Dear LINGUIST List Colleagues,

Today we have another bundle of books and journal subscription prizes, one of which you can win if you donate to the LINGUIST List Fund Drive before this Friday, May 6, before 5 pm.

***

From Cambridge University Press: The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology edited by N. J. Enfield, Paul Kockelman, and Jack Sidnell (http://goo.gl/9sYBoh)

From De Gruyter Mouton: Greek Interjections by Lars Nordgren (e-book) (http://goo.gl/WyLc7L)

From Bloomsbury Publishing: Discourse of Twitter and Social Media (http://goo.gl/qJrP2o)

From Edinburgh University Press: The Handbook of Business Discourse Edited by Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini (http://goo.gl/jR8btP)

From John Benjamins: 1 (of 3) journal subscription of your choice from any of their 70+ journals (http://goo.gl/lvCacl)

***

Again, to win any of these fantastic prizes from this coming week’s prize bundle, you can donate to enter your name into the drawing, until Friday May 6th, at 5 PM EST. For every $10 you donate, your name will be entered into the lottery to win. Donate by the link below:

http://goo.gl/e656LG

In addition to the one-time donations to our Fund Drive, you can also become a recurring donor and support LINGUIST List on a long-term basis. Find out how by following this link:

http://goo.gl/Q27jls

And as always, if you cannot donate monetarily, you can help us out in other ways, such as liking, sharing, and retweeting our Fund Drive posts on social media. If you like the LINGUIST List and have benefited from our free service, tell your friends about the LINGUIST List and our Fund Drive. Every little bit of support is appreciated!

There will be many more great prizes from our supporting publishers in the coming month, so stay tuned to our social media pages to hear about more prizes that you can win. Thanks and good luck!

Linguistically yours,
The LINGUIST List Crew

Featured Linguist: Joanna Błaszczak

How did I become a linguist?

Well, my parents wanted me to become a doctor one day, a woman in a white coat examining patients, using diverse medical instruments, conducting studies. I myself would have rather preferred to work with animals (I love animals, dogs are my favorite ☺). I imagined myself travelling around the world, living in a jungle with wild animals, observing and studying the behavior of chimpanzees and the like. What has become of it? Depending on how you view it, the answer to this question could be: NOTHING, as I became neither a doctor nor an animal researcher or world traveller, or BOTH in some sense. Do you wonder how this latter answer may be sensical at all? I am indeed a world traveller, maybe not (always) in a physical sense, but as a linguist you have the opportunity of travelling around the world through different languages. Originally, I wanted to study the behavior of animals, but studying the structure of languages, trying to understand the principles behind such structures, can be equally fascinating. My parents wanted me to be a doctor. Well, I do not cure sick people but still I have something to do with ‟patients” and medical equipment while conducting psycholinguistic experiments.

But let me go first a few (actually much more than ‟a few” ☺) years back and tell you how all this started.

I think my interest in linguistics originated as early as primary school. While all other pupils hated grammar lessons, I loved them. It was a great fun for me to analyze structures of sentences, determine the grammatical properties of words and their grammatical functions in the sentence. Later I started learning foreign languages (Russian and German), and – while I am absolutely not a talented foreign language learner – I have been fascinated by the clarity of grammar rules governing linguistic structures ever since. Being the finalist of a German language competition (olympiad), I had an opportunity to study abroad, concretely at the Humboldt University of Berlin. There, my interest in linguistics gradually grew even more. (To be honest, I also studied economics, I also did some law at the Free University of Berlin, but these subjects, while surely being interesting and useful, could not diminish my bigger interests in language and scientific work.) My first teachers at the Humboldt University (Prof. Manfred Bierwisch, Prof. Ewald Lang, Prof. Norbert Fries, Prof. Karin Donhauser) showed me how diverse the study of language can be: from lexical and compositional semantics, through syntactic structures to language change. During various linguistic summer schools I’ve got more of that. The young teachers there (Daniel Büring, Christopher Wilder, Christopher Piñón, Lea Nash, Marcel den Dikken, Maaike Schoorlemmer, Tracy A. Hall, David Adger, to mention a few) fascinated me with their cool ideas and their vast knowledge, but what fascinated me even more was generative grammar, a framework with clear predictions which can be corroborated or falsified. I think around that time I started to think or even to wish to become one day one of these scholars. And indeed my wish came true. Of course not immediately ☺, but a Master’s thesis, a Ph.D. thesis and a Habilitation thesis later, here I am: a linguist. As Prof. Gisbert Fanselow, my boss at the University of Potsdam, once said about me, I have always started my research (be it for the MA thesis, the PhD or the Habilitation theses) with a small set of empirical data, questioned the assumptions made for them, by providing evidence or counterevidence from all possible angles (also including language acquisition, diachrony, typology etc.), then formulating a new view and integrating new findings into a consistent theoretical picture. This is what I love most: deriving far-reaching theoretical insights about the structure of grammar from the analysis of a well-defined, small empirical domain. By doing this, I feel like a detective and nobody would say that detective work is not interesting. ☺

My primary linguistic interest was and still is syntax, minimalist theory, semantics, and syntax-semantics interface. By and by this interest has broadened to include typology, psycholinguistics, language teaching, and sociolinguistics as well. My work in various projects at the University of Potsdam and also at the Centre for General Linguistics (ZAS) in Berlin has certainly contributed to that. The projects I was involved in were diverse and ranged from, for example, developing the annotation scheme for the morphological and syntactic aspects of the corpora of the Collaborative Research Centre 632 in Potsdam through working on a book about different languages spoken in Germany’s schools as a help for teachers who have pupils in their classrooms with native languages other than German (a ZAS project under the leadership of Prof. Manfred Krifka) to studying the relationship between national identity and bilingualism (a joint project with Dr Marzena Żygis from ZAS).

Where I am now? Since 2008 I have been an Associate Professor at the University of Wrocław in Poland, a place with a good generative grammar tradition (initiated among others by Prof. Bożena Rozwadowska). There I am Head of the Center for Experimental Research on Natural Language, supervising and coordinating various psycholinguistics projects. With the support of the Foundation for Polish Science (FNP) and the National Science Centre, Poland (NCN) it was possible to obtain additional grants for setting up a neurolinguistic laboratory with the EEG equipment and an eyetracking laboratory. In addition, I managed to establish a publishing house The Center for General and Comparative Linguistics, officially accepted by the National Library of Poland, which publishes a linguistic (book) series Generative Linguistics in Wrocław (GLiW) and, in cooperation with De Gruyter Open, an online, open-access, peer-reviewed journal Questions and Answers in Linguistics (QAL). These publications offer a forum for linguistic discussions on various topics, and more importantly, they give especially young researchers the opportunity to present their work. And thanks to the Linguist List, more and more people know about us. Also thanks to the Linguist List, more and more interested students contact us as they want to apply for our new Master Programme in Linguistics (ETHEL – Empirical and Theoretical Linguistics), a programme, as the name suggests, which combines theoretical linguistics with empirical issues, giving the students the opportunity to study, next to theoretical syntax, semantics, etc. also statistics, corpus linguistics, psycho- and neurolinguistics, and to conduct their own experiments. Needless to say, our laboratories and the publishing house offer another possibility of practical training.

My colleagues, dr Dorota Klimek-Jankowska, dr Barbara Tomaszewicz, dr Anna Czypionka and Piotr Gulgowski (PhD student) and I currently work on decomposition of linguistic categories in the brain, nominalizations, eventualities (FNP project), number and quantification in natural language (NCN project). We cooperate with researchers from Germany (Konstanz University, Heidelberg University and the Humboldt University of Berlin), and invite scholars from various places of the world: from neighboring countries (Germany and the Czech Republic), through other European countries (the Netherlands, Spain, France, Italy, UK, etc.) to Northern America (Canada and USA). Here once again it becomes apparent that also as a linguist you are a world traveller: you are travelling to the world (by going to conferences or workshops) but the world is also coming to you (as participants in conferences organized by you, as guest researchers working with you on joint projects, etc.). And – needless to say – nothing of this would be possible without the help of the Linguist List. A big ‘Thank you’ to all the people engaged in the Linguist List, for your great and extremely helpful work!

Please support the LINGUIST List student editors and operations with a donation during the 2016 Fund Drive! The LINGUIST List needs your support!

Dear LINGUIST List Colleagues,

Today we are rolling out another bundle of books and journal subscription prizes for this weekend, one of which you can win if you donate to the LINGUIST List Fund Drive before Monday, May 9, before 5 pm.

***

From Bloomsbury Publishing: TWO copies of Contrastive Linguistics by Pan Wenguo and Tham Wai Mun (http://goo.gl/ft0t0I)

From Brill: TWO one-year subscriptions to their journal Language Dynamics and Change (http://goo.gl/kUwKXo)

From Cambridge University Press: TWO one-year online-only subscriptions to the journal of English Language and Linguistics (http://goo.gl/GNHMwk)

From De Gruyter Mouton: One one-year online-subscription for the journal Global Chinese (http://goo.gl/RoNmiP)

From Springer: Reading, Writing, Mathematics and the Developing Brain: Listening to Many Voices edited by Z. Breznitz, O. Rubinsten, V.J Molfese and D.L. Molfese (http://goo.gl/VR0U2Q)

***

Again, to win any of these fantastic prizes from this coming week’s prize bundle, you can donate to enter your name into the drawing, until Monday May 9th, at 5 PM EST. For every $10 you donate, your name will be entered into the lottery to win. Donate by the link below:

http://goo.gl/e656LG

In addition to the one-time donations to our Fund Drive, you can also become a recurring donor and support LINGUIST List on a long-term basis. Find out how by following this link:

http://goo.gl/Q27jls

And as always, if you cannot donate monetarily, you can help us out in other ways, such as liking, sharing, and retweeting our Fund Drive posts on social media. If you like the LINGUIST List and have benefited from our free service, tell your friends about the LINGUIST List and our Fund Drive. Every little bit of support is appreciated!

There will be many more great prizes from our supporting publishers in the coming month, so stay tuned to our social media pages to hear about more prizes that you can win. Thanks and good luck!

Linguistically yours,
The LINGUIST List Crew

Featured Linguist: Milan Mihaljević

My decision to become a linguist owes much to happenstance. At eighteen I was, like many teenagers, in the metaphysical phase, searching for the meaning of life. Although I was offered a very good scholarship for business studies, I decided to study philosophy. At the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science of the University of Zagreb we had to combine two programs. The major subject (A) lasted four, and the minor (B) lasted three years. Naturally, I chose Philosophy as my A subject. My first choice for the B program was English, but the problem was that I had learned English only for a short period of time and my command of the language was not good enough to pass the entrance test. Therefore, I had to choose something else. I can’t explain why I chose General Linguistics, since until then I didn’t know that such a program existed. However, after few months I discovered that Philosophy was not as interesting as I had expected and that Linguistics was far more exciting. I decided, and with the support of Radoslav Katičić, who was the chair of linguistic department at the time and later the supervisor of my PhD thesis, succeeded to change Linguistics into my major subject. As a third-year student I discovered Generative Grammar. The topic of my MA thesis was the relations between syntax and semantics in Chomsky’s theory.

After graduation 1978, I got a job in the Old Church Slavonic Institute in Zagreb in which I have stayed until now. It is interesting that, even two weeks before I started working there, I didn’t know that such an institute existed. This is a philological institute devoted to the research of medieval Croatian texts written in the Glagolitic script. As I started working there, I had to find a “common denominator” between my general linguistic education and the needs of my new job. I started to apply generative theory to the old texts written in Croatian Church Slavonic, a language which was used only as a literary language (mostly in liturgy) and never had native speakers. The topic of my PhD thesis was generative phonology of Croatian Church Slavonic. In order to work successfully in such an institution, I had to acquire different philological skills. For example, when a new Glagolitic text is found, I have to determine when and where it was written, and whether it was translated from the Greek or Latin protograph. In order to do that, it is not enough to describe its language. You also need some knowledge of codicology, palaeography, history, etc. In this way, I soon became an unusual combination of a modern, generative linguist and a traditional philologist. They have lived peacefully side by side in my head for many years, and I like both of them equally.

Very important for my professional carrier was a postdoc year (1985-1986) which, thanks to the Herder scholarship provided by the FSV foundation from Hamburg, I spent in the Institut für Slawistik at the University of Vienna. Working with professors František Václav Mareš and Radoslav Katičić, as well as with colleagues Johannes Michael Reinhart and Georg Holzer, I have learned a lot about Slavistics, especially about Old Church Slavonic and Slavic comparative grammar.

In addition to the engagement in the Old Church Slavonic Institute, I have also taught different subjects (Old Church Slavonic language, Slavic comparative grammar, Generative syntax and phonology) at most Croatian universities (Zagreb, Split, Pula, Rijeka, Osijek, Zadar) to undergraduate and graduate students of Croatian language and General Linguistics. Although I studied Linguistics by chance, I was fortunate in my irrational decision, and after more than forty years I wouldn’t change it for anything else.

Please support the LINGUIST List student editors and operations with a donation during the 2016 Fund Drive! The LINGUIST List needs your support!

Dear LINGUIST List Colleagues,

Today we are rolling out another bundle of books and journal subscription prizes for this weekend, one of which you can win if you donate to the LINGUIST List Fund Drive before Friday, May 13, before 5 pm.

***

From Bloomsbury Publishing: THREE copies of The Bloomsbury Companion To Historical Linguistics edited by Silvia Luraghi and Vit Bubenik (http://goo.gl/ObUXv2)

From Cambridge University Press: TWO one-year online-only subscriptions to Journal of Linguistics (http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=LIN)

From De Gruyter Mouton: 30% discount code on all of the linguistics books on their website (https://www.degruyter.com/browse?t1=LS)

From Elsevier: ONE personal one-year electronic subscription to an Elsevier linguistics journal of the winner’s choice (see the complete list of their linguistic journals here: https://goo.gl/NaswSa)
***

Again, to win any of these fantastic prizes from this coming week’s prize bundle, you can donate to enter your name into the drawing, until Friday May 13th, at 5 PM EST. For every $10 you donate, your name will be entered into the lottery to win. Donate by the link below:

http://goo.gl/e656LG

In addition to the one-time donations to our Fund Drive, you can also become a recurring donor and support LINGUIST List on a long-term basis. Find out how by following this link:

http://goo.gl/Q27jls

And as always, if you cannot donate monetarily, you can help us out in other ways, such as liking, sharing, and retweeting our Fund Drive posts on social media. If you like the LINGUIST List and have benefited from our free service, tell your friends about the LINGUIST List and our Fund Drive. Every little bit of support is appreciated!

There will be many more great prizes from our supporting publishers in the coming month, so stay tuned to our social media pages to hear about more prizes that you can win. Thanks and good luck!

Linguistically yours,
The LINGUIST List Crew

This summer, we are excited to welcome to the team 9 interns and volunteers! They are working on various projects such as Geoling and LL-Map, and they are also contributing to research on endangered languages by creating corpora for languages of around the world. If you are interested in becoming an intern, our application cycle will open again next spring. In the mean time, there are other ways to get involved here at LINGUIST List. Just contact us for more information.

Meet the 2016 LINGUIST List interns and volunteers:

So Eun Ahn

So Eun joined the Linguist List as an intern during the summer of 2016. She is from Seoul, South Korea and currently studies German and Spanish at Vanderbilt University. Her work at the Linguist List includes creating speech corpus for Korean. She intends to pursue a Ph. D in linguistics upon completion of her undergraduate degree. She is particularly interested in studying and documenting endangered languages and hopes to apply her training experience to possibly annotating K’iche’, which she has studied this past year. In her free time, So Eun loves to read, write, and listen to good music.

Jacob Heredos

Jacob is working at LINGUIST List as an intern for the summer of 2016, contributing to the LL-Map project. In May Jacob completed a B.A. with a triple major in Anthropology, International Studies, and Spanish and a minor in Linguistics at IU Bloomington, and eventually plans to pursue graduate studies in Linguistics. He has always had an interest in languages and linguistics, especially phonetics, historical linguistics, and the indigenous languages of the Americas. In his free time Jacob also enjoys running, reading, and cooking.

Clare Harshey

Clare is a summer intern at Linguist List, where she works on the GORILLA project, specifically developing the Yiddish Speech Corpus. She studied linguistics and computer science as an undergraduate at the University of Kentucky, and is starting Indiana’s MS in Computational Linguistics this fall. Clare has taken courses in modern and classical Germanic, Celtic, Indic and Romance languages, and is especially interested in the study and preservation of under-resourced languages, endangered languages, and heritage languages.

Lewis Dunham

Lewis is working as an intern at Linguist List for the summer of 2016. He is from St. Louis, MO and in the fall will return to Truman State University in northeastern Missouri to begin his third year pursuing a BS in Linguistics with minors in Sociology and Folklore. He hopes to continue his linguistic studies in graduate school as well. So far Lewis has been assisting with developing the GeoLing project. His research interests include French, Arabic, internet linguistics, creative word-formation processes, and constructed languages (of which he has created one and has a second planned). He also enjoys hiking, cooking, and social activism.

Noah Kaufman
This is Noah Kaufman. He graduated with a BA in Linguistics from McGill University and is now at IU for an M.S. in Computational Linguistics. He became interested in language because of how cool he thought it was that people could secretly talk to each other in a foreign language without others understanding them. This got him interested in language learning and later linguistics. Within linguistics, Noah mostly like sociolinguistics and how discourse constructs our biased mental models of the world which contribute to our judgements and power. At Linguist List I will be working on web development for the new website as well as Gorilla and Geoling.

Hai Hu

Hai comes from Chengdu, China and has just finished his first year of the PhD program in Computational Linguistics at Indiana University. His interests are corpus linguistics, syntactic theories (generative and computational) and documenting Chinese dialects. He is working on the LFG project at Linguist List this summer.

Simon Pierre Munyaneza

Simon Pierre Munyaneza is a summer intern for Linguist List. He is now working on Kinyarwanda speech corpus. He is currently a Doctoral student in Literacy Culture and Language Education – Indiana University Bloomington with a Minor in African Studies. His area of interest is mostly social linguistics and literacy. He speaks two European languages (French and English) and four African Languages Kinyarwanda, Kiswahili, Lingala and Orunyankole­Rukiga and has been a languages teacher in Rwanda since 1999. He thinks that working at Linguist List, through Information Technology, will help him to save and revive numerous endangered African languages.

Julian Dietrich

Julian will be interning at the Linguist list during the summer of 2016 until August, when he will start studying computational linguistics at Indiana University. Born in Germany, he moved to the United States at the age of 7, and was raised bilingual. His father is a professor for German linguistics, from whom his interest in the field developed. Julian’s hobbies include reading, traveling, and hiking.

William Shankman
Will is a summer intern for the Linguist List. He is a senior at IU planning to graduate with a major in Linguistics and a minor in Folklore/Ethnomusicology. He has studied Spanish, Chinese and Italian. He plans to get a graduate degree in Linguistics and one day perform ethnographic and linguistic research on cultures with endangered languages.

Qiaochu “Chloe” Chen
Chloe is a rising Junior at Tulane University in New Orleans, LA. She majors in Linguistics and Computer Science, and minors in Art History and Psychology. As a summer intern here, she’s currently working on the MultiTree project. She is a native speaker of Mandarin Chinese and the Wu dialect spoken in the Yangtze River Delta. She has studied French and is about to start learning Arabic. She hopes to get a graduate degree in Computational Linguistics, and go on to use creative technology to solve problems in language documentation and conservation. Her interests in linguistics include bilingualism, dialectology, and linguistic relativity. In her free time, she enjoys traveling and visiting museums.

Dear Readers,

With the waning of the hot season here in Indiana, and the wrapping up of some of the summer projects at LINGUIST List (you’ll get to read more exciting news about this soon!), and after having said good bye to our deeply missed predecessors, it is time to start a new semester with a new LINGUIST List crew!

You have already encountered most of us, and we’ve actually already been working here for some time, but here is the official introduction of us new GAs at LINGUIST List. Glad to meet you all!

Yue Chen

Yue is a new graduate assistant at the LINGUIST List. She comes from Chengdu, China. She is currently a second year M.A./Ph.D. student in Computational Linguistics here at Indiana University. Her academic interests are natural language processing, machine learning and recently, parsing. In daily life, she enjoys cooking, baking, hiking, crocheting and reading.

Kenneth Steimel

Kenneth Steimel is a student editor at LINGUIST List. St. Louis and Columbia Missouri were his home before moving to Bloomington. He works primarily with conferences and calls for papers at LINGUIST List. However, he also edits ask-a-linguist, summaries, FAQ, queries and discussions. His research, outside of LINGUIST List, is concerned with documenting African languages. He is specifically interested in developing computational tools and corpora for the languages he studies. In his free time, he also enjoys roasting coffee, geeking out over cars and backpacking.

Michael Czerniakowsky

Mike is a student editor here at LINGUIST List, where he works primarily on Books and Publications, while pursuing his MS in Computational Linguistics at Indiana University. In his free time he enjoys reading, crossword puzzles, and trivia nights.

Amanda Foster

Amanda started working at LINGUIST List in October 2015. She is now the Jobs and Supports Editor, as well as the editor for Journal related posts, Software announcements, and Programs and Institutions. She is originally from a small town in Northern France, but has also spent some time in Paris and in Ireland before coming to IU to pursue an MA in General Linguistics. She is passionate about the study and documentation of under-resourced and endangered languages. When she is not entertaining herself with language puzzles, she loves reading, hiking, and discovering the nature and culture around Bloomington!

Clare Harshey

Clare feels lucky to have been a summer intern for the LINGUIST List this year, and even luckier to be able to work here for the school year as well! This summer, she focused on the Yiddish Speech Corpus, part of the GORILLA project. She’s continuing work on the corpus this fall; she’s also in training as an editor for the Reviews, Books, Jobs and Support sections of the LINGUIST List. She is at IU to pursue her MS in Computational Linguistics, and is grateful for the opportunity to do work that builds on her education and her passion for this field. Outside of linguistics, she enjoys music, reading and exploring Bloomington with her dog.

We are excited to have a role to play in connecting the Linguistics community around the world. We’ll be in touch soon (and now, you can even associate a face to these editing emails you receive!)

Linguistically,

The LINGUIST List Editors

The Fall breeze brought the beginning of a new semester along with it, and a new season for our team of highly motivated Summer Interns at LINGUIST List, who (for the most part) just left us for the continuation of their linguistics endeavors. We are very grateful for their hard work and the priceless contribution they brought to multiple LINGUIST List projects, including GORILLA, MultiTree, LL-Map and GeoLing! These projects have all been started some time ago, and they were brought much closer to completion this summer. We are now very excited to let them tell you what they did over the last few months.

1) GORILLA

GORILLA is an exciting project currently being built. The goal of this project is to create a unified source of annotated corpora for languages around the world, with an emphasis on endangered and under-resourced languages. So Eun, Julian, Simon-Pierre, Clare and Will hugely contributed to this project by working on some novel speech corpora for Korean, German, and Kinyarwanda, and by revamping and annotating the AHEYM speech corpus for Yiddish.

Clare

“This summer, I helped to develop the Yiddish Speech Corpus: I transcribed, transliterated, and annotated Yiddish speech and developed corpus metadata. I coordinated with Will and So Eun, and together we annotated over 5 hours of media for the corpus, including interviews, poetry and audio books.”

So Eun

“Over the course of the Linguist List internship, I have worked on collecting and producing speech corpora on the Yiddish and Korean languages. For the Korean corpus, I gathered texts in Korean from non-copy right restricted online sources, made recordings of said texts, and annotated each recording using ELAN. As to the Yiddish corpus, I helped with annotating the Yiddish recordings available at Indiana University’s Archives of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memories (AHEYM) by segmenting audio files as well as converting and copying Yiddish (orthographic and YIVO/romanized) transcriptions onto the ELAN annotations.”

Julian

“While interning at LINGUIST List this summer, I was involved in one main project, and several smaller ones as well. I was told about the speech corpus I would be working on, and shown how to use the program necessary for it. I started off making audio recordings, and then transcribing them to text using ELAN. This took up the majority of my time interning here, but was very useful. After I had completed the transcriptions, I was given some smaller tasks, such as improving LINGUIST List’s website by cleaning up old links. I feel that my time interning here was useful and well spent, and has helped expand my skill set”

2) GeoLing, LL-Map and MultiTree

These three projects are some valuable tools that have been in the makings for quite some time, here at LINGUIST List. Thanks to some of our 2016 interns, these tools are now improved!

MultiTree is a digital library of scholarly hypotheses about language relationships and subgroupings, organized in a searchable database with a fancy web interface. Noah, Chloe and Arjuna spent the summer working on the structure of this useful webinterface, providing you with the new and improved MultiTree!

MultiTree interact with the LL-MAP Project, a geolinguistic database which provides users with a fully functional Geographical Information System (GIS) through which linguistic data – including subgrouping information – can be viewed in its geographical context. Jacob lead this project, assisted by Chloe.

Geoling is also an interactive map service, but with a different goal. It displays linguistics information around the world on a map: jobs, conferences, internships, and for the first time on LINGUIST List: local events. Lewis spent much time and effort reorganizing the data for this project, and with the help of Noah and Arjuna they were able to implement it to the website!

Jacob

“I have spent the summer working on the LL-MAP project, which had been offline for several years. I began by identifying and correcting issues with the geometry and attribute data of the maps in our PostGIS database and KML files to allow them to display properly in viewers like QGIS, Google Earth, and OpenLayers. I also corrected the styles corresponding to the maps, according to recommendations by Jacob Henry, in order to show the colors, labels, and other visual aspects as they appear in the original source. Once the maps had been uploaded into Geoserver, I went through them to identify specific problems and fixed display issues with several dozen maps. Finally, I contributed along with several other interns to the new LL-MAP viewer. I would like to thank Lwin Moe and Damir Cavar for their help at every step of the process, and Damir and Malgosia Cavar for the opportunity to take part in this project.”

Chloe

“As a summer intern at the Linguist List, I worked on improving the MultiTree and LL-MAP sites. Before I started, I had played around with the old and new MultiTree but didn’t know how the trees were generated. With some training in Django and D3 data visualizations, I was able to get behind the scenes of MultiTree and start exploring different tree views using the data from the Linguist List. Because of the variety of visualization options, I learned to put myself in the user’s shoes and to decide what features to prioritize in order for the site to be more helpful to the linguist community.

After MultiTree, I helped with the LL-MAP team on their project. Working on the new LL-MAP was a dynamic process because we constantly adjusted our tasks based on user feedback. The result that came out was an elegant viewer page that provides as much information as possible in a simple and organized way.

One thing I learned from my internship experience is the difference between a classroom assignment and a real project. For both MultiTree and LL-MAP, we had a lot of freedom deciding what to work on as a team as opposed to being assigned specific tasks, with the goal to make the site more informative and easier to use. I’m glad to have gained the experience of collaborating with teammates, and learning to solve issues creatively and efficiently.”

We sincerely enjoyed having these burgeoning linguists join our team, and we even have the pleasure of having Jacob and Clare stay on at LINGUIST List after the end of their internship! Thanks to the devoted work of the 2016 LINGUIST List summer interns, some novel and valuable language resources have now been created: their contribution goes beyond the limits of LINGUIST List, and is truly a contribution to the Linguistics community around the world. We now invite you all to enjoy these new tools that have been developed over the years by many different hands, and most recently by the LINGUIST List 2016 Interns crew!

Prof. Baris Kabak, a colleague from Germany, was visiting LINGUIST List!

“I am currently visiting Indiana University from Würzburg, Germany, where I am a professor of English Linguistics at the Department of British and American Studies. I came to Indiana to give a plenary talk at the 2nd Conference on Central Asian Languages and Linguistics, which was organized by CeLCAR at the School of Global and International Studies. The conference brought together researchers specializing in the languages of the region with the theme “Continuing the Journey: Strengthening the Central Asian Community”. So far, being in Bloomington has given me not only the opportunity to strengthen my ties with scholars working on different languages such as Persian, Uyghur and Armenian, but also the privilege to talk to some faculty members at the Department of Second Language Studies at Indiana University since I have been able to combine the conference trip with a short stay in Bloomington as part of my sabbatical leave.  It was also great to see that the LINGUIST List is not just a list in the digital world, but a real home at the heart of beautiful Bloomington that provides a roof over many dedicated linguists who are doing invaluable service to the field of linguistics.”

http://linguistlist.org/callconf/browse-conf-action.cfm?ConfID=245656

Hey everyone,

This is Ken at the LINGUIST List. I just wanted to let all of you know that we will be at the Linguistic Society of America conference in Austin, Texas in January (http://www.linguisticsociety.org/event/lsa-2017-annual-meeting).

We will have a booth with the other organizations at the conference. We look forward to talking to you about the projects housed here at the LINGUIST List (Multitree, LL Map, Geoling, GORILLA and more). We are also open to discussing our posting areas and the website.

Come, visit, and get to know the people behind the LINGUIST List!

Hey everyone!

This is Ken again. I just wanted to wish everyone Happy Holidays. We will be closing on Saturday for the holiday season. We reopen on the 2nd. This simply means that new submissions that come in during this time will not be posted/reviewed.

Emergency submissions can be sent in with ‘URGENT’ in the subject line. However, we will charge double for ‘URGENT’ postings.

We wish you an enjoyable holiday season and a happy new year! We truly appreciate your continued support of LINGUIST List. We couldn’t do this without you.

P.S. We had a white elephant gift exchange at the LINGUIST List Holiday party. High quality gifts were exchanged.

(Clare got a 24k dial up modem)

Some of the gifts rocked!

(literally a rock)

The LINGUIST List has added a new service to its set of web applications: GeoLing

GeoLing allows you to submit announcements of local linguistic events. See for details the HOWTO page of GeoLing.

It also allows you to view all active conference, job, and summer school announcements that are submitted to LINGUIST List on a global map.

In addition to these exciting new functionalities, GeoLing also displays on a global map all linguistic institutions, programs, organizations, even office addresses that were submitted to LINGUIST List.

GeoLing can link to your institutional online calendar and read all local events from it automatically so that you do not have to update the events on GeoLing manually. GeoLing also understands emails with attached addresses in the vCards format, iCalendar or vCal event data submitted to it via email from your favorite contact management software or app, or your PIM or organizer. You will find more details on the HOWTO pages of GeoLing.

LINGUIST List can host online calendars for your institution and link them to GeoLing. Please let us know, if you are interested in this service.

The interface will allow you in the next version to display selected events. For example, you should be able to display all events that are related to “Optimality Theory”, or to “Syntax” of “Slavic languages”. You should be able to find all “theoretical syntax” jobs, or jobs related to “Natural Language Processing”, “Speech Recognition”, “Pragmatics”, “Translation”. There is a limited search facility implemented already. We are working on more improvements.
The displayed information about the events will allow you soon to “add the event to my calendar” or “add the address to my address book” on mobile devices like tablets or smart phones. We are working on that.

We hope you like this new service.

Your LINGUIST List Team

Dear linguists,

Alexa (Amazon Echo) just got a new Flash Briefing channel. You can add The LINGUIST List Flash Briefing with your Alexa app to your Amazon Echo (Dot) or Tap. The new settings will allow you to select most recent postings or the newest postings in any of the LINGUIST areas (e.g. Books, Calls, Conferences, Disc, Diss, FYI, Internships, Jobs, Media, Qs, Reviews, Software, Summer schools, Sums, Support, TOC).

Once you added The LINGUIST List Flash Briefing to your Echo, you can activate the LINGUIST List postings with “What’s new?” or other commands.

We will add more functionalities to Alexa and extend these functionalities to Cortana and Google Home/Assistant.

Have fun with that!

Your LINGUIST List Team

The LINGUIST List team at the booth at LSA Annual Meeting in Austin, demonstrating GeoLing, Alexa’s Flash Briefing LINGUIST List module, and many other new projects…

This is probably the first time that LINGUIST List posts have been edited and approved on the highway while driving from Bloomington, IN, to Austin, TX.

At the conference:

Thierry Declerck

We were happy to have Thierry Declerck from the DFKI here in Bloomington over the last weeks. He writes:

“I have been visiting the Indiana University on the occasion of a workshop on Corpora in the Digital Humanities that I co-organised with Sandra Kübler.  At the same time I was very happy to follow an invitation by Damir Cavar to visit the office of the LINGUIST List and to discuss issues related to the topics of the workshop, especially in the field of low-resourced languages, and how to make resources for such languages available and more visible. Damir made an impressive presentation of the use and adaptation of recent speech technology products (e.g. Amazon Echo/Alexa, Google Home) for accessing information available at the LINGUIST List (including information about conferences, workshops, jobs, or notes on language resources and technologies).

Thanks for hosting me and for the discussions we also had in the days following the workshop and my first visit at the LINGUIST List offices and hoping to continue the exchanges.”

Thierry Declerck

The LINGUIST List invites undergraduate and graduate students as well as particularly motivated senior high school students to the 2017 summer internship program.

Interns at LINGUIST List have the opportunity to participate in the daily operations of the LINGUIST List, including editing submissions to the LINGUIST List and correspondence with linguists.

Apart from that interns will have the opportunity to work under the supervision of local or visiting faculty at The LINGUIST List on concrete research projects related to language and STEM sub-disciplines, language documentation, as well as engineering of software solutions and algorithms, mathematical concepts and methods, and technologies related to speech and language data.

Depending on individual interests or skills interns can get involved in the following LINGUIST List related projects for a certain proportion of their work time:

• GeoLing: A web-application that maps LINGUIST List events, institutions, resources on a GIS system for mobile devices and access
• Voice interface: Development of dialogs and speech interfaces for use with Amazon Echo/Alexa, Google Home, Cortana, etc. to provide LINGUIST List information over these voice systems/interfaces, develop new linguistic “skills” and extend existing ones
• Improvement of the new LINGUIST List website and content, applications like Ask-a-Ling, and new services and applications

Interns will get an opportunity to also work with:

• LL-MAP
• MultiTree
• GORILLA
• General Ontology for Linguistic Description (GOLD) or the Lexical Enhancement via the GOLD Ontology (LEGO)
• The DAPS (Detecting Anomalous Parse Structures) project
• Marathi Phonation-Type Contrast Typology and Resourcing
• Chimpoto corpus analyses and annotation, ELAN format transformation
• Free Linguistic Environment, Grammar Engineering (Morphology, Syntax, Finite State and LFG-based) for Slavic and Asia-Pacific languages

For more information on the specific projects read about them on the specific pages and visit our “Get Involved” site.

All these emails about Conference that you receive everyday in your email box…Do you ever wonder who is the link behind the scenes, between the organisers and the potential participants? Meet our Calls and Confs Editor, Kenneth Steimel! Find out about his hometown over here:

http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/pages/KennethSteimel/

and find out a little bit about himself right here – an insight into a LINGUIST List editor’s life!

Dear LINGUIST List subscribers,

My name is Kenneth Steimel and I am one of the 5 student editors here at the LINGUIST List. I am a PhD student at Indiana University as well. I edit Calls for Papers, Conferences, Media, Software and Ask-a-linguist. Working for the LINGUIST List has allowed me to pursue my graduate studies. I would not be able to afford my degree without the support of this organization. Since subscribers like you support the LINGUIST List, I am very thankful to all of you. 

As we move further into 2017, we need your support again. Without your donations, it becomes hard for us to sustain the services we provide. If you think we provide a meaningful service, please show your appreciation with a contribution. I know everyone here greatly appreciates your donations. Without the support you provide, we would not be able to support graduate assistants like myself who read and edit each post to keep the quality of content high. Truly, thank you. 

Your Call & Conference Editor

Featured Linguist: Fabiola Henri

My identity as a formal creolist has been shaped by interplay between my country of origin and my formative educational background. I am a native speaker of Mauritian, a French-based creole spoken in Mauritius off the coast of Madagascar.

At a young age, I became painfully aware of how prejudices plague Mauritian creole-speakers and, in my particular case, the Creole community. I learned on the playground that speaking patois marks one as uneducated. My formal education was conducted in a colonial language but my family spoke creole at home. Mauritian education is built on the British colonial system but strives to accommodate the linguistic heritage of Mauritians—other than those of African descent. Mauritian creole—natively spoken by more than 95% of the population—only gained ancestral language status in 2011. Before that date, Mauritian pupils of African ancestry before took Chapel and etiquette classes instead of the rigorous courses offered to students from other ethnic backgrounds. And if at higher levels Creole students were authorized to register for Hinduism, they were not allowed into the classroom.

Private tutoring likewise has been institutionalized to the benefit Mauritius’ most privileged citizens. Acquiring a Mauritian education is thus a considerable struggle for Creoles—especially those raised in a single-parent household with only a modest income.  Despite facing some deplorable prejudices regarding Creoles’ intellect, I was fortunate enough along the way to come across many people who believed in my abilities. For instance, my high school French teacher, Mrs. Desha, provided my private tutoring for free.

I was determined to navigate my way successfully through these ingrained prejudices in the Mauritian educational system. I graduated high school with arts and languages A-levels—a momentous achievement considering I was the first member from my family to graduate high school. My mother then urged me into full-time work, but I was resolved to attend university. I had accumulated savings doing factory work in the summer since I was 13, and my mother helped as much as she could. I gratefully registered for a French BA at the University of Mauritius in 1997.

Ongoing debate on the status of Mauritian creole and language policy fascinated me. Yet I wanted to contribute in a new way. People routinely insinuated that creoles were broken languages devoid of grammar or complexity. If I emphasized how creoles actually possessed complex systems of grammar, these languages could come to be regarded differently. But the training that I sought was not available in Mauritius.

The University of Paris 3–La Sorbonne Nouvelle accepted me in 1999 to begin an undergraduate degree in Linguistics. Paris proved challenging. I juggled multiple jobs alongside school. By the end of my Maîtrise, I was ready to return home when I was awarded a scholarship from the French Government. This began another exciting chapter of my academic journey. I had time to attend seminars and even attended classes at other Parisian universities. My Master’s research focused on the Mauritian Noun Phrase with a formal and computationally efficient description in HPSG.

After graduating in 2004, I went back home to teach in an underprivileged Mauritian high school. Creole-speakers were continually penalized in an education system still so foreign to them. One pupil complained to me about conducting lessons in English, “If you had been on TV, I would have switched channels.” Already struggling students gained little knowledge from being instructed in a foreign language and subsequently found classes boring. Alongside local creolists, I participated in rallies asserting the sophistication of Mauritian creole grammar, urging for its formal introduction into the education system.

The French government again granted me funding for pursuing a PhD in Linguistics. I registered at the University of Paris 7 to work with an outstanding syntactician, Anne Abeillé. Graduate work allowed me to present my research internationally and network with renowned linguists in both creolistics and theoretical linguistics. One of my academic life’s most memorable and inspiring moments happened at the HPSG 2008 Conference in Kyoto. Ivan Sag talked with me over coffee about my work and the possibility of my moving to Stanford University. This was the first of many wonderful opportunities.

I completed my PhD in 2010 with a dissertation on verb form alternation in Mauritian. My research adopts a generalist perspective on creolization, according to which creoles emerge from a combination of factors including natural language change, language contact, input from the lexifier (e.g. forms, frequency, collocations), substratic influence, cognitive processes (e.g. untutored SLA, regularization, grammaticalization), among other factors. This work provides a unique view of creole morphology, one which challenged the simplificational model of creolization. Building on my Mauritian findings, I extended my research to include other French-based creoles as well as Portuguese-based creoles.

After postdoc and adjunct positions at Paris 7, Paris 3 and Lille 3, I accepted another postdoc at the University of Kentucky to work with Gregory Stump, an eminent morphologist, before being promoted to Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department. My associations with international scholars have led to formal collaborations in international research groups like the SEEPiCLa (Structure and Emergence of Pidgins and Creole Languages). I also collaborate with scholars in Mauritius to prepare creole pedagogical materials for Mauritian primary schools.

My academic career devoted to exploring the formal complexity of creoles has taken me across the globe and has established me as a major figure in contemporary creole studies—quite the far cry from that little Mauritian girl dreaming of improving life through education.

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Please support the LINGUIST List student editors and operations with a donation during the 2017 Fund Drive! The LINGUIST List needs your support!

Hey everyone!

I’m sure you’re aware about our job postings section. It’s one of our most popular areas of the listserv. The LINGUIST List has a large number of job postings relevant to our field. In 2016, there were approximately 700 job issues alone. Amanda and Clare work hard to make sure that jobs are posted promptly.

Jobs are one source of income for the LINGUIST List. However, the money we make from jobs is not sufficient to pay for the other services we offer. You can help us out by making a donation at funddrive.linguistlist.org.

Here is a chloropleth map I made in R that shows the percentage of LINGUIST List job posts by country scaled by population. If you click on a country, you should get some information about how many jobs we have received from that country.

Full Map

This data only contains job submissions before January 2016. We’ve only continued to grow since then!

Did you know that the LINGUIST List Jobs editor is French? Meet Amanda Foster, featured staff member of the week! Amanda edits Jobs and Student Support announcements (http://linguistlist.org/jobs/), as well as Table of Contents and Journal Calls for Papers from our Linguistic journals database, and she helps maintain the Publishers and Journals database (http://linguistlist.org/pubs/). She also edits any French submission that come our way You can read where Amanda is from here: http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/pages/AmandaFoster/

And read a message from her right here – an insight into what it’s like working at the LINGUIST List! Consider supporting this Graduate Assistant by donating to the LINGUIST List: http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/

Dear Subscribers and Followers,

Bonjour! My name is Amanda, I’m in the 2nd year (in the final stretch!) of my MA in Linguistics at Indiana University. I started at the LINGUIST List in Fall 2015, at that time I was paid hourly, but thanks to your donations last year, LINGUIST List was able to hire me as a Graduate Assistant here in Fall 2016! I am writing to you to show you how much impact LINGUIST List has already had on my own life, so that you may see how far even the small donations you make can go.

First of all, I would like to express my deep gratitude to those of you who donated last year. When I started the program in Fall 2015, I was not financially sure that I would be able to continue past my first year into the program, in order to graduate. The fact that LINGUIST List was able to hire four GAs instead of 2 is a direct consequence of your donations.

Let me tell you how I got acquainted with LINGUIST List for the very first time, as an Undergraduate student back home. I am originally from France (right here: http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/pages/AmandaFoster/), and at the time I was looking for a university program that could match my interest. That’s how I found Indiana University, from the student portal: http://linguistlist.org/studentportal/. LINGUIST List also helped me find my
very first Internship  through the Student portal, and today as I prepare to begin my professional career, I am so thankful for the Jobs and Student Support pages of the website! (http://linguistlist.org/jobs/)

Being an editor at LINGUIST List benefits me more than financially. Every day, as I edit your submissions, I am able to gain a closer understanding of the field of Linguistics.

But my favorite part about working at the LINGUIST List is that it provides a connection between linguists from around the globe, and working here enables me to be part of this community. This is such an incredible opportunity: as we all strive towards the common goal of reaching a better understanding of our world and the people who inhabit it, we are actually able to connect with each other at more than a theorical level. By donating, you enable us to provide the means to support this worldwide community.

Your donation, however small or large, has the potential to affect so many lives: those of researchers around the world who use LINGUIST List, perhaps your own research, and certainly my own life.

So, thank you for your ongoing, vital support. Please consider donating today: http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Sincerely,
Amanda