PLEASE CIRCULATE (apologies for multiple postings)
We are very pleased to announce that Dr Naomi Nagy (University of Toronto) will be a visiting scholar in the Department of Linguistics at Queen Mary, University of London from 11-25 March 2013. During this time, we will be hosting three events that we hope will be of interest to you (details below). All events are free and open to the public, and take place on our Mile End Campus (see http://www.qmul.ac.uk/about/howtofindus/mileend/index.html for maps and directions).
We look forward to seeing you there!
Linguistics Research Seminar
Naomi Nagy (University of Toronto)
Looking for contact-induced change in Toronto's Heritage Languages
Wednesday 13 March 2013, 4.30-6p
Bancroft Building, room 3.26
All welcome!
Toronto's Heritage Language Variation and Change Project (http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/ngn/HLVC) is a collaboration designed to develop a multilingual corpus to allow inter-generational, cross-linguistic, and diatopic (heritage vs. homeland varieties) comparisons in order to develop generalizations about the types of variable features, structures or rules that are borrowed earlier and more often in contact contexts, using a consistent methodology across studies of different languages and variables. We investigate how social factors (language use, ethnic identity, and linguistic attitudes at the individual level, and demographics at the community level) relate to type and degree of language change by recording sociolinguistic interviews that include an Ethnic Orientation Questionnaire. Multivariate analyses of linguistic variables incorporate these social factors along with relevant linguistic constraints. Divergent findings for the morphosyntactic variable pro-drop (variable null subject presence) and the phonetic variable Voice Onset Time (VOT) underscore the importance of examining multiple variables in multiple languages, and examining multiple facets of multilinguals' performance.
ELAN Training Workshop
led by Naomi Nagy (University of Toronto)
Introducing ELAN to Variationist Sociolinguistics
Friday 15 March 2013, 1-5p
Language Lab 1, Bancroft Building, room 1.37
Space for the workshop is limited. If you are interested in attending, please contact Erez (e.levon@qmul.ac.uk).
ELAN (tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan) has established itself as a valuable tool for language documentation and is frequently used for transcription and multi-tier mark-up illustrating levels of linguistic structure as well as translations and glosses. This workshop explores an extension to ELAN's utility: extracting and coding tokens of linguistic variables for quantitative analysis in the variationist sociolinguistic framework.
Participants will engage in a hands-on demonstration in which they will transcribe, extract, code, and (time-permitting) analyze data from a research project on r-dropping in Boston English.
We will demonstrate benefits of this streamlined approach in which transcription, extraction, coding, and basic analysis are all conducted within one ELAN file:
* seamless connections between recording, transcript, and coding of the dependent variable (response) and independent variables (predictors). This facilitates revision and intercoder reliability tests.
* reuse of contextual factor coding (e.g., style, topic, interlocutor) as well as some structural (morphological, syntactic) tags
* exportability to Excel, R, Rbrul, Goldvarb, SPSS, etc. for multivariate analysis
* importability of (older) transcripts from Word/txt files
* complex searches and concordancing capabilities to speed up token extraction
* archivability of all mark-up related to each data file in a consistent and small-file-size format
Panel Discussion with the Public
Beverly Costa (Mothertongue), Esther de Leeuw (QMUL), Naomi Nagy (University of Toronto), Itesh Sachdev (SOAS) & Devyani Sharma (QMUL)
Multilingual Capital: Launch of a new resource for London communities
Monday 18 March 2013, 6-8p
David Sizer Lecture Theatre
Bancroft Building (ground floor)
All welcome!
London is a multilingual capital. Over 20 per cent of Londoners use a main language other than English, more than anywhere else in the UK. Still, bilinguals face many challenges in using their languages. Our new initiative, Multilingual Capital: A Resource for London Communities, aims to share and develop insights about multilingualism by liaising with community members impacted by multilingualism – from support services, to schools, parents and the general public. We are launching this initiative with a public event, that will include a series of short talks by researchers in the field of multilingualism and plenty of time for a question-answer session. For further details of the event, and to register to attend, please visit: http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/event/5609273488#.
