UCA Linguistics

04/15/2024

Please consider donating to our Study Abroad GoFundMe so that six of our Linguistics students can have the experience of a lifetime! Details below.
https://gofund.me/a0c30fd0

Hello! I'm Dr. Lynn Burley, professor of Linguistics (on the left in the photo), taking six students to Italy this summer, leaving on May 27 for 29 days, and they have all signed up for courses on The Culture of Food in Italy or The Linguistics of Food in Italy. They have already done the hardest part--found the funds to pay for the entire trip by working, getting scholarships, and depending on family. However, while Study Abroad at the University of Central Arkansas does cover flights, housing, insurance, tuition, and some excursions, it does not pay for any meals. None! I'm asking you to help me give these students the best experience of food and culture in Italy by donating so that they can 1. take a six-hour cooking class that includes shopping for local, fresh ingredients and learning from experienced, professional chefs ($140 for each student), and 2. to have funds to experience local foods beyond what college kids from Arkansas can generally afford. With about $200 per student, they can experience a multi-course meal of local truffles, cheeses, and game in Florence; a couple of local Bolzano specialties, risotto with finferlo (chanterelle) mushrooms, canederli (bread dumplings), and Black Forest cake (Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte); and in Cinque Terre--Anchovies! (acciughe)! They will never find the many delightful ways anchovies can be prepared fresh, like Tegame alla vernazzana, a casserole with whole anchovies, and you know they would never willingly eat it if they did ;)

None of these funds will be used by me--I'll pay my own way. And none of these funds will be used to pay for alcoholic beverages except for one glass of Chianti included in the cooking class (I couldn't find anything that did not include wine). I'm buying the students the textbook ($22 each) and a travel notebook to do their assignments in ($16 each), but I can neither afford to pay for their food experiences nor require them to participate if they have to use their own funds--that would be completely unethical.

Thank you for your consideration and helping me make this the most fantastic culinary experience of my students' lives!

07/28/2022

All languages change all of the time. Read this article to see how American Sign Language has changed visually because of new technology and adapting to new ideas.

Ubiquitous video technology and social media have given deaf people a new way to communicate. They’re using it to transform American Sign Language.

07/10/2021

I'll be here, teaching a workshop on how to thrive in academia to graduating PhDs and early career linguists. Always an awesome conference!

The LSA is excited to announce the following distinguished plenary presenters for the 2022 LSA Annual Meeting: Dr. Michel DeGraff, Dr. Julie Hochgesang, and Dr. Tracey Weldon!

Dr. Michel DeGraff is a Professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is an influential scholar of Creole linguistics. He directs the MIT-Haiti Initiative and works on Kreyòl and issues such as education and linguistic justice.

Dr. Julie Hochgesang is an Associate Professor in the Gallaudet University Linguistics Department. She is a Deaf linguist and studies the phonetics/phonology and the documentation of signed languages, with an interest in making linguistics accessible to the public.

Dr. Tracey Weldon is Professor, Interim Dean of the Graduate School, and Vice Provost for Graduate Edu. at the University of South Carolina. Her work focuses on quantitative sociolinguistics and varieties of African American English and Gullah.

To learn more about our plenary presenters or for information about the 2022 Annual Meeting, click here:
https://www.linguisticsociety.org/event/lsa-2022-annual-meeting

06/07/2021

I suppose that we primarily use Facebook as our social media platform is chuegy!

Out of touch? Basic? A new term to describe a certain aesthetic is gaining popularity on TikTok.

05/25/2021

Um, yeah, that makes sense.

Disfluencies can shed light about what's going on in the brain as we speak

05/11/2021

https://subtitlepod.com/japans-mystery-language/
Japan is an ethnically homogenous nation where everyone speaks Japanese, right? Not exactly. Other groups including the Ainu also have called Japan home, perhaps for longer than the Japanese themselves. Today, the Ainu language is spoken by only a handful of people. One of them, Russian-born linguist Anna Bugaeva, takes Patrick Cox to meet Ainu speakers (and non-speakers) on the island of Hokkaido. Along the way, we learn about the mysteries of Ainu, a “language isolate” unrelated to any other language in the world. Bugaeva says Japanese children aren’t taught about the Ainu because their presence—and language—contradict standard Japanese history. Listen to the 26 minute podcast for more.

https://subtitlepod.com/podcast-player/2211/japans-mystery-language.mp3Subscribe: Acast | Amazon | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Himalaya.com Japan is an ethnically homogenous nation where everyone speaks Japanese, right? Not exactly. Other groups including the Ainu also have called Japan home,...

05/08/2021

Congratulations to Wesley Ivy, the Department's Outstanding Student of 2021! Wesley is a double major in Linguistics and Modern Languages in Spanish, and he'll be back this fall to earn an MA in Spanish.

05/03/2021

Congratulations to Ragan Langrell, our Outstanding Student in Linguistics 2021! with Drs. Escamilla and Burley

03/09/2021

Tomorrow is UCA's Day of Giving! I am asking you to consider donating to our department's featured fund, the Lynn Burley Travel Scholarship Fund (yes, that's me).
This fund will provide scholarship money for students in Linguistics, TESOL, and Languages to travel not only for Study Abroad but domestic travel as well, including our new National Student Exchange with 48 states, Washington, DC, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands.
Why? We believe strongly that our students should have the opportunity to experience other cultures and study languages in authentic settings. I donate to this fund all year round and would love for you to help us grow the best linguistics program in the region!

Just follow the link, find the purple College of Arts, Humanities, & Social Sciences button, and the Lynn Burley Travel Fund is listed right underneath it.
Thank you for your support!

You've been CHALLENGED: participate in UCA Day of Giving and take your pick of the fund that means the most to you!

02/08/2021

The start of a new word? The word “cloffice” — the closet office that one exhausted mother uses to balance work, parenting and chores — appeared for the first time in The Times this weekend.

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12/22/2020

TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS (LINGUISTS’ VERSION) · DAVE SAYERS · ACADEMIA.EDU/9856733/

Twas the night before Christmas in the ivory tower,
Not a creature was stirring at the midnight hour,
Twas a problem for linguists who live to hear sounds,
Consonants, vowels (open or round).

We linguists were nestled all snug in our beds,
While visions of fricatives danced in our heads.
Snug in our gowns and our four-cornered caps,
We pondered enigmas like bilabial taps.

When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter.
I sprang from the bed hoping for research matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Hoping my equipment would record and not crash.

The moon made a shape like a back-rounded vowel,
Which was also the sound that I heard from an owl.
When, what should my wondering eyes quickly see,
But a representative sample of society.

Old folks with conservative pronunciations,
And fad-happy teens with their fresh innovations,
Networked globetrotters, laggards and lames,
Their dialect features I noted by name!

Now Nasal! Now Velar! Now Plosive, and Dental!
Lexical! Grammatical! Suprasegmental!
To the top of the mouth! With the tip of the tongue!
Now palatalise! Labialise! Old, middle and young!

This I must record, and I must analyse,
But before I do that I can only surmise,
That this being Christmas and I being me,
There may be more surprises ready to see.

And then, in a twinkling, I heard in the kitchen,
A noise that soon set my microphone twitchin’,
As I drew in my head, and was turning around,
Down the chimney St Nicholas came with a bound.

He spoke in a language never before heard,
Not a sound ever known to man, beast or bird.
Impossible sounds he flung from his face,
He spoke like a robot or a being from space.

Why hadn’t I learned this from tales as a child?
That his taps, clicks and trills were so phonetically wild?
It seemed that his mouth was drawn at an angle
That enabled these baffling articulatory tangles.

The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
Through which fell approximants past the IPA’s reach.
Pharyngeal nasals, glottal flaps quite deducible,
He produced all the phonemes that were thought unproduceable.

I looked through the glass at his hovering sleigh,
And realised at last where his origins lay.
He’d come from the future, he can travel through time,
Hence climbing every chimney in one night, even mine.

This also explained his weird trills, taps and flaps.
In his time, we’ve evolved to fill in all these gaps.
He said his farewells and climbed back whence he’d bound,
But wait, how come I now understood all his sounds?

In his time, Google Translate’s become far superior.
It transferred his message into my mind’s interior.
So I heard him exclaim in his space-age vernacular,
“Happy Christmas! And may your peer reviews be spectacular!”

Twas the night before Christmas in the ivory tower, Not a creature was stirring at the midnight hour, Twas a problem for linguists who live to hear sounds, Consonants, vowels (open or round). We linguists were nestled all snug in our beds, While

11/06/2020

Humans are born with a part of the brain that is prewired to be receptive to seeing words and letters, setting the stage at birth for people to learn how to read, a new study suggests.