Translation Poetry Slam
Nuyorican Poets Cafe
236 E 3 St, East Village/Loisada
Sat Nov 7
7-8:30 pm
$13.00

The battle will play out in an onstage slam, with writers reading from their work in the original language, followed by a translator who reads their interpretation of the text in English. By the end of the night you'll have first-hand experience of how easy it is for words to get lost in translation, and you'll have an all-new appreciation for the unsung heroes of literature - the translators!

Full details at:
http://www.nuyorican.org/event/984379-new-literature-from-europe-new-york/

 

The New School presents "Noam Chomsky: On Power and Ideology"

Chomsky, 86, will give a talk relating to the persistent and largely invariant features of U.S. foreign policy — in the words of U.S. planners, “the overall framework of order” — and its intimate relationship with U.S. domestic policy..

Saturday Sept 19 at 7 pm
The New School's John L. Tishman Auditorium, University Center, 63 Fifth Ave
Free event
Further info at: https://events.newschool.edu/event/noam_chomsky_on_power_and_ideology e eventre-registration: https://hula.typeform.com/to/ZcLqpK

 

The Albertine Bookstore and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy present "A Conversation with Francois Grosjean"

Dr. Grosjean is a world renowned psycholinguist and specialist on bilingualism. Born in Paris, this prominent scholar became bilingual himself when he was sent to an English boarding school in Switzerland at the age of eight and then moved to the United Kingdom when he was 14. He has published eight books (including the seminal Life with Two Languages) and runs a very successful blog Life as a bilingual on Psychology Today.

Friday May 1 (4-8 pm) and Saturday May 2 (10 am-4 pm)
Albertine Bookstore
972 Fifth Avenue
In English. Free and open to the public. No RSVP necessary.

 

HULLS 5 Hunter Undergraduate Linguistics and Language Studies Conference

Keynote speakers: Dr. Angela Reyes and Dr. Daniel Harris of Hunter College.

Friday May 1 (4-8 pm) and Saturday May 2 (10 am-4 pm)
Hunter West in the small cafeteria
Lexington and 68th Street, New York
Pre-registration: https://hula.typeform.com/to/ZcLqpK

 

The Ph.D. Program in Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences presents Student Research Day.

Invited speaker: Professor Lorraine K. Obler on "Can One Lose a First Language?" Followed by poster presentations by 23 by students from The Graduate Center, City, Queens, Lehman, Brooklyn, LIU, Pace, Molloy, St John's and more.

Friday March 27
10:00-2:00 PM
The Graduate Center
34th Street and 5th Avenue, New York
free admission

 

The Endangered Language Alliance, Mano a Mano, and Bowery Arts & Science present poetry in indigenous languages of Mexico.

Come hear poems in Nahuatl, Mixtec, Totonac and other indigenous languages read by native speakers and accompanied by music and translations. Followed by a Q & A sessio.

Sunday June 1st
3:30-5:00 PM
at Bowery Poetry
308 Bowery, New York NY (bet. Bleecker & Houston)
free admission

The Brooklyn College Linguistics Program presents "Skyping with Chomsky."

Tuesday March 18
SUBO - Jefferson-Williams room
Brooklyn College

Program
11:00 to 12:45 - screening and discussion of "Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?: An Animated Conversation with Noam Chomsky," a recently released film
12:45 to 1:15 - free buffet
1:15 to 2:00 - a Skype conversation with Noam Chomsky who will answer questions from the audience

for more information contact profmsp@msn.com

The CUNY Graduate Center's Speech Language-Hearing Sciences Doctoral Program presents The 4th Student Research Poster Day

Friday March 28
10.30am-2.30pm
Rooms 9204-9206,
365 Fifth Avenue at 34 Street, NY

Guest Speaker
Presidential Professor Richard G. Schwartz: Processing Language with a Cochlear Implant

Free,
to attend please RSVP speechlanguagehearingsciconf@gmail.com

 

The Multiple Languages and Ethnic Identity Diversity Project at Brooklyn College presents Professor Illan Stavans of Amherst College in a series of events on "Exploring Multiple Languages and Ethnic Identity."

Illan Stavans is an internationally known, award-winning cultural critic, linguist, translator, public speaker, editor, short-story writer, and TV host, whose best-selling work focuses on language, identity, politics, and history. Born in Mexico in 1961 into a Jewish family with roots in Eastern Europe, he was raised in a multilingual environment. He is best known for his research on English, Spanish, Yiddish, Ladino, and, in particular, Spanglish.

All events take place in the Tanger Auditorium at Brooklyn College Library.

Monday, March 31
12:50-2:05 PM - Prof. Ilan Stavans on "Linguistic Diversity: A Socio-linguistic Perspective"
4-5:45 PM - Prof. Ilan Stavans looks at the nature of cultural diversity, its benefits and its dangers for cultural minorities in "What Melting Pot? Multi-culturalism and American Jews: Oy, Are We a Pluribus?"

Tuesday, April 1
11 AM to 12 Noon - Modern Languages Prof. William Childers and Prof. Ilan Stavans discuss contemporary American Spanglish, Don Quixote, and Spanish in "Tweeting at Windmills: Cervantes and Don Quixote in the 21st Century"

Thursday, April 24
12:30 to 2 PM - A session on "Using Jewish Languages: Women and Other Jews" with Prof. Zelda Kahan Newman of Lehman College ("Hasidic Yiddish and What We Can Learn From It"), Prof. Alana Fader of Fordham University) ("Bi-lingualism among Bobover Hasidic Girls"), and Prof. Jane Mushabac of New York City Technical College ("A Turkish Jew's Tale: 'Pasha'")

A Symposium on Haitian Creole Language and Culture
Bronx Community College, CUNY
2155 University Avenue, Bronx, NY 10453

Saturday, October 26, 2013
9 am to 4 pm

Linguistic Rights of Haitian Creole Speakers: Perspectives and Challenges for the 21st Century

Speakers include noted sociolinguists Michel DeGraff, MITand Arthur Spears, CUNY Graduate Center, among others.

Special Art & Cultural Activities for Children
Bazaar of Books, Arts & Crafts
Performances by Kongo and La Troupe Makandal

Please register at: events@bcc.cuny.edu
Certificate of participation will be awarded to all attendees.

 

The Syntax Supper Series sponsored by the Linguistics Program at the CUNY Graduate Center presents Jonathan Nissenbaum (topic TBA):

Tuesday, October 22, 2013
6:30-8:30 pm
Room 7102
34 St and 5th Ave, Manhattan

The YIVO Institute at the Center for Jewish History presents Isabelle Barriere (Brooklyn College) and Sarah Bunin Benor (Hebrew Union College) who will speak on: Creating Identity: Yiddish Across a Spectrum of Jewish Communities Today

Monday, October 14, 2013
7 pm Receptions will precede and follow the lecture. The first reception will begin at 5:30pm.
15 West 16th Street - NYC
Free admission, but RSVP required: yivo.org/reservations or 212 294 6140

Today, there are approximately half a million Yiddish speakers in the United States. But what role does it play in speakers' lives? How is Yiddish used by Jewish communities today? Isabelle Barrière and Sarah Bunin Benor will discuss the ways in which Hasidim, Modern Orthodox, and liberal Jews use Yiddish both to create a common identity and to establish difference between themselves, non-Jewish society and other Jewish communities.

 

The Wolfe Institute of Brooklyn College presents a faculty panel discussion with Professors Bayoumi, Patkowski, Perez Rosario, and Viscusi: A Brief Wondrous Discussion of Junot Diaz's The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: Language, Fukú, and the Dominican Diaspora.

Tuesday, October 1, 2013
12:30 to 2:00 p.m. Reception to Follow.
Jefferson Williams, 4th floor in SUBO

Moustafa Bayoumi is a specialist in post-colonial literature and literary theory whose interests encompass literature, music, history, architecture, and politics; Mark Patkowski is director of the Linguistics Program specializes in applied linguistics and second language acquisition; Vanessa Perez Rosario teaches in the Puerto Rican and Latino Studies department. Her areas of
interest include Latino/as and education, bilingualism, U.S. Latino literature, and Caribbean literature; Robert Viscusi is executive officer of the Wolfe Institute for the Humanities and president of the Italian American Writers Association; he has published critical studies as well as novels and poetry.

The Endangered Language Alliance presents Unheard Of! - live readings of poetry and oral literature both traditional and modern by native speakers with simultaneous projections of texts and translations.

Join them on Sept 29th from 1:00-3:00 pm at Bowery Poetry for the first installment featuring poetry and stories from five local languages of Indonesia as presented by native speakers:
Ngaju Dayak (Kalimantan)
Tontemboan (North Sulawesi)
Betawi (Jakarta)
Aceh (North Sumatra)
Bugis (South Sulawesi)
Purchase tickets ($10) now at:
http://unheardof.brownpapertickets.com/

The Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States (LACUS) is holding its annual conference (LACUS 40) at Brooklyn College this summer.

More than 50 papers will be presented, including the following:

Leszek Berezowski (Invited Speaker)
Professor of English, Wroclaw University, Poland.
Topic: How to View Things with the Indefinite Article

Henryk Kardela (Invited Speaker)
Professor of Linguistics, Maria Curie-Skodowska University, Lublin, Poland.
Topic: Karl Bühler's Semiotic Legacy: Viewpoint in Focus

Robert Vago (Keynote Speaker)
Chair of the Department of Linguistics and Communication Disorders,
Queens College of the City University of New York, Queens, New York, U.S.A.
Topic: Stratal Optimality Theory: A Case Study of Hungarian Inflections

The Local Host and Program Committee Chair is Brooklyn College Linguistics Professor Renison Gonsalves, who also organized a panel on How to Build an Undergraduate Program in Linguistics. The panel participants include BC Linguistics Profs. Barriere, Nissenbaum, and Patkowski, as well as two students, Stacey DeAraujo and James Green, both Officers of the BC Linguistics Club.

The full schedule of events is available online at http://lacus.weebly.com/uploads/3/4/7/6/3476612/schedule_worksheet_2013_06-23.1.pdf

 

The Hunter Undergraduate Linguistics Association (HULA) presents the Third Annual Hunter Undergraduate Linguistics and Language Studies Conference (HULLS 3)

9:00am - 5:00 pm on May 4, 2013
Hunter College, West Building, 3rd fl
68 Street and Lexington Ave.

Sixteen undergraduate speakers from all over the country will share their original research in linguistics: topics range from Pitch and the Perception of Sexual Orientation to Where Have All the Fronted Fathers Gone? Investigating Eastern New England Dialect Changes in Central Maine.

Registration is free! To cover catered breakfast, coffee, lunch, and snacks we suggest a $5.00 donation from students, and $10.00 from all others.

 

The New York State Association for Bilingual Education (NYSABE), in collaboration with The City College of New York-CUNY, present:

5:00-7:00 p.m. on April 8, 2013
The City College of New York
NAC Building, Room 4/220 B
160 Convent Ave

A Book Panel for "Bilingual Community Education and Multilingualism:Beyond Heritage Languages in a Global City"(Multilingual Matters, 2012), featuring Co-Editors Zeena Zakharia (UMass, Boston) and Bahar Otcu (Mercy College). This event will highlight diverse language and community programs that foster multilingualism across NYC outside of traditional school structures. Participation is free and open to all.

 

The CUNY Graduate Center presents a conference on "Perception, motor control, and learning: Theory and experiment in bird song."

9:15 am to 4:00 pm on Friday, 15 February 2012
Science Center (Room 4102)
365 Fifth Ave at 34th St.

How do we make sense of complex, dynamic signals? How do we generate intricate sequences of motor actions? How do our innate abilities and learning combine in shaping the answers to these questions? Progress on these broad issues about how the brain works requires accessible, concrete examples, instances of the general problem where we can pass from general theoretical ideas to system-specific predictions, and confront these predictions with quantitative experiments. In the last decade, there has been an increasing appreciation that song birds provide one such accessible example. In this symposium, we will hear from three pairs of theory/experiment collaborators who have taken different approaches to this system, and have made surprising progress on questions that reach across orders of magnitude in time, from milliseconds (in the mechanics of song production) to seconds (in the syntax of song) to weeks (in learning).

Further information available from its@gc.cuny.edu.

 

The Urban Education program at the CUNY Graduate Center presents internationally renowned sociolinguist Bernard Spolsky on "Migration and language management: The Jewish experience."

3:00 pm on Tuesday 5 February
CUNY Graduate Center, Room 8402
365 Fifth Ave at 34th St.

 

The CUNY Psycholinguistics supper meeting presents Ann Senghas (Psychology Dept, Barnard College of Columbia) on "Language acquisition as selection in the emergence of Nicaraguan Sign Language."

Tuesday December 12th
6:30 to 8:00 pm on Tuesday 12 December
CUNY Graduate Center, Rm 7102 (7th Floor),
365 Fifth Ave at 34th St.

How do new linguistic elements emerge? How are they changed from the prelinguistic raw materials of their origin? To document the earliest stages of language emergence, we consider the case of Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL). Because NSL arose only 30 years ago, members of different age cohorts today represent a living "fossil record" of the language. I will present examples from a few current studies in progress, including spatial grammar, indexing, and nonmanual gestures. As gestures were coordinated to serve communication needs, linguistic forms and functions were being reshaped, from the time they arose. The patterns of emergence suggest that the emergence of language structure is not a cumulative process, but rather entails proliferation, selection, and reanalysis of forms. Over generations, language is shaped by the process of acquisition. This process is unidirectional and yields increasing complexity over iterations.

 

THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARY presents "Book Talk: Bilingual Community Education and Multilingualism: beyond Heritage Languages in a Global City" (Eds., O. Garcia, Z. Zakharia, & B. Otcu).

Room 306 Russell Hall
West 120th Street and Broadway
Manhattan
5:30-7:00pm
Tuesday 4 December 2012

The book describes the educational contexts of various linguistic communities in NYC, including speakers of Arabic, Bengali, Farsi, French, Greek, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hindi,Japanese , Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Native Mexican Languages, Punjabi, Russian, Spanish, Sub-Saharan African languages, Urdu, and Yiddish. Authors will give presentations, including our own Professor Isabelle Barriere and her doctoral student Marie-Michelle Monereau who will be discussing " Trilingualism of the Haitian Diaspora in NYC: Current and Future Challenges".

For more information about the book, see: http://channelviewpublications.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/bilingual-community-education-and-multilingualism/

 

THE INTERNATIONAL LINGUISTIC ASSOCIATION (ILA) presents Ana Celia Zentella from UC San Diego on: "Patrolling Languages and Identities on the US-Mexico Border."

11:00-12:00 on Saturday, October 6, 2012
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Room: L2.82
524 West 59th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues)
New York, NY 10019

Despite their envied bilingual and bicultural capital, college students who have spent years living and studying in both San Diego and Tijuana (transfronterizos), struggle with conflicting constructions of language and identity that are the result of rigid national and language borders. In particular, intra-sentential code switching, or Spanglish, is frowned upon, because that way of speaking is identified with el hablar mocho de los pochos ['chopped up Mexican American speech']. Transfronterizo attempts to distinguish themselves from monolinguals on both sides of the border suggest the creation of a "Migra Bilingüe", or language border patrollers, akin to the federal agents who track the undocumented. The hierarchy of authenticity that results among Mexicano-Americanos in an era of heightened English-only fervor parallels the Boricua-Nuyorican pattern in several significant ways.

 

THE RESEARCH INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE IN URBAN SOCIETY (RISLUS) presents its 2012 Research Forum

Friday, May 11, 9:30am-5pm, rooms C201/C202 on the Concourse Level
The Graduate Center, 34th Street and 5th Avenue

Papers include: Class, Education, English Skills and Spanish Confidence as Predictors of Borrowing Among Latin American Immigrants in New York by Rachel Varra and
Building Bridges to Academic Success for Emergent Bilinguals by Elaine Klein

The full program is available on the RISLUS website: http://rislus.gc.cuny.edu/rislus_events/

THE CUNY GC LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM presents Jennifer Smith on: "'I ø na like the fairies': Community grammars and the acquisition of negation in a Scottish dialect."

Thursday, March 29th, 4:15pm-6pm, Room 6417
The Graduate Center, 34th Street and 5th Avenue

Research over the past two decades in sociolinguistics has demonstrated that complex patterns of variation evident in adult speech are acquired by children from the very earliest stages of language development. In this paper, we analyze negation in 29 preschool children (aged 2;10-4;2) in interaction with their primary caregivers in a rural community in north east Scotland, as in:
1a. I don't want want to read that…
1b. I do na like that story…
1c. I ø na want to go to bed when I'm having my story (Lois aged 3;2)

1a and 1b demonstrate a classic alternation between standard and local form. 1c on the other hand, looks like a form arising from the developmental stages in the acquisition of negation. Analysis of over 1200 contexts in the caregiver/child data reveal the following patterns. First, the children have high rates of (1a), a form almost absent in the adult data. We explain these results in the context of stigmatised forms in caregiverese. Second, the children have much lower rates of do absence (1c) when compared to adult norms. However, despite these differences in rates of use, the categorical constraints on 3rd person singular found in the adult data are mirrored in the child data: the children never have do absence in this context. In contrast, the fully variable contexts show no statistically significant effects in the child data, suggesting that these patterns of use have yet to be acquired.

We appeal to both universal grammar and more usage-based accounts to interpret these results and discuss the ramifications of these findings for theories of language acquisition in the context of variable community grammars.

Wine and cheese reception to follow lecture.

 

THE CUNY GRADUATE CENTER'S SPEECH, LANGUAGE AND HEARING SCIENCES DEPARTMENT PRESENTS STUDENT RESEARCH DAY

There will be posters by undergraduate students working on different projects, from various CUNY and other NY colleges.

The guest speaker is Professor Barriere, who will be giving a presentation on "Language Acquisition in a Diverse World: Progress and Challenges"; the paper will focus on the intersection of morphology and syntax.

Friday March 23rd 11.30-3pm, room 4201, (snacks served)
The Graduate Center, 34th Street and 5th Avenue

 

THE "WORKSHOP ON MEANING: LANGUAGE AND SOCIO-CULTURAL PROCESSES" SERIES AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY presents: "Computational Linguistics Analysis of Charismatic Speech:Cross-Cultural and Political Perspectives" by Julia Hirschberg, Professor, Computer Science Department, Columbia University.

Tuesday, February 28, 2012
12:15 - 2:15 p.m.
Columbia University, International Affairs Building - Room 801
420 West 118th Street, New York, NY

RSVP with Carmen Morillo at cm2714@columbia.edu
(light refreshments will be served)

To view a Powerpoint of an earlier stage of this research, visit: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~julia/research_talks.htm
and click on "Charisma in English and Arabic Political Speech", 2007

Sponsored By: ISERP, Columbia Linguistics Society, and Columbia Center for Computational Learning Systems

 

THE BOWERY POETRY CLUB presents: "Speak for Yourself: An Endangered Language Alliance Party" (Music, Dance, Poetry, Food, Drink)

Saturday, February 11th at 6pm
308 Bowery (bet. Bleecker and Houston)
NY, NY 10012
(entrance on a sliding scale)

A trio of poet, professor, and field linguist have combined forces in the heart of New York City to document, support, and protect one of the most precious stores of cultural, scientific, and creative human knowledge: living languages. The Endangered Language Alliance (ELA, pronounced ay-la) is a new organization whose goal is "is to further the documentation, description, maintenance, and revitalization of threatened and endangered languages, and to educate the public about the causes and consequences of language extinction." In a small office on West 18th Street known as the Urban Fieldstation, endangered languages are being spoken, recorded, and translated before they possibly recede further into the margins.
More about the Endangered Language Alliance at: ELA

THE ILA SATURDAY LECTURE SERIES

Prof. Kate Menken, Queens College, on "Why Are We Losing Bilingual Education Programs in New York City Schools?: Factors in School Administrators' Language Education Policy Decisions"

Saturday, December 10th at 11:00 am
John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Conference Room, Department of English (7th Floor)
619 W 54th St, Manhattan

Although educational policies for emergent bilinguals in New York City schools have historically favored the provision of bilingual education over other educational program models, the past decade has borne witness to a dramatic loss of bilingual education programs in city schools. The greatest loss has been to transitional bilingual programs, which in the past had always been the predominant model for bilingual education in city schools. This study examines the factors that determine language education policies adopted by school principals, through qualitative research in New York City schools that have eliminated their bilingual education programs in recent years and replaced them with English as a Second Language programs. Our findings show how school administrators, and particularly principals, negotiate a wide range of often competing demands to ultimately adopt English-only instruction in their schools, even though most have little to no formal preparation in educating emergent bilinguals. Unlike states like California and Arizona, which have explicit anti-bilingual education language policies restricting the use of students' home languages in instruction, restrictive policies in New York are primarily implicit; that said, the data from New York shows how implicit policies are also powerful agents in effecting language change.

 

THE BOOK CULTURE BOOKSTORE PRESENTS JOHN. L. LOCKE WHO WILL DISCUSS HIS NEW BOOK DUELS AND DUETS: WHY MEN AND WOMEN TALK SO DIFFERENTLY

Tuesday, October 18th at 7 pm
The Book Culture bookstore on 2915 Broadway at 114th Street, near Columbia University (take the #1 train to 116th St)
646-403-3000; broadway@bookculture

Why do men and women talk so differently? And how do these differences interfere with communication between the sexes? In search of an answer to these and other questions, John Locke takes the reader on a fascinating journey, from human evolution through ancient history to the present, revealing why men speak as they do when attempting to impress or seduce women, and why women adopt a very different way of talking when bonding with each other, or discussing rivals. When men talk to men, Locke argues, they frequently engage in a type of 'dueling', locking verbal horns with their rivals in a way that enables them to compete for the things they need, mainly status and sex. By contrast, much of women's talk sounds more like a verbal 'duet', a harmonious way of achieving their goals by sharing intimate thoughts and feelings in private.

John L. Locke is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences at Lehman College and Professor of Language Science at the CUNY Graduate Center.

 

THE HUNTER COLLEGE LINGUISTICS CLUB PRESENTS THE FIRST ANNUAL HUNTER UNDERGRADUATE LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE STUDIES CONFERENCE (HULLS)

May 7, 2011, 9:30 am to 5:15 pm
8th Floor Faculty Dining Room, West Building
Hunter College, 68th Street and Lexington

Keynotes by Douglas Bigham, San Diego State University ("The Role of Sexuality in the Construction of Gender") and Ben Zimmer, Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus ("The New Rap Language: The Emergence of the Hip-Hop Lexis").