Squibfest and Party

It's Official!

The Linguistics Graduate Student Association Squibfest and Graduation Party will be held

on:
Thursday, May 17th

at:
1:00pm

in:
HUM 587

We will be awarding certificates to graduates from the MAling, MATESOL, and undergrad Language Studies programs, followed by four STUNNING* presentations on FASCINATING* topics related to language or linguistics. Abstracts for these presentations will be posted here shortly.

Come join the party, collect your certificate and/or support your colleagues! The exclamation point means it's imperative.

We look forward to seeing you all there.

Graduation Ceremony/Squibfest

The Linguistics Graduate Student Association is preparing it's annual Graduation Ceremony/Squibfest!

This is an exciting event in which certificates are given to all individuals graduating from the MALing, MATESOL, or undergraduate Language Studies programs. In short, you get to "walk" without wearing one of those silly hats.

In conjunction with the graduation event, we will be holding this semester's Squibfest. The Squibfest is an opportunity for anyone who has completed a language/linguistics related paper to present their findings to their peers. It is a wonderful opportunity to practice your presentation skills and to get feedback from people who actually know what you're talking about.

In order to have a successful event, we need three simple things from YOU.

1. Help us choose a date! Go to www.doodle.ch/dpiXFyUQNSi4 and select all dates that you could attend. The entire event will be approximately 2.5 hours and will be held in the Humanities building.

2. Tell us who is graduating! This one is important. If we don't know who is graduating, how can we reward them for all their hard work? If you or someone you know is graduating from one of the aforementioned programs this semester, please send the name and program to: fraser@sfsu.com

3. Present! We need presenters. Dust off your favorite old paper or pull out something the you plan to present at an upcoming conference, and test it out on us. An audience of eager peers is always kinder than an audience of unknown, competitive academics. We'll be nice. I promise. It should be noted that all those in the MALing program are STRONGLY ENCOURAGED to present at least once before they graduate. For some of you this may be your last opportunity. Please send your name and a really really brief abstract to: fraser@sfsu.edu

I guess we need one more thing: Help us consume all the amazing snacks and beverages that will be provided FREE OF CHARGE at the event.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Jason Fraser

Next Brown Bag Discussion This Wednesday

This week we'll be discussing, for the benefit of all those taking psycholinguistics, or for those who are really excited about morphology, this article:

Frequency effects in the processing of Chinese inflection

We will meet at the usual time and place: Wed, noon, Graduate Reading Room.

Thanks to Jason for recommending this one.

3rd Brown Bag Discussion Wed. 21st

Next Wednesday we will round out our series of articles on functionalist syntax with Frederick Newmeyer's 2003 Language article "Grammar Is Grammar and Usage Is Usage".

This article addresses many of the questions we've brought up in previous meetings about how a generativist might respond to some of the functionalist critiques we've considered.

As always, it will be held at noon in the Graduate Reading Room on the fifth floor of the Humanities building.

This will probably be our last syntax discussion this semester. The next (April 4th) meeting will have a psycholinguistic focus. If you have any suggestions for recent articles in that field, please let me know.

Also, don't forget that our next brown bag lecture is coming up on Thursday, March 29th at 1pm. Details here.

Alan H.

Next Brown Bag Discussion Circle

The next brown bag discussion circle will be held in the Graduate Reading Room next Wednesday March 7th at 12pm.

I have received a few suggestions for articles. The consensus seems to be in favor of more reading in a functionalist vein, so I have settled upon a recent article by Martin Haspelmath which I found very thought provoking. I'm sure it will make for a lively discussion.

"Parametric versus functional explanations of syntactic universals"

Hope you all can make it!

Alan H.

First brown bag meeting a raging success

We held our first brown bag meeting last Wednesday and it was great. About 8 people showed up to discuss Joan Bybee's article on functionalist grammar. We discussed her model's strengths and weaknesses, the nature of its challenge to generative grammar, language evolution, and all kinds of things.

So, we need to find an article to read for next time. I'd like to have this decision made by next Wednesday, so everyone has time to read it. Now that comments work properly, please leave comments here with any recommendations.

Alan H.

Comments are open

Okay, I've been encouraging people to leave comments on this blog, but I just realized that all along comments were restricted. So I've changed the settings and everyone can now comment on any post they want by clicking on the "comment" link beneath each post. Sorry about that!

Alan H.