Call for Applications Seshegopuo Linguistics Winter School 2022
We are inviting postgraduates (MA and PhD students, Honours students will be considered depending on funding) and very recent graduates (no longer than 2 years ago) in Linguistics to apply for a one-week winter school in linguistics. Applications are due by 15 May 2022. We will provide feedback to all applicants by 3 June 2022.
This school is aimed at students who are interested in working with linguistics data -- especially morphosyntactic and/or phonological data -- using corpus, experimental or theoretical approaches. You do not need to have a background or already be using these methods or theories to participate in the classes but you need to have a solid basis in linguistics and ideally some experience of collecting and working with linguistic data.
The winter school will take place in person only on the University of the Free State Bloemfontein campus from 4-8 July 2022. Registered students need to attend the entire week and sign up for at least 3 of the 5 courses offered. Classes will take place from Monday morning until Friday late afternoon. Please plan to arrive at least one day before the start of classes and return home the day after, unless you live locally.
To apply please complete the form by 15 May 2022: https://forms.gle/NmBs9bdzr8NkygLv5
The school is free to attend, but limited spaces are available. Partial travel bursaries are available for a limited number of students. Bursaries for applicants are intended to cover travel to and from Bloemfontein within South(ern) Africa. We plan to offer accommodation for funded students and some meals to all registered participants. Note that travel bursaries will not cover all expenses and you are responsible for your own travel arrangements. Please note that UFS requires all students, staff and visitors to be vaccinated and present proof to access campus. All accepted students will need to follow the UFS processes for access permits and vaccination codes which will be communicated to you by the organisers.
You can view the relevant policies here https://www.ufs.ac.za/return-to-campus
The winter school is hosted by Hlumela Mkabile and Kristina Riedel at the Department of Linguistics and Language Practice at the University of the Free State in collaboration with Will Bennett and Mark de Vos at the Department of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Rhodes University. If you have questions regarding the application process please contact: riedelk@ufs.ac.za
This winter school is made possible with the support of the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR). SADiLaR is a research infrastructure established by the Department of Science and Technology of the South African government as part of the South African Research Infrastructure Roadmap (SARIR).
You can follow SADiLaR on social media at:
https://twitter.com/SADiLaR_ZA
https://www.facebook.com/SouthAfricanCentreForDigitalLanguageResources/
We will post updates and additional information about the winter school at: https://www.ufs.ac.za/humanities/departments-and-divisions/linguistics-and-language-practice-home
Courses and instructors:
The phonology of clicks: Will Bennett (Rhodes)
This course will overview phonology and some aspects of the phonetics-phonology interface through the particular lens of click consonants. We will consider the cross-linguistic typology of click consonant systems, proposed approaches to the featural specifications of clicks and “click-ness”, and how clicks relate to non-click sounds. Other themes touched on may include nasality and aerodynamics, evidence from how clicks affect neighbouring segments, phonotactic restrictions on click distribution, and acoustics & perception.
Corpus-based morphosyntactic analysis of Bantu languages: Hlumela Mkabile (UFS)
In this course students will be introduced to the fundamentals of corpus linguistics and get a practical introduction to some corpus linguistics methods used in the analysis of written and spoken language. Corpora have been used in a number of diverse areas such as discourse analysis, sociolinguistics and language teaching to conduct a wide variety of research. In recent years several corpora have been updated for parts of speech tagging and syntactic dependency analysis to allow for better morphosyntactic analysis. With millions of tokens collected for a number of Bantu languages and developments in POS tagging for agglutinating languages there are more possibilities for morphosyntactic research in Bantu languages. By the end of this course students will understand the basics of corpus design and data collection and using corpora to investigate the morphosyntactic behaviours of Bantu languages.
Bantu Linguistics: Kristina Riedel (UFS)
This course covers selected theoretical, descriptive and comparative approaches to the Bantu languages with a focus on syntax and morphology, and their interfaces with phonology. We focus on recent and current perspectives on key topics relevant to Bantu languages broadly including areas such as the behaviour and structure of applicatives, focus marking, tense-aspect, agreement and phonological boundary marking. The aim of the course is to enable to students to follow the current literature and/or develop their own postgraduate research project in this area. Students taking this course are expected to have some background in syntax and phonology but do not need to speak or do research on a Bantu language.
Experimental linguistics: Jana Willer-Gold (UCL)
The course aims to introduce students to experimental linguistics – a linguistic discipline that uses experimental methods to attest and validate theoretical observations in controlled environment and on a large target population (native speakers, multilinguals). The course will outline the structure of an experimental study - hypothesis, experimental design, participants, procedures and analysis; with an emphasis on selection of experimental task and measures informative of the research question – acceptability judgment (Liker scale 1-7), forced choice task (preferences, biases), self-paced reading (reading times) and elicited production task (production rates). The course will use free online software for demonstration purposes of material presentation, data collection and analysis (PCIbex and R). The main objective of the course is to apply experimental methods to the richness of Bantu languages. At the start of the course, students will be encouraged to identify their own topic of interest in Bantu linguistics and will be helped in turning it into testable hypothesis. By the end of the course, students would have gained knowledge to set up their own small-scale experiment including choosing experimental method, design and analysis.
Introduction to topics in Minimalist Syntax: Mark de Vos (Rhodes)
The aim of this module is to consolidate the syntax you have already learned and to take you further. We will introduce you to a particular theoretical framework that provides some tools with which to explore, describe and explain grammatical phenomena: “The Minimalist Program”. The course aims to provide students with a basic understanding of Minimalism; cover some basic features of the Minimalist Framework for syntactic analysis(e.g. features, merge, move, agree, C-command, etc.); show how syntactic tools and methods can be applied to different languages (particularly focussing on languages spoken in of Southern Africa)and explore how to build a syntactic analysis of a particular construction.