will be considered for inclusion in a peer-reviewed publication.
Plennary Speakers:
Leanne Hinton, University of California, Berkeley
Ofelia Zepeda, University of Arizona, Tucson
Submission Process:
Abstracts should be up to 500 words or less (excluding examples and/or references) for papers.
Abstracts should include:
(a) Title
(b) Name of author(s) and affiliation (if any)
(c) Session (special or parasession)
Paper presentations will be 20 minutes, followed by 10 minutes for discussion.
Please submit your abstract in .pdf format by email to sail@rit.edu (with the subject: “Abstract - SAIL2016”)
Submission Deadline: January 31, 2016.
(Authors will be notified of acceptance by the end of February 2016).
For more information, go here.
Special Session at Interspeech 2016:
Sub-Saharan African languages : from speech fundamentals to applications
Call for papers
This special session aims at gathering researchers in speech technology and researchers in linguistics (working in language documentation and fundamentals of speech science). Such a partnership is particularly important for Sub-Saharan African languages which tend to remain under-resourced, under-documented and often also unwritten. Prospective authors are invited to submit original papers in the following areas:
ASR and TTS for Sub-Saharan African languages and dialects
Cross-lingual and multi-lingual acoustic and lexical modeling
Applications of spoken language technologies for the African continent
Phonetic and linguistic studies in Sub-Saharan African languages
Zero resource speech technologies: unsupervised discovery of linguistic units
Language documentation for endangered languages of Africa
Machine-assisted annotation of speech and laboratory phonology
Resource / Corpora production in African languages
Submission deadline
Same as regular Interspeech 2016 papers: March 23, 2016
Special session web site
For more details on this special session: http://alffa.imag.fr/interspeech-2016-special-session-proposal/
Interspeech 2016 conference website: http://www.interspeech2016.org/
Organizers
Martine Adda-Decker (madda@limsi.fr) – CNRS – LPP and LIMSI, France.
Laurent Besacier (laurent.besacier@imag.fr) - Univ. Grenoble-Alpes, France - LIG laboratory.
Marelie Davel (marelie.davel@nwu.ac.za) – North-West University, Vanderbijlpark, South Africa.
Larry Hyman (hyman@berkeley.edu) - Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley.
Martin Jansche (mjansche@google.com) – Google, London, UK.
Francois Pellegrino (francois.pellegrino@univ-lyon2.fr) – CNRS – DDL Lyon, France.
Olivier Rosec (olivier.rosec@voxygen.fr) – Voxygen SAS,- Pleumeur-Bodou, France.
Sebastian Stüker (sebastian.stueker@kit.edu) - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany.
Martha Tachbelie Yifiru (martha.yifiru@aau.edu.et) – School of Information Science, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia.
David Erschler will be giving a talk entitled “Spoken Yiddish and Theoretically-Oriented Fieldwork” at Hampshire College on Wednesday, November 18 at noon in Adele Simmons Hall. An abstract follows.
Spoken Yiddish and Theoretically-Oriented Fieldwork
I will discuss the importance of doing theoretically-oriented linguistic field work and the urgency to perform such field work on modern spoken Yiddish (Hassidic Yiddish). I will illustrate this via a discussion of two phenomena from Yiddish syntax: the position of the finite verb (the so called "verb-second") and the structure of relative clauses in Yiddish.
Seth Cable will be heading to Alaska to conduct fieldwork on Tlingit this August. Seth anticipates working with James Crippen and Rose Marie Dechaine from UBC.
Kristine Yu will be conducting fieldwork on Samoan in Auckland, New Zealand this July.
Piero Fioralisso writes:
I would like to inform you that we have decided to extend the application deadline to the Amazonian Lingusitics Summer School until May 1st. We hope this extra time helps your students in the case they are considering the option of taking part of the program.
For information about the curricula, go here. And for general information, see this.
Suzi Lima writes:
Seth Cable will be conducting NSF-supported fieldwork on Tlingit from June 19 to July 3, along with UBC PhD student James Crippen.