BULA Past Events
from before the year 2002
( click here for past events in or after 2002 )
|
Organizational
meeting for current
and future officers Sunday,
May 6, 2001 at 4 PM Meeting
in front of 718 Comm. Ave.
Evening of Wednesday, May 2nd,
2001 Time:
6:30 - 7:30 PM
Language and Theory
of Mind
in Deaf ChildrenTime: Wednesday, May 2,
2001 - 7:30 PM
Place: CAS 226
Abstract: Does American
Sign Language make a difference in how Deaf children
understand the world? The process of learning that people
can be deceptive, lie, or even make a mistake is a
learned process. Young children who have not acquired a
Theory of Mind have difficulty telling the difference
between truth and falseness. By the time children reach 6
years of age, they should have acquired ToM. One issue of
importance is the role of language in ToM. Deaf children
are a natural experiment in determining how language
helps children understand the world. We will explore the
issue of when Deaf children begin to undersand that
others can be deceptive and what role American Sign
Language plays in this
process?
ASL/English
interpreters will be present.
"A kind of
pun"
Abstract: This talk combines intellectual
history with linguistic research in order to (eventually)
contribute to social change. I use Creole studies as a
case study to illustrate some of the workings of the
linguistics-ideology `interface' whereby
sociohistorically-rooted ideologies promote, and are
re-enforced by, certain types of linguistic
(mis)analyses. In examining the history of Creole studies from 1655
to the present, I investigate how certain (neo-)colonial
and/or (neo-)Darwinian ideologies have shaped a
peculiarly anti-scientific "regime of truth" about Creole
languages. This "regime of truth" (in Michel Foucault's
sense) seems to prevail among both linguists and
non-linguists, both inside and outside Creole
communities. Here I am mostly concerned with the long-standing
dualism whereby Creole languages are fundamentally
opposed to non-Creole languages (in both diachrony and
synchrony). Creole languages are often perceived (even by
linguists) as belonging to a structurally-defined class
of special languages with
"abnormal"/"broken"/"non-genetic" (pidgin-to-creole)
diachrony---as opposed to the
"normal"/"unbroken"/"genetic" diachrony of non-Creole
languages. I offer the beginnings of an empirical, theoretical
and sociologically-reflexive (re-)evaluation of the
"pidgin-to-creole life-cycle" thesis. This thesis is at
the core of the `classic' Creole-genesis scenarios that
are found in influential treatises and popular textbooks.
My critique of this thesis is based on a comparative
investigation of morphology and morphological development
in a (small, but representative) sample of Creole and
non-Creole languages. This comparison, coupled with
robust results in linguistic theory (from Saussure
onwards), supports a Uniformitarian and Cartesian
framework whereby `creolization' does not exist as a sui
generis linguistically-defined structural process: from
an I(nternal)-language perspective, both `creolization'
and `language change' ultimately reduce to
individual-level acquisition mechanisms as defined by
(presumably species-uniform) Universal Grammar. In way of conclusion, I sketch some of the scientific
and social progress that can be made by embedding Creole
studies within Cartesian, reflexive and
socially-responsible linguistics.
Here is a related,
soon-to-be-published paper:
The Creolist as Myth-Maker"
Thursday, December 7, 2000 at
7:30 PM in CAS
213 Abstract: Existing studies of English dialects
are based almost entirely on materials collected from
older speakers in the 1930s through the 1960s; moreover,
these studies generally focused on the identification of
obscure and archaic vocabulary items. For this reason it
is easy to find discussions of whiffletrees, stone boats,
ground hackies, and a rich variety of plow parts and
types of broom, but it is impossible to find information
about how regular people actually speak today. In this
talk I discuss the sorts of linguistic tricks one can use
to identify the geographical provenance of a random
person who seems to speak "standard" American English.
We'll consider roly polies, sunshowers, soft drinks, pins
and pens, and the Three Maries, and we'll also touch on
issues of crypto- and schizo-prestige, problems of
defining "standard" English, and the future of
non-standard dialects such as Boston, New York, Southern,
and Midwestern.
|
A special screening of François Truffaut's
|
|
Meeting at Espresso
Royale If you would like to see
the minutes from the meeting, send e-mail to
mjfhogan@hotmail.com
or carol@bu.edu.
|
with an introduction by Prof. Jean Berko Gleason |
|
Wednesday, May 3, 2000, at 8:00 PM in CAS room 533 |
of the University of Groningen in
the Netherlands: "The Neurology of Language: Abstract: This paper will discuss a
number of experiments, using positron emission tomography,
casting doubt on the traditionally accepted picture of the
representation of language in the brain: the function of the
area of Broca will be reevaluated, and language will be
shown to share components with other cognitive
functions. Place: CAS room
220 Tuesday, April 4,
2000 at 7:30 PM
Some New Insights."
We will be meeting in
Espresso Royale cafe. Our advisor, Carol
Neidle, is
planning to attend, so hopefully there won't be any trouble
picking us out of the crowd! We hope everyone who is
interested in BULA can come. For further information, please
contact jmolter@bu.edu. Wednesday, March
22, 2000, at 7:30 PM
A film followed by a discussion led by
Meli Cox (an undergraduate linguistics major). Thursday, April 24, 1997, 7
pm
A number of short presentations, followed
by a general discussion, on spelling issues in different
languages, such as standardization, variation, spelling
change, and underlying working assumptions of spelling
systems in a number of languages. February 27, 1997
Featured speakers: Professors Bruce
Fraser, Marco
Haverkort and John
Hutchison Discussion about graduate programs in
linguistics in the US, Canada and Europe,
including: November 19, 1996, 7 PM
February 15, 1996, 8 PM
Marco
Haverkort
Everything you ever wanted to know about
American Sign Language... featuring: a videotape of a
television program that aired on Chronical on
December 13, 1993 about ASL (including discussion of the use
of sign language on Martha's Vineyard with Benjamin
Bahan) and talks by: February 28, 1996, 7 PM
"Like Water for Chocolate" and "Night on
Earth" April 10, 1996, 6:30 PM
This page is part of the Boston University Undergraduate Linguistics Association site.
last modified 1/27/07