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SLA Award for Public Outreach and Community Service – EXTENDED DEADLINE

The newly created SLA Award for Public Outreach and Community Service honors an SLA member or members for work that effectively impacts public awareness of social issues involving language and communication and/or represents a significant service to a particular community outside of the academy. Applicants may self-nominate or consent to the nomination of others.

Human subjects protection and oral history

A story by Beth McMurtrie in the Chronicle of Higher Education asks what ethical obligations historians have to people they interview. This is, in my opinion, an issue of tremendous importance for linguists, anthropologists, and all scholars who work with human subjects.

Video clips for teaching language ideologies

Several colleagues have suggested film and video clips that may be useful in teaching about language ideologies, including the value of standard and non-standard varieties, social stereotypes, and style shifting. This post includes several YouTube videos.

Ambiguity, jokes, and trick questions

“If you choose an answer at random, what is your probability of being correct?” The question is, I think, pragmatically ambiguous. It features neither lexical nor structural ambiguity, yet the joke hinges on understanding the question in more than one way.

Syllabus: Language and Colonialism

Syllabus for Janina Fenigsen’s 2010 graduate/undergraduate seminar, “Language and Colonialism”, at the University of Michigan Department of Anthropology

Evolution and ‘lies to children’

Why am I uncomfortable with talk of evolution in the news? Maybe I’m hearing echoes of Herbert Spencer. A brief exploration of Terry Gross and Daniel Lieberman’s discussion of The Story of the Human Body, and my own discomfort with the necessary simplification of complex ideas