Manchet on 3-week hiatus

Manchet writers will be away undertaking tax-payer funded investigative reporting in the tropics during the epic 3-week UK easter break. We hope to have plenty of news to report upon our return in early April.

3rd Newcastle postgrad conference

The deadline for abstracts is 9 April.  Further details, via the Linguist List, below the fold.

Workshop in Salford: Northern Englishes and Sociolinguistic Theory

The details of a workshop on “Northern Englishes and Sociolinguistic Theory” to be held on 27–28 March in Salford have just come through the Linguist List. Details, cut and pasted from the Linguist posting, appear below the fold.

Kidd and Cameron-Faulkner in Linguistics

Psychology colleague Evan Kidd and former U of M Linguistics and English Language colleague Thea Cameron-Faulkner have a paper in the most recent issue of the journal Linguistics entitled “The acquisition of the multiple senses of with”. Check it out here.

Manc linguists at ISLE

The list of participants for the First Triennial Conference of the International Society for the Linguistics of English to be held in Freiburg in October is out. Unsurprisingly, there’s a whole host of Manchester linguists represented in the program, including David Denison, Kersti Börjars, Alan Scott, John Payne, and Nuria Yáñez-Bouza. Catch the details here.

[Thanks, Nuria!]

Yáñez-Bouza at International Conference on English Historical Linguistics

Colleague Nuria Yáñez-Bouza will represent the department at the 15th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics in Munich from 24 to 30 August 2008 with a paper (coauthored with María Esther Rodríguez-Gil, University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain.) entitled ‘A disparate band of entrepreneurs’? What the ECEG-database can tell us about eighteenth-century grammarians.’ Stay tuned for the details of the conference here and checkout Nuria’s abstract below the fold.

[In addition to hearing about the details of this exciting-sounding paper, Manchet writers are particularly keen on learning if coauthorship with a colleague from the Canary Islands entails University-funded trips... ]

Tuesday seminar

This week’s seminar features Malcah Yaeger-Dror (University of Arizona) who among many other things, in the words of colleague Maciej Baranowski, “is the Yaeger in Labov, Yaeger, and Steiner (1972)”. Her talk is entitled ‘Is there a supra-regional African American Dialect, and if not why not?‘ There will be drinks and lively conversation in W3.13 afterwards. See you there!

[This week's Langwidge Sandwidge is canceled, so make sure you show up to the seminar for your linguistic fix!]

Call for first annual Richard Hogg prize

Via the Linguist List:

Date: Sun, 09 Mar 2008 15:34:51
From: Graeme Trousdale

Subject: Richard M. Hogg Prize

The International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE) intends to offer an annual Richard M. Hogg Prize for a paper on any research-related topic in English language or English linguistics. The competition is open to any individual who is both (a)an early-career scholar, defined as a registered student not yet in possession of a doctoral degree, or a post-doctoral scholar within two years of the award of the doctorate at the time of submission; and (b) a member of the Society (membership can be applied for at the time of submission). The deadline for this year’s competition is 31st March 2008. For more details, please visit:
http://www.englang.ed.ac.uk/isle/richard-hogg-prize.html

New research on the LEL “new research” website

Two new papers by colleague Beth Evans have appeared on the department’s new research website, one entitled “Subject agreement in Marovo: Synchronic and diachronic perspectives“, the other entitled “From aspect/mood marker to discourse particle: Reconstructing syntactic and semantic change“. Check out these, and other new papers by members of the department here.

Harris to chair Clare Hall

Former Manchester linguist Prof. Sir Martin Harris (oh, and former Manchester uni vice chancellor as well) has been announced the new chair of Clare Hall at Cambridge University. Read all about it here.