SIL linguists at 87th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America
(January 2013) The 87th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) was held in Boston, 3-6 January. Both students and professional linguists presented research on a wide variety of linguistics topics.
A number of SIL linguists attended the LSA meetings, including three who presented research:
- Dr. Colleen Ahland: “The status of Gumuz as a language isolate”
- Dr. Michael Ahland: “Degrammaticalization in Northern Mao’s pronominal innovations: From subject prefix to full pronoun”
- Dr. Mike Cahill: “Polar question intonation in five Ghanaian languages”
Several SIL linguists also participated in meetings that were held concurrently with the LSA event. At the annual meeting of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, Dr. David Frank presented “Discourse analysis of Guinea-Bissau Portuguese Creole texts.” Frank also chaired a session on sociolinguistics. Dr. Stephen Marlett and Dr. James Watters both presented research to the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) in a special session, “Language Contact in Mesoamerica.” Marlett’s paper was entitled “What has influenced speakers’ perceptions of sounds in Me'phaa?” Watters presented “Structure-changing and structure-preferring Spanish influence on Tepehua.”
SIL linguists work in partnership with the world’s ethnolinguistic minority communities to support language development and language documentation efforts, with a special focus on endangered languages. Publications by SIL staff are made available through SIL International Publications and the SIL Language & Culture Archives, with some materials available for free download for personal use and study.
Related links of interest
- 87th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America
- Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics
- Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas
- Additional publications by Dr. Colleen Ahland, Dr. Michael Ahland, Dr. Mike Cahill, Dr. David Frank, Dr. Stephen Marlett and Dr. James Watters in the SIL Language & Culture Archives
- Linguistic fieldwork in SIL
- Ethnologue: Languages of the World
- ScriptSource: a collaborative reference to the world’s writing systems