BABBLE
Newsletter of the University of South Carolina Linguistics Program
Vol 5
2000-2001

Check out our previous issues in Babble Archives

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Word from the Director
Greetings! Actually, belated greetings! So many things have happened in the past year that Babble has slipped through the cracks. Let me review some of what has been happening, before going on to tell you about some other things that are coming up.
Beginning this year, the Linguistics Program has a Graduate Director (separate from its Program Director, me). The appointment of Kurt Goblirsch to the position of Graduate Director is a milestone for the program, and has already had the positive effect of improving the mentoring of our own students and the recruiting of new graduate students. From my own perspective, as Program Director, it has freed me to do a better job of managing the Program's relationship with its cooperating departments and of creating new ventures for the Program's future. Another milestone for our Program, is the University's approval of a new Linguistics Program Charter. This document will serve a model for governing the Program, and will help to insure the Program's stability (by providing ways to guarantee continued participation from cooperating departments and by making sure that the Program's faculty get proper credit for all their efforts on its behalf). Less happy news is that we are losing Laura Ahearn to Rutgers University. We are all very sad to see her leave, but wish her the best in her new position.

As many of you are aware, the University is in the midst of a serious budget crisis, and this has effected some of our initiatives. At the same time, it is fair to say that our Program is on stable ground. I have been reappointed to serve another (three-year) term as Program Director, Kurt Goblirsch will continue as Graduate Director, and we anticipate that Hyeson Park will continue as our SLA specialist for next year. The Program is also considering a proposal which would enhance our connections to Experimental Psychology, by bringing Robin Morris and Matthew Traxler onto the core faculty and expanding our course offerings in the area of Psycholinguistics. We also hope to develop our links with Walt Wolfram and the linguists at North Carolina State University. Finally, we have received a favorable response to our desire to establish an academic exchange with the Department of Language, Linguistics, and Literature at the University of the West Indies - Cave Hill Campus (Barbados).

— Stan Dubinsky

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Welcome New Students
We welcomed 17 new students into our program this year. Their interests are as varied as their backgrounds. Here is a "Who's Who" list of our new program members:
Petia Alexieva, From Bulgaria, Enrolled in MA in Linguistics, Interested in Sociolinguistics and TEFL/TESL.
Thomas Sherwood Barefoot, From USA, Enrolled in Ph.D. in Linguistics, Interested in SLA, Composition / Rhetoric, Literature (prose fiction), jazz, politics, Thai and Indian cuisine, good wine, fine cigars.....
Sean Barnette, From the States, Enrolled in MA (syntax) and TEFL Cert., Interested in syntax, music, theology.
Gail Lynn Clements, From Florida (Jacksonville), Enrolled in Linguistics MA, Interested in sociolinguistics (dialects).
Cheryl Fitzgerald, From the States, Enrolled in M.A. in Linguistics, Interested Historical Linguistics & SLA, tennis, Masters Swimming & Golf.
Johnny Hancock, From USA, Enrolled in TEFL Cert., Interested in psycholinguistics, semantics, pragmatics, non-literal language processing and music & film.
Mary Heinrich, From the United States, Enrolled in the ESL certificate program, Interested in ESL workforce programs/assessments and Business-use English.
Daniel Carter Henderson, From the United States, Enrolled in MA in Linguistics Program, Interested in reading (mostly about history, religion, and foreign languages/cultures) and watch movies.
Sonya Henley, From Saluda, South Carolina, Enrolled in Linguistics MA program, Interested in Sociolinguistics, Syntax, and Computational Linguistics.
Chris Hill, From Toronto, Canada, Enrolled in MA Linguistics, TEFL certificate, Interested in TEFL, SLA, traveling, art, roller hockey.
Adam Shambaugh, From North Carolina, USA, Enrolled in Master of Arts, Linguistics, Interested in Sociolinguistics, Dialectology
German Lopez Hernandez, From Spain, Enrolled in M.A and TEFL, Interested in SLA and TEFL/ESL.
Natalia Ramos-Silva, From Spain, Enrolled in TEFL Certificate, Interested in TEFL and Historical Linguistics.
Adam Shambaugh, From North Carolina, Enrolled in M.A. in Linguistics, Interested in Sociolinguistics.
Butsakorn Yodkamlue, From Thai, Enrolled in Ph.D in linguistics, Interested in Second language acquisition, Applied Linguistics, and Sociolinguistics.
Lan Zhang, From China, Enrolled in Ph.D. program in Linguistics, Interested in SLA and Syntax.

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Colloquium Series
The Colloquium Series of 2000-2001 has been a great success, thanks to Eric Holt's coordination of the talks and our graduate students' efforts in providing colloquia receptions. As the list below shows, this year's colloquia have cover diverse topics of interest presented by our faculty at University of South Carolina and by distinguished guests. Some of the talks have been co-sponsored by the Linguistics Program and other departments. For detailed information about the talks, please refer to the Colloquia webpage (http://www.cla.sc.edu/ling/activities/coll.html). The list of the 2000-2001 colloquia is as follows (all events are sponsored by the Linguistics Program, except as noted):

Carol Myers-Scotton, University of South Carolina, The many implications of looking at morphemes from the standpoint of production.
Stanley Dubinsky, University of South Carolina, Event structure licensing of extractions from NP.
Walt Wolfram, North Carolina State University, Workshop on community-based sociolinguistic studies in the Carolinas. Co-sponsored by the Linguistics Program, the Department of English, and the College of Liberal Arts.
Sarah Blackwell, University of Georgia, Why use a pronoun? Cognitive and pragmatic constraints on the use of overt null subjects in Spanish narratives. Co-sponsored by the Linguistics Program and the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.
Darrell Dernoshek, University of South Carolina, A comparison of a reductive grammar approach with other mainstream methodologies in the teaching of Spanish as a second language. Sponsored the Linguistics Program and the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.
Susan Cook, Yale University, Urban language and language ideology in post-apartheid South Africa. Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology.
Dennis Preston, Michigan State University, The linguistic theories of real people. Sponsored by the Departments of Anthropology, English, and Philosophy, and the Linguistics Program.
Janina Fenigsen, Brandeis University, Old modernities and new: Language, alienation, and postcolonial selves in Barbados. Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology.
Janice Jackson, University of Texas-Austin, Difference versus disorder in African-American English: The role of linguistic theory. Sponsored by the Department of Communication Disorders.
Craig Melchert, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Sociolinguistics in the Hittite Empire: Hittite and Luvian.
Walt Wolfram, North Carolina State University, and Tracey Weldon, University of South Carolina, Dialects: Myths and realities about the way we speak. Sponsored by the Humanities, English, and Developmental Studies Departments of Midlands Technical College, and their Center for Teaching and Learning Enhancement.
Joaquim Camps, University of Florida, Processing form and meaning in the input: Pronominal reference in Spanish as a foreign language. Sponsored by the Linguistics Program and the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.
Joe Opala, James Madison University, The African-Gullah connection. Sponsored by Organization of Africans at USC, Dept. of Anthropology, Linguistics Program, and International Programs for Students.
Elizabeth Joiner, University of South Carolina, The impact of sound stimulation training on foreign language listening comprehension and pronunciation: Some recent findings.
Frederick Newmeyer, University of Washington, Formal linguistics and functional explanation: Bridging the gap.
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Wolfram Workshop
In October 2000, the Linguistics Program, the English Department, and the College of Liberal Arts sponsored a two-day workshop by Professor Walt Wolfram (William C. Friday Distinguished Professor, English Department, North Carolina State University), titled Community-based sociolinguistic studies in the Carolinas. The worskhop was a great success, and attracted participants from within the university community and from afar.
The workshop focused on field-initiated, community-based studies, which offer one of the greatest resources for addressing the most fundamental issues in language variation and change. Unfortunately, their potential is surprisingly underutilized in sociolinguistics in general and dialectology in particular. Relevant questions addressed in the workshop were:

What are the linguistic and sociolinguistic "issues" that make for a good community-based study?
How do researchers practically set up and carry out such a study?
How can a community itself be involved in the process?

The two-day workshop considered theoretical, methodological, and practical issues involved in conducting field-initiated studies, based on extensive field experience in different sites in North Carolina in the last decade. A special emphasis included the discussion and demonstration of applications of the linguistic gratuity principle, by which researchers work with communities to return linguistic favors. A practical goal of the workshop was the encouragement of more extensive community-based sociolinguistic projects in South Carolina and the Southeast US.

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Graduate Student Linguistics Organization(GSLING)
From the President of GSLing
I would like to begin by welcoming the new class of graduate students who have entered the Linguistics Program this academic year. You will have found yourselves among a group of young linguists who are active in our studies, our research fields, and even beyond.

As a group, the Graduate Students in Linguistics (GSLing) has taken on many activities this year. We coordinate the receptions after colloquia, meet in three different focus groups, and organize professional development workshops led by faculty and other specialists. We are also working on reviving the web journal, Carolina Working Papers, that was begun here two years ago.

In addition, we get together occasionally for non-academic activities. For example, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day several of us volunteered time to help organize donations at a local women's shelter. We also created the annual Linguistics Program T-shirt with the first democratically elected design (which is more than we can say for either of our presidents). With all this activity, it's surprising that we also find the time now and then to meet informally at a local restaurant or pub to relax and talk.

The Spring Semester activities have already begun and promise to keep us equally busy in the months ahead. As a finale, one of us will present our research at the last colloquium of the year as part of the Pearson Award. This year as much as ever, GSLing activities are crucial to our development as linguists.

— Matthew H. Ciscel
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Historical Linguistics Research Group
Since last semester was not a very successful one for HLRG, the meeting being a no-show, I decided to rethink the format so that people would be more attracted to it. Some have suggested that it should be more general-easy-to-understand topics of historical linguistics, rather than hardcore-specific ones. I tend to agree. I am planning for only one meeting this semester but hopefully, a successful one. The topic and exact date of the meeting should be announced very soon.

— Philippe Albert
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Carolina Working Papers in Linguistics
Carolina Working Papers in Linguistics had its first issue in 2000 featuring four papers. The second issue is coming soon. We expect each future issue of CWPL to grow and improve.
We plan to expand on the academic institutions involved in the project to universities not only in the Carolinas, but also Florida, and Georgia. We are announcing a new call for papers, so work on those papers from the last couple of semesters, and submit them by May 15, 2001. More details will follow soon.

— Mila Tasseva & Butsakorn Yodkamlue

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Second Language Acquisition Reading Group (SLARG)
This was the second year of operation for our Second Language Acquisition Reading Group (SLARG) which was refound in 1999. Due to the tense colloquium schedule and the willingness to coordinate with the other informal research groups in the Program, the group met twice during the Fall 2000 semester and is planning on two more meetings in Spring 2001.
We kept the format of our meetings unchanged–we discuss readings about current research in SLA. Generally, at each meeting two students present an overview article on a chosen SLA area, as well as an article on a specific study within that area of research. We opened the semester with a presentation of original student research and then proceeded to discussing articles related to the planned research of the ‘members’. Meetings have been informal, organized as pot-luck dinners at the homes of students on Friday evenings.

All students and faculty interested in issues related to SLA are welcome to join us for discussion. To follow is a list of the topics and articles discussed during the Fall 2000 semester and proposed topics for the Spring 2001 semester:

September 22, 2000. Strong vs. Weak Continuity in L2 acquisition. Presenters: Matt Ciscel (general article) and Mila Tasseva.
October 21, 2000. Grammatical vs. Lexical Aspect in L2 acquisition. Presenters: Theresa McGarry (general article) and Alina Ciscel.
February 23, 2001. Brainstorming and feedback. Each member of the group who is interested in receiving feedback on their planned research will briefly present their questions and concerns.
March 23, 2001. Topic TBA. It is possible that the group will meet to discuss a topic relevant to the linguistics colloquium presentation the same day.
— Mila Tasseva
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Language and Culture Reading Group (LangCult)
The Language and Culture Reading Group (LangCult) meets twice a semester to discuss issues related to sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. The group is coordinated by Adam Shambaugh. At each meeting an article is presented and discussed. Each informal meeting is held in the home of a student and typically involveds a potluck dinner. For the Fall 2000 semester, the LangCult looked at the relationship of gender and language.

This Discussion is Going Too Far: Male Resistance to Female Participation on the Internet by Susan Herring et al. Presenters: Adam Shambaugh and Leticia Trower, October 11, 2000.
'Is There and Ketchup, Vera?': Gender, and Pragmatics by Deborah Cameron. Presenter: Steve Gross, November 17, 2000.
— Adam Shambaugh
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Professional Development Workshops
Last semester we had two professional development workshops. The first was about finding an academic job after graduation: the MA workshop speaker was Dr. Alexander Rowe and the Ph.D. workshop speaker is Dr. Goblirsch. We met separately on October 6th at 3:30pm. The MA session had about four people and the Ph.D. session had about five to six people showing up. The second workshop was on non-academic jobs. it was held on November 3rd, also at 3:30pm. Dr. Robert Oakman was the first speaker, and Dr. Walter Rolandi and two of his colleagues from Conita also spoke, about fifteen people attended. This semester will see more workshops coming up, and we expect more active and populated participations.

— Gail Clements

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Faculty Research
Laura Ahearn

2001. Invitations to Love: Literacy, Love Letters, and Social Change in Nepal. University of Michigan Press. forthcoming, 2001.
2001. "Language and Agency." Annual Review of Anthropology, Volume 30. Forthcoming, 2001.
2001. "'We Were Kings Here Once': Gendered Constructions of Magar Ethnicity in a Speech by Gore Bahadur Khapangi." Himalayan Research Bulletin 21(1). Forthcoming, 2001.
2001. "Agency." In Duranti, Alessandro (ed.), Key Terms in Language and Culture. London: Blackwell. Forthcoming, 2001.
2001. "Changing Cultures, Changing Selves." Invited speaker in Last Lecture Series, University of South Carolina, 31 January 2001.
2000. " 'It's about Real Life': Service Learning as Part of an Ethnographic Methods Course." Paper presented at a session entitled, "Bridging Classroom and Community through Service Learning: Critical Reflections." American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, 19 November 2000.
2000. " 'We Were Kings Once': The Gendered Construction of Magar Identity in a Speech by Gore Bahadur Khapangi." Paper presented at a session entitled, "A Decade of 'Democracy': Assessing Activism after the 1990 People's Movement" at the 29th Conference on South Asia, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 14 October 2000.

Anne Bezuidenhout

2000. National Science Foundation Grant PIs: Anne Bezuidenhout, Robin Morris and Cooper Cutting Title: The Process of Understanding Utterances that Involve Semantically Underdetermined Constituents. Award period: 8/1/2000 - 7/31/2001
2000. Invited participant in Millennium Workshop in Pragmatics and Cognitive Science, Oxford University, Oxford, England, Sept 29- oct 1, 2000.

Stanley Dubinsky

2000 (with Junko Baba). "A novel semantic rule for causee marking and its pedagogical applications." Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 34.1-24.
2000 (with William Davies). "Functional structure and a parametrized account of subject properties." Proceedings of the 1999 Eastern States Conference on Linguistics (ESCOL 99). Cornell University, Ithaca, NY: CLC Publications, pp. 48-59.
2001 (with William Davies). "On argument structure and extraction from NPs." LSA Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C. January 2001. (30 minute paper)
2000 (with William Davies). "Bypassing subjacency effects: How event structure amnesties extraction out of object NPs." North East Linguistics Society (NELS), Georgetown University. October 2000.
"Event structure licensing of extractions from NP" USC Linguistics Program. 9/00.

Kurt Goblirsch

2000. "On the Germanic Consonant Shift: The Third Obstruent Series." New Insights in Germanic Linguistics II. Ed. Irmengard Rauch and Gerald F. Carr. New York: Lang, 2000. 35-44.
2001. "Scandinavian with a Southern Accent: Medieval Consonant Changes in Danish." Conference o Medieval, Renaissance and Early Modern Studies, Columbia, SC, March 2001.
2001. "Danish and the Development of Germanic Consonants". Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference-7, Banff, Alberta, Canada, May 2001.
2001. "The Icelandic Consonant Shift in its Germanic Context." Arkiv för nordisk filologi 116 (2001). (forthcoming)

D. Eric Holt

2001. "The articulator group and liquid geometry: Implications for Spanish phonology present and past." In Caroline Wiltshire and Joaquim Camps, eds., Romance Phonology and Variation. Philadelphia and Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Expected late 2001.
2000. "Comparative Optimality-Theoretic Dialectology: Singular/plural nasal alternations in Galician, Mirandese (Leonese) and Spanish." In Héctor Campos, Elena Herburger, Alfonso Morales-Front, and Thomas J. Walsh, eds., Hispanic Linguistics at the Turn of the Millennium: Papers from the Third Hispanic Linguistics Symposium. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. 125-143. 2000.
2001. Book (ed.): Optimality Theory and Language Change. Approx. 350 pp. Probable publisher: Kluwer Academic Press, Dordrecht, the Netherlands. Completed final manuscript to be submitted in summer 2001 and "An Introduction to Optimality Theory and Language Change" and "On the collapse of contrastive vowel length in Late Latin and the evolution of mid vowels and geminate consonants in Hispano-Romance". In Optimality Theory and Language Change. (D. Eric Holt, ed.)
2000. "Linguistic Structure and Linguistic Change: Explanation from Language Processing." By Thomas Berg. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press. 1998. Language 76.1 (2000).
2000. "Comparing approaches to the underlying specification of Spanish vowels." The 29th meeting of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest (LASSO 29), Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP), Mexico,
October 13-15, 2000.

Michael B. Montgomery

2001. The Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English. (with Joseph S. Hall). Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. This is a comprehensive dictionary of the traditional language of the southern Appalachian mountains.
2000. The Position of Ulster Scots. Ulster Folklife 45.85-104. Special issue on language diversity in Ulster, ed. by James Mallory.
2000. Isolation as a Linguistic Construct. Southern Journal of Linguistics 1.25-36.
2000. The Problem of Persistence: Ulster-Scot-American Missing Links. Journal of Scotch-Irish Studies 1.105-19.
2000. Ulster: A Linguistic Bridge across the North Atlantic. Journal of Scotch-Irish Studies 1.40-60. (with Philip Robinson)
2000. The Idea of Appalachian Isolation. Appalachian Heritage 28.2.20-31.
2000. The Celtic Element in American English. Celtic Englishes II, ed. by Hildegard Tristram, 231-64. Heidelberg: Winter.
2000. The Many Faces of the Scotch-Irish. Familia 16.24-40.
2000. Myths: How a Hunger for Roots Shapes Our Roots about Appalachian English. Now and Then: The Appalachian Magazine 17.2.7-13.
2000. The Formation of American English, American Speech 75.380 - 82.
2000. Chasing Snyder's Pup and Other Lexicographical Adventures. Philological Association of the Carolinas, Rock Hill, South Carolina, March.
2000. "A Lot of Mountain People are Kind of Backward, but I Don't Care to Talk to Nobody": The Inarticulate Mountaineer? Appalachian Studies Association, Knoxville, Tennessee, March.
2000. Inchoative Verbs in Appalachian English, Southeastern Conference on Linguistics, Oxford, Mississippi, April.
2000. What is Ulster Scots? Thirteenth Ulster-American Heritage Symposium. Omagh, Northern Ireland, June.
2000. Inverted Compounds in Southern American English. Eleventh International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, Santiago de Compostela. September.
2000. Trans-Atlantic Connections Variable Grammatical Features. New Ways of Analyzing Variation in English, East Lansing, Michigan, October.
Carol Myers-Scotton
2001. "Why bilingualism matters." American Speech 75. 290-91.
2000a. Explaining aspects of code-switching and their implications. In Janet Nicol (ed.) One mind, two linguages: bilingual language processing, pp. 84-115. Oxford: Blackwell. (with Janice L. Jake).
2000b. "Four types of morpheme: Evidence from aphasia, code switching, and second-language acquisition." Linguistics 38.1053-1100. (With Janice L. Jake).
2000c. "What matters: The out of sight in mixed languages." Bilingualism, Language and Cognition 3. 119-21.
2000d. "Three approaches to language contact." Rivista di Linguistica 11. 367-86.
Keynote speaker, International Colloquium in Codeswitching and Dialect Accommodation, University of Hamburg, Germany. 12/00
"The inside story on mixed languages." Invited presentation, Mixed Language Workshop, Manchester University, England. 12/00.
"The inside story on mixed languages." Invited presentation, Mixed Language Workshop, Manchester University, England. 12/00.
"Minimalism meets Matrix Language: Variation in codeswitching". NWAV annual conference. East Lansing MI 10/00. (With Janice L. Jake)
"Negotiating an identity through codeswitching: ‘This is a 24-hour country’." International Pragmatics Assocation, annual meeting. Budapest. 7/00.
"Implications of codeswitching for models of language production." Department of Psychology, University of London, England. 12/00.
"What language contact phenomena can tell us about language production." USC Linguistics Program. 9/00.
Hyeson Park
2001. "Topics in subordinate clauses in Korean. Paper" Paper presented at Annual Meeting of Linguistic Society of America. Washington, DC.
2000. "When-questions in L2." Second Language Research 16(1), 44-76.
2000. "Conditionals in L2 acquisition." Paper presented at the International Conference of Applied Linguistics Association of Korea. Korea University, Seoul, Korea.
2000. "When-questions in L2." Paper presented at Annual Meeting of Linguistic Society of America, Chicago IL.
Bruce L. Pearson
Bruce L. Pearson gave a presentation on a Wyandotte folk tale at the Iroquois Research Conference at Albany NY in October. He spent a week in Ottawa in February examining the century-old Wyandotte field notes of Marius Barbeau, and in April he conducted a week-long workshop on the Wyandotte language and its oral literature for the Wyandotte Tribe in Oklahoma.
Tracey L. Weldon
2000. "Reflections on the Ebonics controversy". American Speech (Diamond Anniversary Edition). 75: 3. 275-277.
2000. "The Gullah copula: A comprehensive analysis." Presented at "Gullah: A linguistic legacy of Africans in America-A conference on the 50th anniversary of Africanisms in the Gullah dialect." Howard University, Washington, D.C.
1999. Review of African American English. Structure, history, and usage. Salikoko Mufwene, John Rickford, Guy Bailey, John Baugh, eds. Routledge, 1998. Diachronica XVI: 2. 372-380.
Haller, Cynthia, Victoria Gallagher, Tracey Weldon, Richard Felder. July, 2000. Dynamics of peer education in cooperative learning workgroups. Journal of Engineering Education 89: 3. 285-293.
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Student Research
Matthew H Ciscel
2000. "Identity and Control in Second Language Acquisition." Second Language Research Forum, Madison, Wisconsin.
2000. "English in Moldova: A portrait of linguistic opportunism." International Association of World Englishes Conference, Portland, Oregon.
Lori Donath
2001. "Unravelling the Confederate Flag: Discourse Frameworks as Ideological Constraints." Symposium on Language and Society. Austin, TX. April 19-22 2001.
2001. "Styleswitching in Televangelists' Talk: Interactional Power and Discourse Cohesion." Southeastern Conference on Linguistics. Knoxville, TN. April 5-7 2001.
2000. "Beyond CD Roms: Using Computers to Facilitate Student Interaction in Second Language Learning." Presentation for faculty at English Programs for Internationals, University of South Carolina. Columbia, SC. September 19.
2000. "Communicative CALL: Integrating Computers into the ESL classroom." Southeast Regional TESOL. Miami, FL. October 19-21.
1999. "Using Crossroads Cafe as a Supplemental Multimedia Resource." Louisiana TESOL. Baton Rouge, LA. April 1999.
Larry LaFond
2001 "Optimality theory, constraint demotion, and the acquisition of Spanish as a second language." 11th Annual Graduate Symposium on Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literature, Language and Culture, University of Arizona. February 2001. (With R. Hayes & R. Bhatt).
2001 "Understanding diachronic changes from null to overt pronouns in French." 75th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), Washington, DC. January 2001.
2000 "When must it, can’t it, might it BE." Linguistics section (SECOL LXIII) of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA), Birmingham, AL. November 2000.
2000 "Don’t stop now: A learning strategy your students can take with them beyond the business communication classroom". 65th Annual Convention of The Association of Business Communication (ABC), Atlanta, GA. October 2000. (With M. Thomas).
Theresa McGarry:
2001. "A narrator's distribution of responsibility." SECOL, April 2001. Knoxville, TN.
Mila Tasseva-Kurktchieva
2000. "The Spread of the imperfective 1st person singular and plural inflections to the perfective conjugations in modern Bulgarian", Annual conference on Slavic cognitive linguistics (SCLA), University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Nov. 2000.
2000. "Evidence for weak continuity in learning Bulgarian as L2", Second language research forum (SLRF), University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sept. 2000.
2000. "As I can do it: a discourse analytical approach to Bulgarian e-mail style", USC Graduate Student Day, April 2000.
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Faculty Profile: Tracey Weldon
The Linguistics Program is delighted to welcome Tracey Weldon, who joined our faculty Fall, 2000. Dr. Weldon is a native of Columbia. She has a B.A. from Furman University and a Ph.D. from the Ohio State University, where she specialized in sociolinguistics and syntax. Her dissertation was titled Exploring the AAVE-Gullah Relationship: A Study of Copula Variability. She comes to us from the English Department at North Carolina State University, where she taught linguistics for five years.
How did you get interested in linguistics?
Well, I was a French and English major as an undergraduate, and decided I enjoyed the grammar side of things more than the literature, so I was thinking about doing something like comparative grammars. One of my professors recommended linguistics, which I had been exposed to through courses on the history of the English language and modern English grammar. So I applied to a few schools and ended up at Ohio State. I've been on that track ever since.

How would you describe what you do to a non-linguist?
It's hard to explain linguistics to non-linguists because it's not a very well-known field, so I usually tell people that I study dialects, which is fairly accurate because I am a sociolinguist. Most of my work has been with varieties of English spoken primarily by and among African-Americans, but I'm interested in American dialects of any sort. In addition to that, my training is in language variation, so variation in any language is of interest to me, and I've done work in a variety of different contexts, along the lines of studying how speakers can communicate the same message in different ways. Language variation essentially means different ways of saying the same thing. So I call myself a socio-linguist, a person who looks at the relationship between language and society, and also a language variationist, a person who looks at how the same messages get communicated in different ways and what factors influence the choices that speakers make.

How do you go about researching those things?
I like to begin all projects by collecting actual spoken data. Different linguists will take different approaches to the form of their data, but I like to begin by recording speakers in natural conversational settings. Most of the work that I've done on Gullah and African-American English has been based on natural conversational data. I spent about three years going back and forth to the Sea Islands of South Carolina collecting data on Gullah, talking to speakers there and trying to get a sense of how that variety compares to varieties spoken by African Americans on the mainland. It was a challenging task because speakers are aware of the stigmas that have been placed on their dialects, and they aren't always willing to talk to people outside the community until they really understand the purpose. So it took several years to get them to trust me; but it helps to have people in the community who trust you and know what your goals are. The people who helped me enter this community understood the social implications of studying dialects and the fact that there's so much that speakers just don't know about language; all of the stigmas that are placed on dialects are really social judgments and not linguistic judgments. So the people who helped me understood that, but the speakers themselves weren't always aware of the exact purpose of the research. If they had been, a lot of them wouldn't have been willing to talk to me. So I might tell them, for example, that I was looking at the culture, and I was, but I was looking at it as it influenced the language.

What plans do you have for research or other projects here over the next few years?
We just had a two-day workshop with Walt Wolfram from North Carolina State University, which is where I was prior to this. He talked about some of the community-based projects that he's done in North Carolina, and I would really like to extend some of that research to South Carolina. Not just along the coast of SC, where Gullah is spoken, but in the midlands and the upstate; all across the state there are so many interesting dialects that haven't been thoroughly researched. So I'd like to get some grants to begin some of that work on a larger level than what I've done thus far. In the next few years, I hope to develop some of those research projects, If I have the student interest – it's not really something you can do alone. If I find students who are interested in the local dialects, that's the direction I'd like to take in my work.

Are there any improvements you'd like to see in the linguistics programs in the next few years?
I don't know about improvements, but I'd like to introduce my type of sociolinguistics into this program. We have a couple of sociolinguistics on the faculty but I'm the only one who really does variation-based types of research, so I think that would be a contribution to the program.

There's a growing concern among linguistics graduate students about the lack of diversity among the American students in the program, especially given that this university has such a high proportion of minorities among undergraduates. Can you comment on this?
Really I can only talk about my own experience. My experience in linguistics departments is that you tend to find more international students than American students. In my program at Ohio State, I think there might have been a majority of international students, and I was the only African-American student. Part of it may be interest in the field itself. Part of it is exposure – not getting other groups exposed to the type of work we do. It's hard to say why linguistics hasn't attracted a more diverse group of American students, but I don't think it's necessarily unique to USC. I think it's probably something that you would find to some extent in linguistics departments or programs across the country.

Do you think diversity is important for our program?
Well, I think the more diversity you bring in, the more you grow, and the more you learn from people whose ideas are different from your own. So I don't think making the program more diverse would hurt us in any way. It's a matter of getting the word out to people about what we do, and bringing in the students. I don't know how you do that. I think from a university perspective it probably starts at the undergraduate level, getting people interested enough in linguistics that they want to continue on for a Master's or a Ph.D., in the program here. And I don't think that's necessarily a difficult task; we just need to concentrate our efforts a little more on the undergraduate program itself and trying to recruit students.

Do you find Columbia different than when you left?
Columbia is changing, it's growing. It's probably a more diverse population than when I was growing up here. But it's growing slowly. I have not lived here for thirteen years, but I'm happy to be back.