Story by Lang Sci student Media Intern G Sorensen; photos by Monica Macaulay and Eric Raimy
The Linguistic Society of America held its annual conference in New Orleans over the past winter, where many UW linguists were able to learn and share their work. The LSA annual conference co-occurs with the American Dialect Society; the Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages; the North American Research Network in Historical Sociolinguistics; and the North American Association for the History of the Language Sciences.
The event took place over four days in the New Orleans Marriott hotel, where attendees were to stay for the event. The conference kicked off on Thursday with a walk/roll through the meeting space to ensure the space was easily accessible for attendees. This was followed by an opening ceremony and the LSA’s first plenary panel discussion, where the LSA invited prominent linguists, including UW-Madison’s Dr. Kelly Wright, to share their thoughts on the current sociopolitical landscape and contextualize our work as linguists in it. John Baugh introduced and mediated this panel, pulling the purpose of the panel back into focus when the topic strayed.
Tvisha Rao, a Junior studying linguistics and data science, marveled at how far the field has come in recent years, mentioning the outreach to high schoolers and people from outside of traditional academic environments.
Despite the conference not having a theme, it was clear to attendees that there was special attention paid to increasing accessibility. This meant there were many ASL interpreters present, and subtitles were commonplace. Aside from the organization of the conference being made highly accessible for a wider audience than in previous years, many of the topics discussed were also within the realm of accessibility.
We had three UW-Madison presentations representing the University at the conference. Brendan ‘B’ Dowling had a poster “Consonant onsets in Chinese ‘weak syllables'” with Lang Sci professor Joe Salmons. “Presenting the work at LSA provided an opportunity for feedback from linguists outside of UW. Next steps for this project is a journal article which will build off the LSA poster presentation,” commented Dowling.
Yang Liu gave a psycholinguistics presentation with English faculty member Juliet Huynh, “Morphological processing of Chinese compound words: A masked priming study with L1 and L2 speakers.”
Lang Sci PhD candidate Jae Weller and English/Lang Sci professor Eric Raimy presented a poster “Turkish Emphatic Reduplication: Foraging for Loose Ends.”
LJ Randolph debuted the Journal of Black Language and Culture. This will be one of the only free-to-access journals through the LSA, published by Cambridge. The journal comes at a time when the LSA has committed to supporting and celebrating scholarly excellence from all scholars. The journal will welcome empirical, pedagogical, and student-submitted articles, along with many more. The LSA has chosen to advance seven initiatives to further this goal, including the invention of a new symposium at the LSA: Linguists in Industry, non-profits, and government (LEXING).
Rao commented on how networking opportunities such as LEXING served her interests, and expanded her confidence, writing, “I got to meet some people I know from before—but I also got to meet new people: some of whom were advantageous to my career interests, some of whom were just supportive colleagues. I feel like it was a consequence of my own personal growth: I feel I have grown not just as a linguist but as a person, and I am confident in the persona I set forth to others. The events set up by the LSA only bolster this.”