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Mocking in Mock French:
Time and location TBA
 John R. Rickford Linguistics, Stanford University Director, Program in
African and African American Studies Martin Luther
King, Jr., Centennial Chair Friday, February 29, 2008 3:00 pm Gambrell 153 Reception to follow in the English Department Lounge The persistent Black/White achievement gap in
Education has
been a source of concern for many years. Although
many other factors contribute to it, one
that has not attracted
sufficient attention is the African American Vernacular English [AAVE]
spoken
by many African American students, and more importantly, the negative
responses
of teachers and administrators to it. The predominant response of
teachers and
administrators to AAVE has been that of the ostrich--burying their
heads in the
sand, and hoping that by ignoring and failing to acknowledge it, the
vernacular
would quietly disappear, with mastery of mainstream or standard English
miraculously replacing it. An
alternative response has been that of the elephant--acknowledging the
vernacular, but attempting to stamp it out with proscription and
vigorous
correction. Neither approach has been
particularly effective, as shown by data from more than thirty years of
research.
Sociolinguistic Perspectives Dr. Phil. Lucia Siebers Department of English and American Studies Friday, February 22, 2008
3:30 p.m. HU 202 Reception to follow in the English Department Lounge Since the beginning
of the 1990s, the socio-political situation in
In this talk, I will provide a brief historical overview of the complex language contact situation and outline current language practice in the New South Africa. I will further focus on characteristic features of BSAE and the socio-educational background of the speakers, taking into account the complex interplay of dialect input, native language influence and general second language developmental patterns. My discussion will largely be based on my own field work and, like other recent research in the field, is characterised by the attempt to emphasise BSAE as a variety in its own right rather than considering it as a 'deviant' form of English. I will draw comparisons with other varieties and will pay particular attention to the question of whether BSAE can be considered a 'new' English.
3:30 pm Gambrell 151 Thousands
of conventionalized noun-noun compounds in
English must be learned and stored in a speaker’s lexicon.
At the same time, new compounds can be coined
freely and understood. The meaning
of a
compound, stored or novel, is normally built from the meanings of its
nouns. However, aside from the fact that
the second
noun is normally the semantic head of the compound (a dog house
is a
kind of house), the relation of the two nouns varies wildly
from one
example to the next. Many analysts have
despaired at there being a systematic account of compounds. Yet speakers understand compounds and learn
them, so something systematic must be going on. I will propose an account adopting features of Pustejovsky’s Generative Lexicon theory, formalized in terms of my Conceptual Semantics. Some components of the account are independently necessary for the semantics of nouns, and some are particular to compounds. The consequence of this account is an extremely broad range of possible ways to create compound meanings, sensitive to the semantic affordances of the constituent nouns. I will conclude that compounding arises in a layer of language more primitive than full modern grammar – so-called “protolanguage” in the sense of Bickerton – in which meaning is composed on the basis of linear order plus a lot of pragmatics. The Peculiar
Logic of
Value
Thursday, November 15, 2007 7:00 pm How do humans conceptualize systems of value? The hypothesis is that value is conceptualized as an abstract (non-perceptible) property attributed to objects, persons, and actions. The value of an entity plays a role in a suite of inference rules which affect the way one reasons about the entity and acts on it. There are several distinct types of value, including Affective value (does it feel good or bad?); Utility (is it good for me?); Prowess (is so-and-so good at doing such-and-such); Normative value, which includes moral value as a sub-case (is it good of so-and-so to do such-and-such?); Personal Normative value (is so-and-so a good person?); and Esteem (does so-and-so have a good reputation?). In addition, values can be differentiated as subjective (is it good for me? for you?) verses objective (is it good, period?). Each of these kinds of value plays a different role in the ecology of the value system. I will work through several important inference rules that determine the interaction of multiple values in determining one’s course of action and one’s expectations of others’ actions. I will develop formal treatments of fairness, reciprocity, restitution, honoring, shaming, and apology, and I will address the question of what constitutes “true” altruism rather than concealed self-interested behavior. It will be possible to ask what aspects of values are culture-dependent, and what aspects are consequences of human (and even primate) universals.
Department of Linguistics/Department of Biology The relation(s) between linguistics and neurobiology Date: Friday, September 14, 2007 Time: 3:30 pm Location: Gambrell 152 The
enthusiasm for
neurobiological research into the basis of language suggests that
progress is being made regarding our understanding of how the brain
computes with linguistic representations. Is this enthusiasm warranted?
In which domains of brain-language relations is there credible
progress? While there are grounds for optimism that we are beginning to
understand where to look in the brain, we do not understand very much
at all about how linguistic representations and computations are
implemented -- the putative goal of the overall research program.
Recent experimental work using different brain imaging methodologies
will exemplify how complex the (many) relations between brain
organization and language architecture are (the 'granularity problem'),
and in which areas of inquiry there is hope for genuine
interdisciplinary insight into the mechanisms that form the basis
forlanguage processing.
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