Conferences – Page 3 – Sociolinguistics Lab

Rural fieldwork on display at MSU undergraduate conference UURAF

April 11, 2019

On April 5th, undergraduate sociolinguists Jared Kaczor and Travis Coppernoll presented their poster Football, Church and Free Breakfast: Doing Sociolinguistic Research in Rural Communities Around Lansing at the 2019 Michigan State University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum (UURAF). The project, which has been running since August, focuses on two small communities in a rural part of mid-Michigan. Jared and Travis have been developing an ethnography via trips to football games, church coffee mornings and local cafés. They have just begun to record sociolinguistic interviews with residents. The goal of the project is to compare rural speech with the Sociolinguistics Lab’s existing corpus of urban speech.

Conferences / Events / Meetings

GLEAMS and NWAV Workshop Summaries

October 30, 2018

There will be no Sociolinguistics Lab meeting this week, due to GLEAMS (Graduate Linguistics Expo At Michigan State), although all are welcome to attend any and all GLEAMS sessions! A special congratulations goes to Alex Mason and Matt Savage for their talk Style and Attitude: The Social Evaluation of the BET Vowel, which they presented at NWAV earlier this month. If you missed their talk in New York, your chance to see their encore performance is Saturday, November 3, 2018 at 3:55pm in Wells Hall, B-342.

GLEAMS is open to the public, and begins Friday, November 2, 2018 at 1:00pm (Wells Hall B-342)

The next sociolinguistics lab meeting will be on November 9, 2018 at our regular time (2:00pm), where attendees of NWAV 47 Workshops will present synopses of the sessions they attended. Presentations are scheduled to run as follows:

2:00 – 2:20 Computational sociolinguistics and eye-tracking for sociolinguistics
2:20 – 2:40 Automated, non-invasive phonetic measurements [demo ISCAN]
2:40 – 3:00 Best Practices in Sociophonetics [demo Clox]
3:00 – 3:20 Integrating undergrads into corpus studies/data collection
3:20 – 3:30 Plan any future in-house workshops on the above, depending on need/interest

If you didn’t get a chance to attend NWAV, or you attended NWAV, but not any of the workshops, this is your chance to catch up on what you missed!

Conferences / Faculty / Graduate Students

Congratulations to NWAV 47 Presenters!

September 27, 2018

The Sociolinguistics lab will be sending many projects to the 47th Annual NWAV Conference at New York University in New York City from October 18-21, 2018, including several talks! Congratulations to Silvina Bongiovanni, Monica Nesbitt, Matt Savage, and Alex Mason for getting accepted!

There will be practice talks in the weeks leading up to the conference, and all are invited to attend lab meetings to learn more and/or provide feedback!

Please see the Sociolinguistics lab calendar for specific dates of each practice talk!

TRAP: The loss of tensing in Michigan (Monica Nesbitt)
Style & attitude: The social evaluation of the BET vowel (Matt Savage & Alex Mason)
On the relationship between vowel nasalization and nasal weakening: Evidence from a Caribbean and non-Caribbean dialect of Spanish (Silvina Bongiovanni)
It’s a TRAP!: The trigger for the Elsewhere Shift in Lansing, Michigan (Alex Mason)
Attitudes toward TRAP in Michigan (Monica Nesbitt)
“It’s an American Symbol!”: Non-native speakers’ take on remarkable LIKE (Irina Zaykovskaya) – Practice Talk: October 5, 2018; Wells Hall B243; 12:30pm-3:00pm via Skype