On April 11th, 2023, Dr. Betsy Sneller, co-director of the Sociolinguistics Lab and MI Diaries project lead, gave a talk as one of the panelists for the Honors College public series, Sharper Focus/Wider Lens. The talk is titled “COVID: Looking Back, Looking Forward”. She was joined by other panelists discussing research developed during COVID-19. Betsy’s talk discussed how MI Diaries grew as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.
On April 14th, undergraduate Sociolinguistics Lab members Caroline Zackerman, Whitney Kuta, Mikayla Thompson, Newt Kelbley and Zach Sebree presented their posters at the 2023 Michigan State University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum (UURAF). Our presenters discussed their projects with a general audience, interacted with visitors, and answered questions about their research. Congratulations to our UURAF presenters!
Dr. Gareth Roberts was invited to give an in-person talk on Thursday, March 16th as part of the Linguistics colloquium series this year. Dr. Gareth is an associate professor in Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania and a former co-author of Dr. Sneller, one of the Socio Lab co-directors here at MSU. It was great to have Dr. Gareth here!
MI Diaries, run by the Sociolinguistics Lab at MSU, partnered with Inquiry Arts as part of the STEAM Expo Day at the MSU Science Festival on April 1st and 2nd, 2023. We invited Michigan residents and visitors to reflect on their lives, curiosities, and hopes for the future while learning about sociolinguistic research. In addition to providing information about MI Diaries, we shared some of our featured participant stories with with Science Festival attendees and welcomed them to record their own stories!
Dr. Tsung-Lun Alan Wan is joining us to give a colloquium talk this spring! Please see details of the talk below.
Dr. Tsung-Lun Alan Wan received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh and is a postdoctoral researcher in medical humanities at National Cheng Kung University. He will be presenting his work on agentive language use among deaf or hard-of-hearing speakers in Taiwan.
Time: April 7, Friday 2023, 8:30-10:30am Eastern Time
Event: Virtual via Zoom
Abstract:
Deaf identity and style-shifting in read speech
Within a medical discourse of disability, deaf ways of speaking spoken languages are approached from pathological perspectives. In this talk, I instead focus on speaker agency among deaf speakers of Taiwan Mandarin in utilizing speech style-shifting to performhearingness/deafness. Looking at the linguistic variable ㄕ sh /ʂ/, in the first part of the talk,I will emphasize the importance of identifying indexical fields of variants from the perspectives of deaf speakers. In the second part of the talk, I will look at topic-based shifting which takes place when deaf speakers read aloud a passage about the oppression upon deaf signers by hearing people. The data show that even if the participants argue deaf speakers should conform to hearing ways of speaking Mandarin, some of them shift to deaf ways of realizing the variable when engaging with the identity politics topic, and the others instead shift to hearing ways of realizing the variable. I argue that this difference in topic effect is mobilized by different stances toward the content of the passage, and the stance-taking is mediated by the presence of a hearing interviewer.
If you are interested in joining the talk, please email Yongqing (yeyongqi@msu.edu) for the Zoom link.
