The Center for Taiwan Studies has come back to campus in full force this year, with a roster of speaker events that stress the ties between Taiwan studies and other departments, and also enhance the artistic component of its lectures to bring Taiwan studies alive beyond textbooks. In one week alone, the department was abuzz with a total of three lectures, in both the center’s Workshop series and Sounds, Screens and Stages series.
Thanks to UC Santa Barbara’s Creative Computing Initiative, graduate student Kevin Whitesides incorporated hands-on multimedia projects in his Linguistics course Memes: When Language and Culture Go Viral . Donor Ross Dowd ‘94, has provided funds for Humanities and Fine Arts instructors and students to apply computer technology and digital tools to their areas of study.
UC Santa Barbara sociology major Olivia Roberts reflects on her discovery of the Linguistics Department and how the culture of language applies to her experience as an out-of-state college student.
Visiting linguistics professor Tracy Conner recently spoke at the UCSB Linguistics Department’s biweekly colloquium about her impactful research on syntactical patterns of African American English (AAE). Further study of these patterns could benefit educators and prevent young AAE speakers from wrongful speech disorder diagnoses.
While Olivia Saunders isn’t majoring in Linguistics, her major in Communication has provoked many questions from others about whether she wants to pursue speech therapy. That led her on a search to learn more about Linguistics, the major that is most closely linked to speech therapy. She found that its career options and students’ pursuits go much further, as she explains in this article.
In a series of video interviews, Humanities and Fine Arts professors share thoughts on the merits of their fields and their most rewarding experiences as teachers and researchers.
Linguistics professor Marianne Mithun was recently elected as the 95th President of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), the latest in a string of high profile UC Santa Barbara Linguistics achievements on the national level. As president, she will lead the meetings of the society, serve as the chair of the Executive Committee and appoint honorary members and non-elective committees. Meanwhile, linguistics professor Anne Charity Hudley received the LSA’s Linguistics, Language and Public award.
Chinese student Zhitao Kou describes how UC Santa Barbara eased his transition into American university life with programs for international students and step-up Linguistics department classes run by the English for Multilingual Students.
“ Each of us needed to write and present on current affairs such as presidential election, American social classes, American ethnicities and so on. Compared to other easy freshman courses, these classes are quite challenging,” writes Kou, who also benefited from one-on-one contact with professors.
The introduction of computers in the linguistics field have made it easier for researchers to verify their research and data. “It allows linguistic researchers to off-load the tedious part of verifying analyses to a computer,” said linguistics scholar Emily Bender in a recent talk at UC Santa Barbara.
Bender currently teaches at the University of Washington. Her main area of research is multilingual grammar engineering, computational semantics and the relationship between linguistics and computational linguistics.
UC Santa Barbara’s hire Anne H. Charity Hudley believes linguistics is a discipline that offers insight into one of the most intriguing aspects of human knowledge and behavior: how we use language.
Insults can be used to empower people rather than demean them, says Chloe Brotherton, who won the 2017 Undergraduate Research Slam with her presentation “A ‘Bitch’ by Any Other Name: Reclaiming Gendered Insult Terms.” Brotherton, who graduated from UC Santa Barbara in Linguistics, is now a graduate student at UC Davis.