“Ah, how Manchester’s changed” is a sentiment you hear a lot, usually in the context of skyscrapers springing up like mushrooms all over the place. But there are also other changes enveloping the city, and you’ll only know if you keep an ear, and other instruments, to a rich corpus of sociolinguistic data. It’s just […]
March 17, 2022
by manling
Comments Off on New book by Sagna
Hot off the press is Serge Sagna’s book on “Cross-Categorial Classification”. The book has been published by De Gruyter as part of the Empirical Approaches to Language Typology Series. If you’d like to snap up a copy, you can do so here. The highlights are below (from the publisher’s website). Languages in which non-finite verbs […]
March 7, 2022
by manling
Comments Off on Jens Hopperdietzel at LEL Seminar
This week’s LEL seminar will feature our very own Jens Hopperdietzel, who will present on “Manner/result polysemy in Daakaka” (see below for an abstract). The talk will take place on Tuesday 8th March at 4pm in Samuel Alexander. There is also an option of following it remotely via zoom. Manner/result polysemy in Daakaka: Complex […]
March 4, 2022
by manling
Comments Off on Xing viva-ed
Manchet is delighted to announce LEL’s latest viva. Kaiyue Xing has passed her viva, defending a dissertation titled “Phonetic and phonological perspectives on rhoticity in Mandarin”. The dissertation provides novel rich data on r-sounds in Beijing Mandarin. It’s been said that these may or may not be r-sounds, but Kaiyue has settled this controversy once […]
February 7, 2022
by manling
Comments Off on Elizabeth Stokoe at LEL seminar
The LEL seminar series will re-start tomorrow, 8th February, with a talk by Elizabeth Stokoe (Loughborough). The talk will be delivered on Zoom, starting 4pm. If you’re on campus, you can watch the talk in Sam Alex A201. The title and abstract are below. The softness of hard data Elizabeth Stokoe As largely (but not exclusively) […]
January 11, 2022
by manling
Comments Off on Morrison in JIPA
It’s a great start of the year for LEL’s Donald Morrison whose paper has just appeared in Journal of the International Phonetic Association. The paper, titled “Vowel allophony in Ness Gaelic: Phonetic and phonological patterns of laxing and retraction”, documents a number of phonological processes affecting the vowels in the dialect of Scottish Gaelic spoken in […]
December 17, 2021
by manling
Comments Off on Successful viva for Juliette Angot
Congratulations to Juliette Angot on passing her viva! Juliette’s dissertation, supervised by Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen and Martina Faller, is on “Epistemic and subjective expressions in French: the case of ‘je pense’, ‘je crois’, and ‘je trouve’.” The examiners were LEL’s Eva Schultze-Berndt and Kate Beeching (UWE, via Zoom). Pictured below is Juliette with her committee. […]
December 13, 2021
by manling
Comments Off on Martin Haspelmath at LEL seminar
The final LEL seminar of this term will feature Martin Haspelmath (Max Planck Institute, Jena), who will speak on Method and theory in comparative grammar: Measurement uniformity vs. building block uniformity (abstract below). The speaker will deliver his talk via Zoom (https://zoom.us/j/8379113954), at 4pm on Tuesday 14/12/2021. There is also an option of watching this talk from […]
November 29, 2021
by manling
Comments Off on Mary Chioti at LEL seminar
This week’s seminar talk will be by LEL’s own Mary Chioti. Mary will give her talk in-person in Roscoe_2.3, but it’s also possible to attend remotely via https://zoom.us/j/8379113954 . The talk will be on Tuesday, 30/11/2021 at 4pm. The abstract is below. The Cognitive and Affective Bases of Accent Attitudes Mary Chioti The study examines the formation of […]
November 17, 2021
by manling
Comments Off on Rutland viva-ed
Congratulations to Colin Rutland on passing his viva voce! Colin’s dissertation is titled “The lexical semantics of gradable nouns in English”. It provides a revised explanation of the meaning of potentially ambiguous adnominally modified noun phrases like “big smoker” and “complete idiot” using degree semantics and the theory of kinds. Colin explored the grammar of […]
March 20, 2022
by manling
Comments Off on Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes in Manchester English