Colloquia and Talks
Fall Semester Discussion Groups
Conferences and Calls for Papers
Graduate Student Funding Opportunities

(SLIS Friday Conversation) Epistemic Cultures In Wikipedia's Academic Core: A Corpus-based Study

It is well established that epistemic cultures differ across disciplines (Cronin, 2005). In this presentation, we employ a corpus linguistics approach to investigate two types of rhetorical devices related to epistemic modality--hedges and boosters--in a 1.5 million-word corpus of Wikipedia entries and their associated Talk pages from four ?soft? and four ?hard? sciences. Epistemic modality indicates how confident language users are about the truth of the ideational material they convey: Hedges are linguistic devices like perhaps, I guess, and to a certain extent that speakers employ to reduce the degree of liability or responsibility they might face in expressing the ideational material, and boosters are elements like definitely, I assure that, and of course that speakers use to emphasize what they really believe--or would like their audiences to think they believe. In written academic discourses, scholars use these markers to create research spaces for themselves, construct evidence, politely refute others? claims, etc. (Hyland, 2000). Our findings show how disciplinary variations in epistemic cultures carry over into the massively-distributed, collaborative writing environment of Wikipedia, and also reveal disciplinary differences in epistemic modality use in the entries vs. the Talk pages. In concluding, we discuss the implications of our study for current rhetorical theory and for methodological paradigms such as Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis (Herring, 2004) and Web Content Analysis (Herring, in press, 2009).

(Speech Research Laboratory) Subglottal Acoustics in Speech Production, Perception, and Technology

ABSTRACT: The acoustics of the subglottal airways and their effects on speech acoustics are receiving increasing attention, but they are still relatively unfamiliar to most speech researchers. This talk will present an overview of subglottal anatomy and acoustics, as well as the physics of acoustic coupling between the subglottal system and the vocal tract during speech, its effects on vowel formants, the salience of these effects for vowel perception, some data and implications relating to phonological distinctive features in a variety of languages, and applications in automatic speech recognition and speaker normalization.

(LingLunch) Structure of infinitival complements in Russian

ABSTRACT: This study investigates the coherence properties of non-finite complements in Slavic languages, mainly in Russian. The main argument is that Slavic non-finite complements do not have the same syntactic structures and among them there are smaller than CP, as their top projection such as MoodP, vP or VP. The classic GB approach assumed that all infinitival complements, except ECM and raising constructions, are CPs and the subject of the infinitives, PRO, is always present in terms of the uniformity of phrasal structure. In Russian, however, ECM and raising constructions appear to be very restricted compared to English. But the uniformity of phrasal structure is still not tenable because various morpho-syntactic properties such as the presence/absence of embedded tense, a PRO subject, and a modality phrase show non-uniform structures in infinitival complements. Thus, I will first identify the morpho-syntactic properties of non-finite complements in Russian. Second, I will introduce Wurmbrand's (2001) restructuring approach as a theoretical background of this study. Wurmbrand's main claim is that the maximal projection of infinitival complements is not fixed. It can be VP, vP, or TP, depending on the selectional properties of the matrix verb. Thus some infinitives, called restructuring infinitives, lack PRO while other infinitives, called non-restructuring infinitives, have PRO. Based on the theoretical assumptions, I will show the coherence properties reflected in Russian long-distance binding, long-distance NPI licensing and long-distance scrambling. Finally, I will discuss dative subject and dative PRO in Russian. I will argue that the source of the dative case in dative NP + infinitive and dative NP + impersonal modal + infinitive constructions is ModP. It checks the dative case on the thematic subject of the infinitives. I apply this ModP analysis to Russian infinitival complements as well. Russian object control complements project a ModP and this ModP checks the dative case on PRO so that a semi-predicate can agree with the dative PRO. The ModP constructions in Russian dative NP + impersonal modal + infinitive, dative NP + infinitive, and object control complements uniformly have a dative subject by ModP and share the semantics of ModP. My proposal that ModP is the source of dative PRO supports the idea that Russian infinitival complements are CP-less, because it goes against Landau's (2008) recent claim that an embedded C is the source of the dative case on PRO .

Syntax Reading Group

NEXT MEETING: The group will finish discussing Chomsky's Derivation by Phase.

Syntax Reading Group meets this semester on fridays from 12-1:30pm in the Linguistics Seminar Room (MM 317a). Some topics loosely decided on are "phases" and "small v." If you would like to participate in the discussion, please mail Dr. Kitagawa to request a copy of the next reading.

Computational Linguistics Discussion Group

NEXT MEETING: Mike Gasser will talk about constraint satisfaction for dependency parsing

We are continuing a CL discussion group this semester, a forum for presentations and discussions. Anyone who has work-in-progress (at any stage) can present their work in this informal setting and receive feedback. It's a good opportunity to get outside perspective and input from colleagues on current project, to give such input on other people's project, and also just to keep up-to-date about the different types of interesting CL-related work being done here at IU.

Parsing Reading Group

The two primary discussion topics for this semester are dependency parsing and the parsing of Minimalist grammars.

NEXT MEETING: Dependency Parsing: MSTParser

If you are interested in joining the discussion, please contact Sandra Kübler to request online access to the readings.

17th Annual ACES (Association of Central Eurasian Students) Central Eurasian Studies Conference

ACES invites panel and individual paper proposals for the Seventeenth Annual Central Eurasian Studies Conference to be held Saturday, 6 March 2010 on the Bloomington campus of Indiana University. Graduate students, professors, and independent scholars are cordially invited to submit abstracts of papers addressing all topics pertaining to Central Eurasian Studies.
 Central Eurasian Studies is defined for the purposes of this conference as the study of the historical and contemporary Afghan, Balto-Finnic, Hungarian, Mongolic, Persian, Tibetan, Tungusic, and Turkic peoples, languages, cultures, and states.

Information about a wide range of conferences can be found in the Linguistics Calendar Conferences Supplement, which is currently being updated. Please check this link early next week for a list of opportunities for conference attendance and paper submission in areas of interest to IU Linguists.

Department of Energy (Newly Established Science Fellowship)

The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science (SC) has established the DOE Office of Science Graduate Fellowship ( DOE SCGF) program to support outstanding students to pursue graduate training in basic research in areas of physics, biology, chemistry, mathematics, engineering, computational sciences, and environmental sciences relevant to the Office of Science and to encourage the development of the next generation scientific and technical talent in the U.S. The Fellowship award provides partial tuition support, an annual stipend for living expenses, and a research stipend for full-time graduate study and thesis/dissertation research at a U.S. academic institution for three years. Fellowships awarded in the first year of the DOE SCGF program will be funded in part by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.