The Oxford Dictionary of African American English (ODAAE): Why We Need an Oxford Dictionary of African American Language
Sonja Lanehart, University of Arizona
June 19th, 5:00pm-6.30pm
Location: Mahar Auditorium
Reception to follow: Bromery Lobby MAP
There have been several dictionaries that tackled different aspects of language use in African American communities. Dr. Emerita Geneva Smitherman’s Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner is the one I am most fond of, but there are several others. However, none has been anything like the new ODAAE Project spearheaded with Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The ODAAE Advisory Board is comprised of several scholars in various fields related to language use in African American communities. The combined resources of the OED and the grants supporting it, as well as Harvard University’s famed Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, make this project not only special but a watershed mark in the research and scholarship on language use in African American communities. To illuminate this project and my perspective, I will discuss who is involved, what this is, where we are, how we got here, when to expect it, and why it is important to linguistics, research, and society.
Allison Burkette, The University of Kentucky
American Dialect Society Professor
June 23rd, 5:00pm-6.30pm
Location: Mahar Auditorium
Reception to follow: Bromery Lobby MAP
Universal multilingualism: Why we are born to code-mix
Enoch Aboh, The University of Amsterdam
Edward Sapir Professor
June 26th, 5:00pm-6:30pm
Location: Mahar Auditorium
Reception to follow: Bromery Lobby MAP
Aditi Lahiri, Oxford University
Hermann & Klara H. Collitz Professor
June 30th, 5:00pm-6:30pm
Location: Mahar Auditorium
Reception to follow: Bromery Lobby MAP
‘Not everything goes’: a familiar phrase, applicable to phonological and morpho-phonological variation, observable in synchronic systems, change and processing. The well-known speaker-listener relationship is fraught with difficulties. The listener has no influence over a speaker’s utterances which could be as variable as they please. Variability occurs on all levels too, segmental as well as tonal. The level of variation is however, constrained, and the ways to deal with it are observable in texts as well as in speech. We attempt to provide a model which tries to account for the ways in which the variability is channelled to make comprehension possible and change accountable. Diachronic evidence as well as support from a series of psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic experiments on Norwegian, Swedish, German, English, and Bengali will be provided.
How different is Salish?
Lisa Matthewson, The University of British Columbia
Ken Hale Professor
July 3rd, 5:00pm-6:30pm
Location: Mahar Auditorium
Reception to follow: Old Chapel MAP
Legend has it that when Ken Hale was asked which languages were the most unlike English, he named Coast Salish. Indeed, there are many striking differences between Salish languages and Standard Average European. Salish languages lack overt tense paradigms; they have evidentials; they lack definite articles; they lack determiner-quantifiers; they allow non-culminating accomplishments; their modals tend to encode flavour but not force. Salish can obviously teach us a lot about how languages can vary, and these very differences also make Salish an ideal place to search for underlying commonalities that might constitute universals. In this talk I will consider what we have learned from the past 30 years of research into Salish semantics. Based on the findings of this research, I will wildly speculate about the big questions: How do languages vary in their semantics? What is universal?
Nitana Greendeer, Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project
July 7th, 5:00-6:30pm
Location: Mahar Auditorium
Reception to follow: Bromery Lobby MAP
Veneeta Dayal, Yale University
Charles Fillmore Professor
July 10th, 5:00pm-6:30pm
Location: Mahar Auditorium
Reception to follow: Bromery Lobby MAP
