The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics
This Tuesday (11/18) Ken Wexler will speak at the Harvard Linguistics Theory Group.
Title: Clefts, Inverse Copulas, and Passives: Understanding Their Delayed Acquisition as Phasal Difficulties
Time: Tuesday, November 18th, 6 p.m. Boylston Hall Room 303
This year’s fall UMass/MIT Meeting in Phonology (UMMM) will take place this Saturday, Nov. 22, at UMass (Amherst), from 9:30am-6pm. If you are interested in attending, please contact Donca for details.
This week’s Phonology Circle presentation is by Jonah Katz.
Title: Phonetic similarity in an English hip-hop corpus Time: Wed 11/12, 5pm, 32-D831
In this talk, I present preliminary results from a corpus study of hip-hop. Previous studies on half-rhyme in Romanian poetry (Steriade 2003) and Japanese hip-hop and imperfect puns (Kawahara 2007, 2008) have established that the frequency of specific imperfect rhymes varies with the phonetic distance between the correspondents involved in the rhyme. The current study extends that finding to English hip-hop. The complex nature of the data poses special challenges for data extraction and analysis. I’ll discuss in some detail how the corpus was constructed and what the proper statistical methods are for testing generalizations about half-rhymes.
Please join us for this week’s Ling-lunch:
Vanja de Lint
“Argument Structure in Classifier Constructions in ASL”
Thursday, Nov. 20
12:30-1:45
Room 32-D461
Ora Matushansky (University of Utrecht)
“Special Cases”
Friday, November 21st, 2008, 3:30pm
There will be a party in honor of Ora, beginning at 6:30pm. Directions to the party will be provided at the talk venue.