LiLa at UiB

Visit from Copenhagen

hector

Héctor Martínez, a CLARA-researcher at the University of Copenhagen, is visiting Bergen this week. He will give a Friday lecture (see the Friday lecture schedule).

Sol på trærne

INESS avholder sin første workshop med referansepanelet på Solstrand Hotel & Bad.

After the successful first Language Corpus Research conference in Louvain in 2011, the second conference in this series will be organized by the University of Bergen and will be held at Solstrand. See the conference website for more information.

Nästan infödd i L2

Prof. Kenneth Hyltenstam gir et foredrag i Bergen 12. des. 2012 med tittelen Nästan infödd i L2 – tvåspråkighetseffekt eller ålderseffekt? Foredraget finner sted i Auditorium D, Sydneshaugen skole fra 10:15 til 12. Les sammendraget og mer informasjon her.

Who’s behind language change?

Paul Kerswill, University of York, will be giving a lecture on Sep. 27 2012 at 13.30 in SH:G.

Operationalising sociolinguistic typology: on investigating speech communities in Great Britain and their role in language change

The lecture will present research trying to operationalize some ideas about sociolinguistic typology by Henning Andersen and Peter Trudgill touching on sociolinguistics, language contact and language change. Some existing British studies will be analyzed in the light of these two author’s theories. A proposal to research a little-investigated and relatively isolated region of England: the county of Cumbria, will be presented. Cumbria is famed for the Lake District, composed of traditional hill farming communities where traditional dialect was spoken until recently, existing side-by-side with a large tourist industry and wealthy retirees. There are two large towns/cities, Carlisle in the north (well connected, relatively prosperous) and Barrow-in-Furness in the south (poor communications and dependent on a single, declining industry, that of shipbuilding). Along the coast, there are a number of small towns, including Maryport (small, relatively isolated). The parameters for a comparison of these four localities along parameters derived from Andersen and Trudgill will be outlined: small vs. large community; high vs low contact; stable vs. unstable community; inward vs. outward looking. This will, it is hoped, form the basis of a research proposal.

Can machines invent their own language (including grammatical case)?

Luc Steels (Institut de Biologia Evolutiva, CSIC-UPF in Barcelona and director of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris) will give a talk on Monday Nov. 5, 2012 at 18:00 in Egget, Studentsenteret i Bergen. He is a linguist who graduated from the University of Antwerp (See also his TEDx lecture and his publications.)

The following day, Tuesday Nov. 6 at 10:00, Luc Steels will give another lecture on the emergence of grammatical agreement in Grupperom H, Sydneshaugen Skole (SH:GH). This will be followed by a workshop with the NonCanCase group.

Seminar series fall 2012

The usual Friday seminar series is soon starting up this fall, see the top menu. The first lecture will be on Sep. 7 by Masao Yokota from the Department of System Management, Fukuoka Institute of Technology, Japan. He will talk about Language-Centered Intuitive Human-Robot Interaction Based on Mental Image Directed Semantic Theory.