engl 6006 guest speaker series

17 September 2008

“Flexible Like Water”:

The Bruce Lee School of Linguistic Inquiry

Dr. Shannon T. Bischoff

Department of English

UPR-Mayagüez

CHARDÓN 318 @ 6:30 p.m.

ABSTRACT: In the summers of 1927 through 1929 Gladys Reichard, at the request of Franz Boas, recorded some forty narratives of Tom Miyal and Dorothy Nicodemus, the last speakers of the Coeur d’Alene language, and edited the materials with several Coeur d’Alene community members. Unfortunately, the narratives were never fully analyzed, published, or made accessible at the time. This talk discusses recent efforts to make these materials available to the Coeur d’Alene community for revitalization purposes and to the linguistic community for research purposes. The presentation focuses on the link between revitalization efforts (a largely applied linguistic, socio-linguistic, and language policy task) and research strategies employed primarily within the following three sub-fields of linguistics: anthropological, theoretical, and computational. It also discusses a number of unexpected challenges which, in the words of Bruce Lee, require one to be “flexible like water.”

INFORMATION: Contact Jocelyn A. Géliga Vargas (787-832-4040 ext. 3096/3064; jgeliga@www.uprm.edu)

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