Meeting Minutes

Dr. Bigham’s Presentation

During this meeting, the prime focus was to provide students with a notion of the type of research that is conducted by our new faculty member, Dr. Douglas Bigham. Five recurring (and sometimes co-occurring) themes in Dr. Bigham’s research:

• Dialect Contact – What happens when people speakers of different dialect varieties speak with one another?
• Accommodation – People tend to shift certain aspects of the way they speak (e.g. phonology, rate of speech, syntax) to be more consistent with that of their speaking partner.
• Queer Linguistics – Recognizing sexuality as an important component of linguistic identity in addition to the standard male/female gender dichotomy widely focused upon in past linguistics studies.
• Performance Speech – Using performance (via sock puppets) to elicit salient vocal features in linguistic identities that might not otherwise arise in free speech.
• Emerging Adulthood – A stage of life between adolescence and early adulthood. Described as a period of time during which people’s lives are mutable, undetermined, free, transient. Language interaction among emerging adults exhibit features that are a departure from Standard Linguistic Theory.

You can read more about his current and planned projects on the handout he distributed during the meeting and by visiting his website. Last, Dr. Bigham told us about Popular Linguistics Magazine, an online magazine he began as an effort to clarify and explain linguistic concepts, theories, and research to the public. If you have any interest in writing an article for Popular Linguistics, you should take a look at the submission guide.

T-shirts

Now that the T-shirt design has been determined, we will be able to send the design to the T-shirt screeners and find out the actual cost of production and how much we should charge per shirt. An e-mail with instructions on how to order T-shirts will be sent out soon.

Halloween Party

There will be a Halloween costume party at our LSA President’s house in the Hillcrest area on the Friday preceding Halloween (October 28). The party will begin at 9:30 PM. You must dress up or else we will make you tag our corpora. Please, bring your own beverages and some tasty snacks. The exact address of the party will go out over the LSA mailing list with the official invite.

Attendees: 19

• Cowles Mountain hike on Sunday October 2nd will be our second social event of the semester.
• For those students who were unable to attend Dr. Keating‘s MA Exam information session, you can contact him to schedule an individual appointment. He is also working on a handout for those who were unable to make it.
• LSA will host heir own Exam vs. Thesis information session with alumni who have been through both processes.
• Thesis students are invited to practice presenting their research at LSA meetings.
• Other planned academic events: Fall Applied Linguistics Colloquium with ALI, Brown bags on technology in the classroom coordinated with LARC, Careers information panel (Career Services and alumni), Faculty presentations, Spring Colloquium (2012).
• Proposed social events: Halloween potluck party (need to find someone to host this), video game and board game night.
• Gaged interest for T-shirts priced at $10-15 (15 people interested depending on the design) — we will hold a T-shirt design contest in which the winner will get a free T-shirt.
• Proposed for next meeting (Sept 30 postponed to Oct 7): Presentation by Dr. Bigham

First general meeting

• Icebreakers?
• Get feedback on what members would like to see
• T-shirt interest at $10-15 price mark

Potential social events

• Hiking
• Beach day
• Video game / board game night

Potential academic events

• Brown bags coordinated with LARC
• Careers information panel (Career Services and alumni)
• Research presentations (Professors from SDSU/UCSD, graduate students)
• Thesis (Plan A) versus Test (Plan B) — alumni who have been through each process, Montezuma Publishing

Fall 2011 Colloquium

• Coordinated with ALI and LARC
• Proposal