Events
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Past Events
Symposium on Afro-Caribbean Cultural Identity
Thursday, April 5, 2007
Black Culture Center
Main Multipurpose Room
Organized by the Afro-Romance Institute
Conference Schedule [in Word]
Noam Chomsky
Biolinguistic Explorations: Design, development, evolution
Monday, February 27, 4 p.m.
Ellis Auditorium
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor and Professor of Linguistics Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has written and lectured widely on linguistics and philosophy, intellectual history, international affairs and U.S. foreign policy. The New York Times has referred to Chomsky as “arguably the most important intellectual alive”.
Professor Chomsky also will be speaking about politics at 7 p.m. at the Missouri Theatre. [flyer in pdf]
How Language Endangerment Is Changing Linguistics
N. Louanna Furbee , Professor Emerita
MU Department of Anthropology, Linguistics Program & LSA Archivist
Tuesday, October 25 , 3:30 pm
113 Arts & Science Bldg.
Over the past century, rapid integration of the world and accelerated exploitation of its resources have threaten the survival of many of the world's biological species. It is widely known that these processes have exacted a high cost in the natural world, where decline in biodiversity is recognized as a primary concern for the future. Less well recognized is the vastly greater threat to the world's languages.
Linguists generally agree that about half the 7,000 languages presently spoken will disappear within the next 100 years under current conditions, a mass extinction that will erase much of the diversity of logics and thought strategies for problem-solving available to humanity, a key to the uniqueness of human cognition.
This crisis is changing the direction of much linguistic research, bringing about a renewed concern with field studies, variety among languages, comparative work, typologies, and an entirely new set of collaborations with computer science, libraries, and archives that falls under the rubric of "language documentation." It is at last bringing significant financial support from major foundations and granting agencies, resulting in a burgeoning development in the new field of language documentation and archiving.
Conference on Language Documentation: Theory, Practice, and Values
2005 LSA Linguistic Institute, MIT/Harvard
Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
July 9 - 11, 2005
Preliminary program (in rich text format
Dr. Walt Wolfram, North Carolina State University: "Dialect and the Public Interest," February 16, 2005.
Michel De Graff, Associate Professor of Creole Linguistics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "Three Centuries of Transnational Utopias in Creole Studies," November 4, 2004.
As part of
the conference Our America: Transnational Utopias and the Haitian Revolution in Caribbean and Latin American Culture, November 4-6, 2004.
Dr. John Miles Foley: "Rediscovering Our Roots: Oral Tradition and the Internet," 21st Century Corps of Discovery Inaugural Lecture, September 8, 2004.
Words and Music Conference, 2003 |
