Seminars, Conferences and Events
The Department of Linguistics at SOAS is host to a range of academic events and seminars throughout the year. In addition to the Departmental Seminars that run at regular intervals during term time, there are also regular special events, workshops and conferences. Details of future and previous events in the Department of Linguistics can be accessed via the calendar below, or through links to the left.
In addition to the events held at SOAS, other events of interest to linguists regularly take place at other institutions in London. Details can be found on the London Linguistics Circle page.
The Linguistics Departmental Seminar Series is a forum for speakers to present their work to an audience of fellow academics and students of Linguistics. These seminars are open to members of SOAS and the wider academic community.
Meetings are normally held on Tuesdays at 3.30pm, in the SOAS Main Building.
Please contact Sophie Salffner ss123@soas.ac.uk, the convenor of the seminar series, if you have any queries.
2012
January
17/01/12
- Computational Grammar Development: What is it good for?
Miriam Butt, University of Konstanz, Germany
24/01/12
- 'What do paradigms look like (and why care anyway)'
Greville Corbett, University of Surrey
31/01/12
- Speech Prosody: Theories, mechanisms, models and tools
Yi Xu, University College London
February
03/02/12
- Direct Lexical Elicitation: Notes from the Field
Bonny Sands , Northern Arizona University
07/02/12
- Descriptive and theoretical linguistics without linguistic analysis -causative and ditransitive case studies
Martin Haspelmath, MPI Leipzig, Germany
21/02/12
- Intonation in tonal new Englishes
Carlos Gussenhoven, Radbout University, The Netherlands
28/02/12
- On the temporal nature of universals
Frans Plank, University of Konstanz
29/02/12
- Correlating Transfer Patterns in the Boundaries of Borrowing: a cross-linguistic perspective
Anthony Grant, Edge Hill University
March
06/03/12
- The relationship between spoken Burmese and Yangon Sign Language
Justin Watkins, SOAS
13/03/12
- Open Access: Transforming Science
Dieter Stein, Heinrich Heine Universitaet of Dusseldorf, Germany
20/03/12
- Language: The Cultural Tool and film screening
Daniel Everett, Bentley University, USA
29/03/12
- Film Screening: 'Silvestre Pantaleon'
Jonathan D. Amith and Roberto Olivares Ruiz
April
03/04/12
- 7th European Australianists workshop 2012
Include: Eva Schultze-Berndt (University of Manchester), William McGregor (University of Arhus) and Peter Austin (SOAS)
The purpose of the workshop is to provide a venue for the presentation and discussion on current research on Australian languages.
17/04/12
- "Till death do us part: What keeps clusters together?"
Markus Pochtrager, Bogazici University, Turkey
May
01/05/12
- "Ideological Directions in Welsh Language Policy"
Dave Sayers, University of Swansea
01/05/12
- Ritual Scissors Dance
Performed by: Jose Navarro (Pishtaco) & Jose Fernandez (Cory Cente)
03/05/12
- Exhibition: at the intersection of language and culture
The programme is listed below
An interactive exhibition where we showcase the work of fieldworkers from places like Australia, Vanuatu and Burma.
04/05/12
- Fifth Austronesian and Papuan Languages and Linguistics conference, 2012
The list of speakers is confirmed below
APLL5 follows the successful Austronesian Languages and Linguistics (ALL) conferences held at SOAS and St Catherine’s College Oxford in previous years, most recently ALL4 in 2008.
05/05/12
- BAAL: The social life of language and language development in Africa
Keynote speaker: Dr Jo Westbrook (University of Sussex)
08/05/12
- The painter's eye, the painter's voice: Language, art and landscape in the Gija world
Frances Fokod
Frances Kofod, will talk about her work with the project ‘The painter's eye, the painter's voice: Language, art and landscape in the Gija world’.
09/05/12
- Open Day
The programme is listed below
Visit the Russell Room and R201 (SOAS main building) to see a variety of displays, demonstrations, software, posters, and books from organisations involved in endangered languages activities.
09/05/12
- Maori Songs followed by an evening with Bob Holman (and Friends)
Bob Holman (Poet)
Perhaps best known as a leader of the spoken word poetry movement, including slam and hiphop poetries, Bob Holman's work these days is taking him to Addis Ababa, Bamako, Jerusalem, Wales and Australia on the trail of the poetry of Endangered Languages.
10/05/12
- The Films of Bob Holman
Introduced by Bob Holman
Pioneer poet/moviemaker Bob Holman, twice winner of awards from the Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin and recipient of the International Public Television Award will screen some of his new documentary series, "On the Road with Bob Holman".
10/05/12
- Writing Panare - Portrait of a Linguist Fieldwork / Firekeepers
The list of films is confirmed below
We will show films from the collection of the International Festival of Ethnographic Film (RAI), sponsored by The Royal Anthropological Institute, The Department of Anthropology, University College London (UCL), and InSight Education.
10/05/12
- Website Launch of Language Landscape
Linguistics students will launch their Language Landscape website
11/05/12
- Sign Language workshop
Ulrike Zeshan and her team (International Institute for Sign Languages and Deaf Studies (iSLanDs))
This year’s workshop will be about sign language documentation. Linguists working on spoken languages will learn about how to begin documenting a sign language they discover in their field site. The work shop will be taught by Ulrike Zeshan and her team from the International Institute for Sign Languages and Deaf Studies (iSLanDs).
15/05/12
29/05/12
- Interrogatives and information structure in Cameroon Pidgin English: a typological perspective
Miriam Ayafor (University of Yaounde 1) and Melanie Green (University of Sussex)
June
20/06/12
September
October
09/10/12
- An Introduction to the Phonetics and Phonology of Abkhaz (Cwyzhy dialect)
Bert Vaux, Kings College, University of Cambridge
16/10/12
- Sourcing the Crowd in Language Documentation
Bruce Birch, Australian National University, Canberra
23/10/12
- Makhuwa grammar: how to link description and theory
Jenneke van der Wal, University of Cambridge
30/10/12
- How old is polysynthesis in the Amur-Sakhalin-Hokkaido region?
Michael Fortescue, University of Copenhagen
November
09/11/12
- Every Language Matters
Various Speakers
13/11/12
- The place of the affix in the morphology of the Igbo verb
Godson Echebima, SOAS
20/11/12
- Tone Sandhi domains in Nuosu Yi
Seunghun Lee, Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin/Central Connecticut
27/11/12
- Construction-based asymmetry in the coding and behaviour of Estonian subjects
Helena Metslang, Tallinn University
December
04/12/12
- On the Analysis of Datives in Maltese
Louisa Sadler, University of Essex
11/12/12
- Agreement in Archi
Marina Chumakina, Surrey Morphology Group, University of Surrey
