Upcoming Events

The NCSU Linguistics Program sponsors an ongoing informal lecture series of "brownbag" lectures by scholars from here at NC State and around the world. Click above to view the current schedule, and for a list of lectures in semesters past. View the current Brownbag Schedule.

Recent News

July 1

Neal Hutcheson wins a regional Emmy award for "The Last One"!

Our own Neal Hutcheson was honored with a regional Emmy award for his film The Last One, a documentary about the late North Carolina moonshiner Popcorn Sutton. The film grew out of Hutcheson's earlier work with Sutton in previous NCLLP films. See the title article in this month's NCSU Bulletin for more information on the award. Congratulations to Neal for this prestigious honor!

Posted by NCLLP

June 1

Congrats MA graduates!

Congratulations to this year's MA graduates, Hannah Askin, Alexis Smith, Janneke Van Hofwegen, and Ashley Wise!

Posted by NCLLP

April 7

NCSU goes to SECOL

Many NCSU linguists are presenting at this year's SECOL (South Eastern Conference on Linguistics) at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana on April 8-10, 2009. Papers include:

• Hannah Askin & Ashley Wise: Composition Instruction at North Carolina State University: An exploratory study


• Walt Wolfram, Janneke Van Hofwegen, & Paula Dickerson: Summary of Longitudinal Data


• Janneke Van Hofwegen & Jeremy Needle: An Acoustic Analysis of Vowel Shift at Grades 1, 7, & 10


• Tom Wilkinson & Tim Castor: Relation of Background Social Factors to Language Change


• Jeffrey Reaser: An 18-month partnership between linguists, education faculty & in-service, middle grades teachers


• Hannah Pick: Reverse Transfer & Accommodation: Retroflex /r/ in the Use of Spanish


• Jeannine Carpenter: Three Cities, One Feature, Different Pattern: Plural –s Absence in Southern Urban AAE

Posted by NCLLP

January 12

Spring 2009 Brownbag series

The tentative Spring 2009 Brownbag series schedule has been posted on the events page.

Posted by NCLLP

January 10

LSA and ADS

NC State presenters gave several papers at two conferences in San Francisco this January, the Linguistics Society of America, and the American Dialect Society.

At the Linguistics Society of America annual meeting:

• "The longitudinal development of African American English: From childhood through adolescence," a paper presented by Janneke Van Hofwegen (NCSU) and Walt Wolfram (NCSU).
• "Trained listener judgments of rhoticity in English: What R we hearing?" Malcah Yaeger-Dror (University of Arizona), Tyler Kendall (Duke University and NCSU), Paul Foulkes (York University, UK), Dominic Watt (York University, UK), Phil Harrison (York University, UK), Colleen Kavanagh (York University, UK), Jillian Oddie (York University, UK)
• "Fostering Synergistic Partnerships between Teachers and Linguists," a symposium co-organized by Jeffrey Reaser (NCSU) and Thomas E. Payne (University of Oregon).

At the American Dialect Society annual meeting:

• "On the Ethnic Marking of /l/ in Chicano English: A Generational Study," Janneke Van Hofwegen (NCSU).
• "The Diversity and Stability of Vocalic Variation among Bidialectal and Bilingual Children," Mary Elizabeth Kohn (UNC), and Janneke Van Hofwegen (NCSU).

To view the conference programs click here: LSA or ADS.

Posted by NCLLP

November 10

NWAV 37

NCSU linguistics was well represented at this year's NWAV conference, New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 37, at Rice University in Houston, TX on November 6-9, 2008.

NCSU linguists who presented papers, workshops, and/or posters include: Hannah Askin, Erin Callahan, Jeannine Carpenter, Robin Dodsworth, Stephany Dunstan, Tyler Kendall, Mary Kohn, Jeffrey Reaser, Alexis Smith, Janneke van Hofwegen, Charlotte Vaughn, Tonya Wolford, and Walt Wolfram.

To view the conference program and links to the participants' abstracts, click here: NWAV 37 program.

Posted by NCLLP

October 15

Walt Wolfram wins 2008 John Tyler Caldwell Award for the Humanities

Professor Walt Wolfram will receive the John Tyler Award for the Humanities from the North Carolina Humanities Council on Thursday, October 23 in Stewart Theater. The award is the organization's top honor, and will be given to Dr. Wolfram for his career-long effort to document and preserve linguistic diversity (particularly in North Carolina) and to raise public awareness of its cultural significance.

See more at the Humanities Council website, and the feature article on the NCSU news site.

Posted by NCLLP

October 1

Fall NCSU Brownbag Schedule

The tentative schedule for the fall 2008 NCSU Brownbag Series has been posted on the events page.

Posted by NCLLP

August 18

Announcing the release of The Carolina Brogue

The North Carolina Language and Life Project announces the release of their newest documentary, The Carolina Brogue! More information is available here. The DVD is available for purchase here.

Posted by NCLLP

August 15

Ph.D. program in Sociolinguistics at NC State in the works

A proposal has been sent to the University of North Carolina system to establish a new doctoral program in sociolinguistics at NC State. Download the proposal here. Read about the existing cooperative program with Duke here.

Posted by NCLLP

May 9

Congratulations, MA program graduates!

Five of our second-year Master's students will graduate this Sunday, May 11, after successfully completing their Theses or Option B final projects. Congratulations!

Theses:
Erin Callahan, "Resonant Systems: Interlanguage Patterning across Time and Space"
Mary Kohn, "Latino English in North Carolina: A Comparison of Emerging Communities"

Option B:
Danica Cullinan, "'I don't know': The Acquisition of Intonation among Adolescent Bilinguals in Durham, North Carolina, and What It Means to Us"
Stephany Dunstan, "The Use of AAVE Grammatical and Phonological Features by Hispanic Adolescents in Two North Carolina Communities"
Leah White, "Exploring Family Influence: An Analysis of Sibling Speech among Hispanic English Speakers in North Carolina"

Posted by NCLLP

April 15

Brownbag: Julie Tetel, Friday 4/18

Dr. Tetel will present on her current project "Linguistics Reimagined," a textbook-workbook combination for students of linguistics. This project opens a path to a new approach in linguistics, one that integrates into our discipline a "minor tradition" of thinking about our subject matter that may be summarized as "languaging as an orienting behavior." This minor tradition is represented by such disparate theorists as the American psychologist William James, the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, the British embryologist Conrad Waddington, and the Chilean neuro(epistemo)biologists Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana. The minor tradition is dintinguished by an appreciation of languaging activities engaged by minds that are fully embodied and with bodies that are fully embedded in environments. As such, the minor tradition is generally consistent with constructivist accounts of phenomena that have been explored in the social and biological science in the past several decades. The title of the textbook-workbook combination shows its solidarity with constructivist accounts, broadly conceived.

Posted by NCLLP

April 7

Brownbag: Gerard Van Herk, Thursday 4/10

Across America, large regional sound changes have taken place in the past century. These changes are well-described and somewhat explained linguistically, but not socially. How can we account for the timing and distribution of changes like the vowel shifts of the inland South or the Great Lakes region, or the decrease in R-lessness in the coastal South and New York City? Why are there so many social exceptions to participation? This talk expands earlier claims that all these changes are triggered by increased contact with, or awareness of, African American English speakers, resulting from migration, desegregation, and the civil rights movement. Van Herk investigates the implications for sociolinguistic method and theory of this “white flight” argument (and vice versa) with respect to concepts of accommodation, social identity, agency, whiteness, oppositional identity, markedness, overshoot, and conflict. He suggests that the demographic (migration and segregation) evidence supporting a white flight view in the US might mean something very different in a Canadian context. The talk is deliberately speculative and exploratory, and invites input from audience members from across social sciences disciplines.

Posted by NCLLP

April 1

SECOL LXXV

Many NCSU linguists are presenting workshops and papers at Southeastern Conference on Linguistics (SECOL) LXXV, at the University of Tennesses in Knoxville, TN, April 4-6.

Presentations include:
Special Session
"Implementing Dialect Awareness in the Middle-School Classroom: From Theory to Practice"
Walt Wolfram, Jeffrey Reaser, Hannah Askin, Ashley Wise

Papers
"Peak Alignment in Hispanic English: New Trajectories of Language Contact and Change"
Erin Callahan

"Understanding Dialect Recession: Integrating Real Time and Apparent Time Perspectives"
Alexis Smith and Walt Wolfram

"Exploring Family Influence: An Analysis of Sibling Speech Among Hispanic English Speakers in North Carolina"
Leah White

"The Evolution of /l/ Across Three Generations of African Americans"
Janneke Van Hofwegen

"The Use of AAVE Grammatical Features by Hispanic Adolescents in Two North Carolina Communities"
Stephany Dunstan

"I be like, ‘He talked about what he talked about’: Latino and African American English Quotative System"
Mary Kohn and Hannah Askin

"The Acquisition of English Negative Intonation by Spanish Bilingual Adolescents"
Danica Cullinan

"Inter- and Intra-Speaker Variation in Speech Timing"
Charlotte Vaughn

Posted by NCLLP

January 22

This Side of the River Upcoming Events

This February, the NCLLP's documentary This Side of the River will make its television debut. The film, which tells the story of Princeville, NC, the oldest black town in America, will air on SC ETV, the South Carolina PBS affiliate, on February 7, as part of the Southern Lens series. There is also a screening at the North Carolina Museum of History on February 9, in conjunction with a new exhibition by the State Capitol. See the TalkingNC website for more information.

Posted by NCLLP

November 20

Documentary Preview - The Carolina Brogue

On Wednesday, December 5 at 4:30 pm, we offer a special opportunity to preview the newest film-in-progress by the North Carolina Language and Life Project. The Carolina Brogue, a documentary on the dialect of North Carolina's coastal communities, is the first phase of a larger effort to document and celebrate North Carolina's traditional coastal culture. The production, funded in part through an NSF Informal Science Education grant, is thirty minutes. A discussion will follow, and pizza will be served to those who attend.

We will screen the film in Caldwell G111, an auditorium-style classroom, at 4:30 pm. These screenings are a great way to be involved in the project by offering comments, suggestions, constructive criticism. Please mark your calendars. You won't want to miss it!

Posted by NCLLP

November 18

Brownbag Lecture Friday, 11/30

A fortition conspiracy in Yucatan Spanish: an Optimality Theoretic analysis, Jim Michnowicz, 4:15 pm

This presentation is initial work on constructing a model that captures several features of Yucatan Spanish that have not been linked in the literature, namely voiceless stop aspiration, glottal stop insertion, and a preference for voiced stops. These onset phenomena are the outcome of a highly ranked constraint in YS, StrongOnset (cf. Bakovic 2000).

Posted by NCLLP

November 14

Brownbag Lecture Friday, 11/16

The Innu community of Sheshatshiu, Labrador, is one of an increasingly few groups in which children learn an Aboriginal language at home and enter school speaking little or no English; however, little sociolinguistic research has been conducted on its linguistic situation. Research on language attitudes and use in other Aboriginal communities shows that most of Canada's Aboriginal languages are in decline. Given this precedent, it seems likely that the language of Sheshatshiu would also be endangered and that English would be regarded as the prestige language.

To determine if this is the case, a questionnaire was administered by inside interviewers to a random stratified sample of 129 men and women, looking at a variety of topics, including prestige, language change and loss, language of instruction in school and patterns of language usage. Data were analysed statistically to determine whether any of the four variables considered (age, education, gender and occupation) had an effect on participants' responses. Results indicate that the Sheshatshiu Innu generally value their language, use it in daily life and are trying to balance cultural preservation with the need to speak a majority language to communicate with the outside world.

Posted by NCLLP

November 8

Brownbag Lecture Friday, 11/9

This linguistic anthropological study analyzes 41 postcards written by residents of Charles Village, a gentrified, ethnically diverse, and predominantly white neighborhood surrounding the Johns Hopkins University. Establishing themselves as local elites, Charles Villagers discursively mark boundaries—spatial, economic, and moral--to separate themselves from less affluent residents as well as external infiltrators (e.g., university students). Specifically, postcard writers employ spatio-discursive practices to construct identities of community and place via linguistic strategies that include the use of elaborated syntactic structure, lexical items associated with a more formal and a religious register, person and place deixis, and "positive self" and "negative other" presentation As such, postcards from Charles Village are symbolic sites of struggle over turf and community identity, sites where local tensions prefigure larger debates about hierarchy and stratification within the urban neighborhood.

Posted by NCLLP

October 23

ToBI Workshop

Julie McGory, from The Ohio State University, will be leading a workshop on ToBI, an intonation transcription methodology, as part of our Brownbag series. Note that this workshop will be held in two parts. The first session meets on Thursday, November 1 from 6-9pm during the regular meeting of Erik Thomas' ENG528 course in Tompkins G117. The second session meets on Friday, November 2 from 3-6pm. All linguistics graduate students are required to attend both sessions.

Also, the brownbag originally scheduled for Friday, October 26 on statistics has been cancelled.

Posted by NCLLP

October 15

Ralph Fasold Lecture

Ralph Fasold, Professor Emeritus at Georgetown University, will deliver a lecture on Tuesday, October 16 at 4:30 pm in 126 Tompkins. All are welcome to attend. All linguistic students and interested others are invited. His lecture, following up on a topic he has discussed in several recent papers, is titled: "Of Dialects, Deermice and Diaspora Ebonics."

Posted by NCLLP

October 8

NWAV36

Many NCSU linguists are presenting workshops, papers, and posters at an upcoming conference, New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 36, at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA, Oct. 11-14.

Workshops

“Operationalizing linguistic gratuity: From principles to programs”
Walt Wolfram, Jeffrey Reaser, and Charlotte Vaughn (NC State University)

“Two things sociolinguists should know: Software packages for vowel normalization, and accessing linguistic atlas data”
Erik Thomas, North Carolina State University; Tyler Kendall, Duke and NC State University; Malcah Yaeger-Dror, University of Arizona

Papers

“An empirical view of varieties of English in Appalachia”
Kirk Hazen, West Virginia University; Ashley Wise, NC State University

“Selection of interference features in the formation of a new dialect”
Erik R. Thomas, Erin E. Callahan (NC State University)

“Undershoot in intraspeaker variation”
Robin Dodsworth, NC State University; Christine Mallinson, University of Maryland Baltimore County; Lykara Charters, University of Sheffield

“Systems theory and the description of emerging patterns of language variation”
Mary Kohn, NC State University

Posters

“Language attitudes and use among Hungarians in North Carolina”
Leah White, NC State University

Posted by NCLLP

September 24

Brownbag Lectures Friday 9/28 and 10/5

September 28
Talk 1: Language attitudes and use among Hungarians in North Carolina
Leah White

Talk 2: Selection of interference features in the formation of a new dialect
Erik R. Thomas and Erin Callahan

Talk 3: Systems theory and the description of emerging patterns of language variation
Mary Kohn

October 5
Talk 1: New ways of analyzing African American English: Examining the speech of adolescent girls in Washington
Tyler Kendall, Christine Mallinson, and Kaye Whitehead

Talk 2: Dying a slow death: Tracing the complexities of language use, loss, and persistence in the Spanish of South Texas
Tonya Wolford and Phillip M. Carter

Talk 3: Undershoot in interspeaker variation
Robin Dodsworth, Christine Mallinson, and Lykara Charter

Posted by NCLLP

September 10

Brownbag Lecture Friday 9/14

The organization Perverted Justice is dedicated to seeking out possible child molesters who might use the Internet as a means of contacting youths. Their web site contains the texts of instant message exchanges between adult undercover “decoys” working for the organization and unsuspecting “marks” who contact and converse with the decoys in chat-rooms and then engage in IM conversations. Our paper uses linguistic analysis of the discourse of two of the IM sequences and of the corresponding “Dateline” interviews to explore potential avenues of criminal defense and the nature of the legal and ethical challenges, both in terms of the case at hand as well as broader cultural, theoretical, and philosophical contexts.

Posted by NCLLP

September 5

First Brownbag Lecture Friday 9/7

Our first scheduled Brownbag will take place this Friday at 3pm. Tyler Kendall will present an overview of the North Carolina Sociolinguistic Archive and Analysis Project - the NCLLP's growing online archive of sociolinguistic interviews. It is intended to provide new NCLLP members an introduction to the features and uses of the archive and the old members updated information about the status of the project and its future directions. We will also discuss the digitization of the NCLLP's audio collection and people's roles and tasks for the upcoming year.

Posted by NCLLP

September 5

Fall Brownbag Series

We have an exciting schedule of talks in our Fall 2007 Semester Brownbag Series! The brownbags are frequently held at 3:00 pm in room G118 of Tompkins Hall, but please download the schedule for specific dates, times, and locations.

Posted by NCLLP

August 15

Welcome Robin Dodsworth!

The NC State community would like to welcome Robin Dodsworth as an Assistant Professor in Sociolinguistics in the English Department. Robin has her Ph.D. from Ohio State University and will add expertise in social theory and language, sociophonetics, variation theory, and other areas within general linguistics and sociolinguistics. Robin comes to NC State from the Center for the Advanced Study of Language in College Park, Maryland, with an impressive portfolio of research, publications, and experience.

This fall she will be teaching Introduction to Language and Linguistics (ENG 210) and Modern English (ENG 324). Read more about her at her faculty page.

Posted by NCLLP

August 15

New Website Launched

Welcome to the new online home of the NC State Linguistics Program and the North Carolina Language and Life Project! The site is still under construction, but in the meantime we hope you find what you're looking for.

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