Every other year, the Linguistic Society of America holds its Summer Institute, bring together faculty and students from around the world for 4-6 weeks of courses, workshops, and lectures. This past summer, the University of Oregon in Eugene hosted the LSA Summer Institute from July 7 to August 8. The theme of the Institute was Language in Use.
Ohio State Linguistics was very well-represented at the Institute, including courses offered by current faculty and PhD alumni, and current and former graduate and undergraduate student attendees.
Current OSU Linguistics Professors Cynthia Clopper and Andrea Sims taught courses on Speech Accommodation, Convergence, and Imitation and Introduction to Quantitative Morphology: Questions, Methods, Models, respectively. Courses were also taught by Linguistics PhD alumni Robin Dodsworth (Linguistic Variation and Social Networks), Kathleen Currie Hall (The Message Shapes Phonology), Jeff Mielke (Tongue Movements and Phonology), Rory Turnbull (Modeling Linguistic Networks), Abby Walker (Sociolinguistic Perception), and Tracey Weldon (Word Up! A Focus on the African American Lexicon).
In addition, PhD alumna Tracey Weldon held one of five named professorships at the Institute, as the American Dialect Society Professor, and gave one of the Institute-wide Forum Lectures on That’s a Word! Middle Class African American English and the Significance of the Spoken Word.
Finally, recent Ohio State Linguistics BA alumna, Larisa Bryan, won third place in the first-term student poster competition at the Institute for her work with Erica Hsieh on Negation and Prosody in Three American English Varieties: A Case Study.