CLCG colloquium

The CLCG Colloquium is back, with a new format!

Each colloquium will welcome an external keynote speaker who will give a 45 minute talk followed by a 15 minute Q&A period. Then two CLCG-internal speakers will each give a 15 minute presentation about their research related to the keynote. This will be followed by a 30 minute discussion session for all three speakers.

We hope this will be an important platform for all CLCG members to get a better impression of the wide-ranging research that is carried out in our research institute.

The first colloquium of the 2023/2024 academic year will be on 6 October at 15:00 in the Offerhauszaal of the Academy Building and will welcome Lauren Hall-Lew from The University of Edinburgh, as well as CLCG members Angela Cristiano and Morana Lukač.

Please find titles and abstracts of the talks below:

KEYNOTE (Lauren Hall-Lew)

Title: Beyond attitudes and prestige: Why changes-from-below have social meaning

Abstract: While the fields of phonetics, phonology, and sociolinguistics have all contributed to the study of sound change, different research traditions have often sought explanations for different aspects of sound change, or even differed with respect to the very definition of the term (Garrett 2015; Hall-Lew, Honeybone, and Kirby 2021). For example, phonetic and phonological work may focus on which changes are possible and likely, while sociophonetic work might focus on which factors influence the trajectory of change. This talk critiques the binary contrast between changes ‘from above’ and ‘from below’, and then focuses on those aspects of sound change research that could more fruitfully engage with sociolinguistic questions, methodologies, and theory, with particular attention to how theories of ideology (Kroskrity 2016), embodiment (Bucholtz & Hall 2016), and their overlap (Bourdieu 1977) can bridge phonetic and phonological accounts of sound change actuation with sociolinguistic accounts of sound change propagation.

Talk based on: Hall-Lew, Lauren. (under review) "Sound Change." In Sociophonetics: Implications for Phonetics and Phonology, edited by Nycz, Jennifer and Lauren Hall-Lew, Chapter 7. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

SHORT TALK 1 (Angela Cristiano)

TBA

SHORT TALK 2 (Morana Lukač)

Title: At the coal-face of standardization

Abstract: This talk resonates with the relatively recent reorientation toward studying prescriptivism as a relevant sociolinguistic factor. In it I direct the gaze towards copy editors who work at the "coal-face of standardization" (McArthur, 2001, p. 4) and mediate text production. Consequently, theirs is a crucial role in maintaining the illusion of the standard language. They however hardly form a homogenous group and their decisions vary. To explore this further, I report on the variation in copy editors’ treatment of the prescriptive rule against the singular use of data. The introduced changes indicate that age, variety, intra-linguistic factors, and prescriptive guidelines play a role in shaping the copy-editing practices.

Reference: McArthur, T. (2001). Error, editing, and World Standard English. English Today, 17(1), 3–8. DOI.

Talk based on: Lukač, M., & Stenton, A. (2023). Copy editors, (not) all alike. In J. Beal, M. Lukač, & R. Straaijer (Eds), The Routledge Handbook of Prescriptivism (pp. 227–245). Routledge. DOI.