phonoloblog | all things phonology | camba.ucsd.edu/phonoloblog

July 31, 2007

Mid-America Linguistics Conference

The 2007 Mid-America Linguistics Conference (MALC) will be hosted by the Linguistics Department at the University of Kansas. The conference will be held over the weekend of October 26-28, 2007 at the Lawrence campus, and coincides with the 50th anniversary of the Linguistics Department at the University of Kansas.

The organizers invite abstracts in all areas of linguistics, including (but not restricted to) phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, psycholinguistics, acquisition, neurolinguistics, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics.

Deadline for abstract submissions: August 22, 2007.

Filed under Conferences/Workshops by Eric Baković @ 3:29 pm

Categories

If you subscribe to the comments rss feed for phonoloblog, then you may have noticed a recent flood of comments. This is because I have just begun categorizing posts to facilitate browsing. Allow me to explain.

Up until now I had only set up one category, “General”, for posts on phonoloblog. I don’t recall why I made that decision way back when; maybe it was because I didn’t want to think about what sorts of categories we might need. But now that we’ve been online for three full years and have about 360 posts of various types, I thought it was time to take this step.

You should be able to see the current category list in the sidebar. In alphabetical order, they are:

  • Books — for book announcements, book reviews, etc.
  • Conferences — for conference/workshop announcements, calls for papers, programs, etc.
  • General — still the grab-bag for most posts
  • Jobs — job announcements, etc. (though this is mostly covered by the phonolojobs page
  • Online — links to material available online (e.g. archives), etc.
  • Papers — links to / discussion of particular papers, etc.
  • Software — links to / discussion of software, etc.

I’m sure I’ll add to these categories as time goes on, but for now I think they’ll do. Contributors, please try to use these categories when you post — you can use multiple categories when appropriate.

So what does this have to do with the flood of comments, you ask? Well, I’ve been going through and manually recategorizing old posts. When there’s a link from one phonoloblog post (post-1) to another (post-2), a surrounding snippet of text from post-1 is posted as a comment on post-2. For some reason, these particular comments are being automatically updated in the manual recategorization process, and so they’re coming up as new comments. My apologies for the barrage.

Filed under General by Eric Baković @ 2:00 pm

OCP 5 website now up

Though not yet acknowledged by LINGUIST List (see also my previous announcement here), the Fifth Old World Conference in Phonology (OCP 5) to be held January 23-26, 2008 in Toulouse now has an official website. Deadline for abstracts is (still) September 1, 2007.

Filed under Conferences/Workshops by Eric Baković @ 12:39 pm

July 29, 2007

Experimental Approaches to Phonology

[ Via LINGUIST List. ]

Maria-Josep Solé, Patrice Speeter Beddor, and Manjari Ohala (eds.), Experimental Approaches to Phonology. Oxford University Press, 2007.

Publisher’s blurb:

This wide-ranging survey of experimental methods in phonetics and phonology shows the insights and results provided by different methods of investigation, including laboratory-based, statistical, psycholinguistic, computational-modeling, corpus, and field techniques. The five chapters in the first part of the book examine the recent history and interrelations of theory and method. The remaining 18 chapters are organized into parts devoted to four key current areas of research: phonological universals; phonetic variation and phonological change; maintaining, enhancing, and modeling phonological contrasts; and phonological knowledge. The book provides fresh insights into the findings and theoretical advances that emerge from experimental investigation of phonological structure and phonological knowledge, as well as critical perspectives on experimental methods in the perception, production, and modeling of speech.

This book will be a valuable asset for all researchers into the sound structure of language, including scholars and advanced students of phonetics, phonology, speech science, psycholinguistics, and applied linguistics.

(Click here for a sample.)

Filed under Books/Journals by Eric Baković @ 9:48 pm

July 23, 2007

Batch-convert wav to mp3

I found a way to convert a bunch of wav files to mp3 on Windows. Since it took me a while to find this supposedly simple thing, I though I’d share, and also ask if anybody knows how to do the same on a mac.

First, download the Windows version of LAME. You might already have it if you are using Audacity with mp3 files. The LAME folder has a dll file that Audacity uses, but also an exe file, which gives you a command-line interface.

From the command prompt, go to the LAME directory, and try something like:

FOR %X IN (sounds\\*.wav) DO lame %X

Where “sounds” is the path to the directory that has your sound files in it.

What is this good for? If you want to run a web-based questionnaire with sound files, you will find that browsers treat sound files poorly and inconsistently. The best way I know to improve the situation is to use Sound Manager 2, which puts your files inside a little flash object - but it requires your files to be in mp3 format.

Filed under General by Michael Becker @ 6:07 am

July 14, 2007

Workshop on Prosody, Syntax and Information Structure

The Department of Linguistics at Indiana University will host the Workshop on Prosody, Syntax and Information Structure (WPSI) III.

WPSI III will aim to provide a forum to explore new research methods in formal linguistics which seek objective empirical bases through interdisciplinary, collaborative, and experimental settings.

Topics include:

  • Re-examination of the Models of Prosodic Phonology
  • Prosody and Syntax of Wh-interrogatives
  • Information Packaging and Syntax
  • Experimental Syntax

Speakers include:

Caroline Féry (Potsdam), Yuki Hirose (Tokyo), Shinichiro Ishihara (Potsdam), Junko Ito (UCSC), Sun-Ah Jun (UCLA), Yoshihisa Kitagawa (Indiana), Robert Kluender (UCSD), Haruo Kubozono (Kobe), Armin Mester (UCSC), Norvin Richards (MIT), Jennifer Smith (UNC), Satoshi Tomioka (Delaware)

The workshop website is still under construction but will provide fuller information by the end of July.

[ Via LINGUIST List. ]

Filed under Conferences/Workshops by Eric Baković @ 10:57 am

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