Colloquia and Talks
Conferences and Calls for Papers
Fall Semester Reading Groups

Second Language Studies Colloquium

The Department of Second Language Studies presents this colloquium series, which explores a wide range of topics related to second language acquisition.

• November 16: Rex Sprouse presents "Universal Grammar, the Poverty of the Stimulus, and the Nature of L2 Acquisition."


• November 30: Robert Baxter presents "Response Appropriateness in Spanish: Interactional Competence in Collaborative Talk."


• December 7: Sunyoung Shin presents "Investigating the rater bias patterns in reading-to-write tasks using FACETS."

For more information on these or future SLS Colloquia, please visit http://www.iub.edu/~psyling/SLSColloquium/Fall2012.html.

Guest lecturer John Edwards presents "The 'New' Ecology of Language: Some Critical Thoughts on Ecolinguistics"

The IU Department of Linguistics is proud to co-sponsor John Edwards, Professor of Psychology at St. Francis Xavier University, as he presents a lecture examining ecological views of language and linguistics. The following is taken from the lecture abstract.

As a focus of study, ecology emphasizes the holistic study of environments, with both beneficial and inimical interrelationships among plants, animals and, indeed, inorganic surroundings. The extension of this idea to language is particularly associated with the late Einar Haugen (circa 1972). His intent was to emphasise the interconnectedness of languages with their environments, with particular regard to status and function. Unfortunately, however, the breadth of the ecology-of-language view has been progressively reduced, and the label of ecology increasingly co-opted. Much that is written under the rubric of ecology now argues for pacific language interaction, instead of a more brutal social Darwinism, presenting a sense of a world in which there is room for all languages. This is a kinder and gentler picture, but is it always accurate?

Guest lecturer John Edwards presents "Multilingualism: Understanding Linguistic Diversity"

The IU Department of Linguistics is proud to co-sponsor John Edwards, Professor of Psychology at St. Francis Xavier University, as he presents a lecture examining linguistic diversity and the role of language in identity. The following is taken from the lecture abstract.

The general intent of this lecture is two-fold. The first goal is to present an outline picture of global linguistic diversity, with some of its important ramifications and consequences. The second goal is to point out that the most compelling aspects of this diversity are not linguistic at all. They have to do, rather, with the symbolic and group-identity-marking features of language.

Guest lecturer Lauren Eby Clemens presents "English does not have resumptive pronouns: A cross-sentential account of 'resumption' in English"

Join us as we welcome Lauren Eby Clemens of Harvard University for a talk (co-authored with Maria Polinsky and Gregory Scontras) titled "English does not have resumptive pronouns: A cross-sentential account of 'resumption' in English." The abstract follows.

The claim that resumptive pronouns (RPs) ameliorate island violations in English has informed various syntactic theories of movement (Chomsky 1993, Boeckx 2003, McCloskey 2006, Bošković and Nunes 2007). Yet, experimentalists have converged on the finding that RPs in English are rated equal to or worse than illicit gaps in island contexts (Alexopoulou and Keller 2007, Heestand et al 2011 and Polinsky et al 2012). We present the first auditory experiment on the acceptability of English RPs in islands. Our results show that i) even in spoken language, the medium where they most naturally occur, RPs do not improve the acceptability of island violations, and ii) English RPs do not facilitate listener comprehension of island violations.
Even though speakers reject RPs, they still use them with surprising frequency. We approach this paradox from the perspective that RPs are simply referential pronouns that refer to contextually salient antecedents (see also Kroch 1981, Prince 1990, Erteshik-Shir 1992, and Cann et al 2005) We argue that resumptive structures in English actually consist of two syntactically independent structures: i) a false start beginning like a relative clause and ending with an embedding complementizer; and ii) a well-formed clause containing a pronoun whose antecedent is found in the preceding false start (see also Asudeh 2012's discussion of locally well-formed structures in the context of English resumption). The outcome of this analysis is that i) performance error explains the use vs. acceptability paradox; ii) English RPs in island and non-island contexts receive a unified treatment; and iii) the peculiarities between resumption in English and other languages (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew, and Irish) are given a straightforward explanation: RPs in English occur only in environments where discourse-linked pronouns occur.

IULC Working Papers call for submissions

The Indiana University Linguistics Club Working Papers Online is now accepting submissions for Volume 13.
Undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty members from all departments are encouraged to submit original papers on any subfield in linguistics. Submissions resulting from outstanding term papers and independent research studies are welcome.
The IULCWP is meant to provide a gentle introduction to the world of publishing and a stepping stone to a full-fledged journal submission through the review and revision process. We appreciate faculty support in familiarizing our students with this opportunity and encouraging them to keep it in mind as they begin designing their final projects and papers.
Please visit our website for detailed instructions on submission and to view previous volumes: http://www.indiana.edu/~iulcwp
If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact us at iulcwp@indiana.edu.

Conferences of Interest

Many conferences of interest to IU Linguists can be found on the Linguist List Calls and Conferences page. Our own page for such announcements is undergoing revisions and will be linked shortly.

CLingDing: Computational Linguistics Hour

CLingDing is a weekly computational linguistics discussion group, where students and faculty share in-progress research. CL students are strongly encouraged to attend.

• November 27 - Olga Scrivner & Eric Baucom: Latin-English parallel corpus

Please see http://cl.indiana.edu/wiki/Fall2012ClingDing for the full schedule of talks, or contact Markus Dickinson (md7@indiana.edu) for more information.

Syntax Reading Group

The Syntax Reading Group meets on Tuesdays from noon to 1:00 p.m. The group is currently reading Daniel Siddiqi's book, Syntax within the Word. If you would like to join the discussion or need to be added to the Oncourse site, please contact Steven Franks (franks@indiana.edu).