Events – Page 6 – Sociolinguistics Lab

Summer accountability

May 16, 2019

It’s that time of year again. The Socio Lab is hosting a weekly summer accountability meeting for any students or faculty in Linguistics or in programs related to Linguistics. Summer can be a tough time: You think you’ve got tons of time to get things done, but it goes by very quickly, and can feel very isolating. Our group aims to build continuity, community and accountability in a low-pressure way. We lay out our goals for the summer on sticky notes, and watch them move across our kanban board from week to week. It’s fun to hear what other people are working on (we have so many amazingly productive students!) and what non-work goals they have. Last year’s non-work goals included “Catch all the Pokemon” and “Learn to make a really good latte”. This year’s include “KonMari my whole apartment” and “Finally finish making my sister’s Christmas present.” If you’d like to join us, you can find us in B-411 Wells every Thursday, 10am – 11am.

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.

Alumni / Events / People / Research

Welcoming back Rebecca Roeder

December 10, 2018

The Linguistics program‘s latest Colloquium speaker was Rebecca Roeder (UNC Charlotte). Roeder graduated with a PhD in Linguistics from MSU in 2006, under the direction of Dennis Preston. Her colloquium talk was titled “The role of PALM in the low back merger: Theory and evidence”. We were lucky to also get some time with Becky in the Sociolinguistics Lab, where we talked about the phonology and sociolinguistics of the Canadian Shift/Third Dialect Shift/Elsewhere Shift/etc, which Becky has been studying in the Canadian context, while we’ve been tracking it here in Michigan.

It was great to have Becky back at Michigan State!

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!

Meetings

NWAV 47 Debrief Meeting this Friday!

October 24, 2018

MSU Sociolinguists had a fun and productive time at NWAV 47 this past weekend at New York University! If you missed out on the party and want to hear about the best talks, posters, and events, or just want to congratulate our presenters, please feel free to attend our annual NWAV Debriefing Meeting this Friday, October 26, 2018 at 2pm in B-411 Wells Hall. All are welcome!

MSU Sociolinguists with Professor Aaron Dinkin of San Diego State University and Professor Chun-Yi Peng of CUNY at NWAV 47 in New York City.