We are looking for about 10-15 courses to supplement and complement the offerings at the 2025 Linguistics Society of America Summer Institute, to be held in Eugene, OR, USA from July 7 to August 8, 2025. The Institute is the largest and most prestigious summer school for linguistics in the world, and has been held since 1928. Eugene is a city of ~170,000 people, home to the University of Oregon, located at the southern end of the beautiful Willamette Valley. Within a 90-minute drive, you will find snow-capped mountains, a gorgeous coastline, wild hot springs, deserted ocean beaches, top-notch wineries, and more.

The theme of the Institute is “Language in Use”, and we currently have particular strengths in

• Typology
• Descriptive and functional morphosyntax
• Usage-based, learning-theoretic and constructivist approaches to language acquisition
• Language variation and change, including frequency effects therein
• Construction grammar and formulaic language
• Information-theoretic and probabilistic approaches to linguistic theory
• Bayesian and connectionist approaches to speech and language processing
• Statistical methods in linguistic data analysis

Courses can be either 2.5 weeks (July 5 – July 22, or July 24 – August 8) or the full 5 weeks. Courses scheduled for the full 5 weeks should be relatively broad. Each course will meet twice a week for 100 minutes each time, either on Mondays and Thursdays or on Tuesdays and Fridays.

We are especially interested in courses that will provide alternative perspectives on the core questions of linguistics: why languages are the way they are, why and how do they change in the directions they do, how do we produce and comprehend speech or sign, and how do we become competent speakers or signers of a language.

We will reimburse the costs of traveling to Eugene for 1-2 instructors (up to $1500/person), provide housing and meals for the duration of the institute in university dormitories, as well a small honorarium (~$500 for a two-week course or $1000 for a 5-week course; split between the instructors of the course). Housing for the duration of the institute is available in the form of one-person dormitory rooms. For those bringing families, we will try to cover expenses of family housing up to the cost of a dorm room, but availability of family housing cannot be guaranteed.

Perhaps, the most important benefit of teaching at the institute is interacting with interesting colleagues. We are happy to announce that we have preliminary commitments from the following faculty:

Jenny Audring (Leiden), Harald Baayen (Tübingen), Matthew Baerman (Surrey), Danielle Barth (Australian National), Gašper Beguš (UC Berkeley), Balthasar Bickel (Zurich), Idan Blank (UCLA), Paul Boersma (Amsterdam), Laurel Brehm (UC Santa Barbara), Canaan Breiss (Southern California), Esther Brown (Colorado), Lucien Brown (Monash), Gabriela Caballero (UCSD), Sonia Cristofaro (Sorbonne), Kathleen Currie Hall (British Columbia), Don Daniels (Oregon), Scott DeLancey (Oregon), Dagmar Divjak (Birmingham), Robin Dodsworth (North Carolina State), Nick Ellis (Michigan), Mirjam Ernestus (Radboud), Sara Finley (Pacific Lutheran), Elaine Francis (Purdue), Richard Futrell (UC Irvine), Spike Gildea (Oregon), Adele Goldberg (Princeton), Simon Greenhill (Auckland), Stefan Gries (UC Santa Barbara), Zara Harmon (MPI for Psycholinguistics), Kaori Idemaru (Oregon), Laura Janda (Tromso), Gaja Jarosz (UMass Amherst), Zhuo Jing-Schmidt (Oregon), Vsevolod Kapatsinski (Oregon), Seppo Kittilä (Helsinki), Linda Konnerth (Regensberg), Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm (Stockholm), Chigusa Kurumada (Rochester), Natalia Levshina (Radboud), Maryellen MacDonald (Wisconsin), Kyle Mahowald (UT Austin), Alec Marantz (NYU), Bob McMurray (Iowa), Laura Michaelis (Colorado), Jeff Mielke (North Carolina State), Marianne Mithun (UC Santa Barbara), Emily Morgan (UC Davis), Fermin Moscoso del Prado Martin (Cambridge), Corrine Occhino (UT Austin), Pavel Ozerov (Innsbruck), Thomas Payne (Oregon), Florent Perek (Birmingham), Janet Pierrehumbert (Oxford), Michael Ramscar (Tübingen), Terry Regier (UC Berkeley), Arnaud Rey (CNRS Marseille), Caroline Rowland (MPI for Psycholinguistics), Mark Seidenberg (Wisconsin), Jason Shaw (Yale), Naomi Shin (New Mexico), Shahar Shirtz (Arizona State), Andrea Sims (The Ohio State), Kenny Smith (Edinburgh), Morgan Sonderegger (McGill), Benedikt Szmrecsanyi (Leuven), Rachel Theodore (Connecticut / NSF), Malathi Thothathiri (George Washington), Catherine Travis (Australian National), Rory Turnbull (Newcastle), Rosa Vallejos Yopán (New Mexico), Abby Walker (Virginia Tech), Stephen Wechsler (UT Austin), Andrew Wedel (Arizona), Rachel Weissler (Oregon), Colin Wilson (Johns Hopkins), Bodo Winter (Birmingham), Xin Xie (UC Irvine), Roberto Zariquiey (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru / Harvard), Roberto Zavala (CIESAS Sureste), Georgia Zellou (UC Davis), Fernando Zúñiga (Bern)

Preliminary titles and descriptions (where available) of some courses (to be updated; in the meantime, please enquire if you wonder whether your topic is already covered):

Danielle Barth (Australian National University), Corpus linguistics for field linguists

Corpus linguistics is an approach to understanding large amounts of data. This course is hands-on and will lead students through building corpora, annotation, text-mining, quantitative analysis and visualisation techniques using text data from web sources as well as ELAN transcriptions of spoken and signed languages. This course will provide the theoretical foundation to understand how corpora can answer research questions, as well as guided practice with computational skills. We will use an ELAN to R data pipeline to think about the steps of a research project including ethics, videography, transcription, annotation, qualitative and quantitative analysis and language comparison. By the end of this course, students will have achieved basic computational proficiency to perform corpus-based analyses on their own data for their own research. No prior programming experience is required, simply a willingness to learn

Spike Gildea (University of Oregon), Diachronic syntax

TBA

Stefan Th. Gries (UC Santa Barbara & JLU Giessen), Statistical measures in corpus linguistics: frequency, dispersion, association, and keyness

By now, corpus linguistics has for quite some time made many connections to (i) cognitive/usage-based theory, (ii) both observational and experimental psycholinguistic work, and (iii) more applied areas. Since corpus linguistics is ultimately a distributional discipline, these connections often take the form of quantitative measures; among those, frequencies of (co-)occurrence, dispersion, association, and keyness are among the most widely used. These notions are often employed to operationalize cognitive notions such as entrenchment, commonness, contingency, and aboutness and dozens of specific statistical measures have been promoted in the literature. In this course, we will first revisit very briefly the main corpus-linguistic measures that have been used most, before we then discuss a new approach towards this cluster of notions and issues, one that tries to improve on the last few decades of work in three different ways. Improvement 1 will be to **unify the statistical approaches** towards dispersion, association, and keyness by using only a single information-theoretic statistic for each of them. Improvement 2 will be to discuss the degree to which existing measures are correlated with frequency to such an extent that they really don’t measure much else and to discuss a solution to **’remove frequency from existing measures’ to arrive at cleaner, more valid measures**. Improvement 3 will be to realize that 40 years of looking for one measure to quantify X may have been mistaken and that we need to **measure and report multiple dimensions of information at the same time**. The course will pursue these goals and exemplify them in small case studies by using the programming language R on several corpora. Prior knowledge of R will not be required to follow the conceptual logic, but will be advantageous to follow the programming-related parts of the class.

Arnaud Rey (CNRS, Marseille, France), Implicit associative learning, language development, and non-human primates

In 1957, the publication of “Syntactic Structures” by N. Chomsky and “Verbal Behavior” by B. F. Skinner introduced two radically different approaches to the study of language. After a brief and critical presentation of these approaches, I will pave the way to current approaches based on language use and implicit statistical learning, showing that these approaches have slowly created a favorable climate for a paradigm shift in the study of language processes. I might also argue that the central notion of syntax should certainly be reconsidered, if not abandoned, when language development is considered. In a second part, I will assess the reasons why language has not developed in other species, notably in the non-human primates that are genetically closest to us. Contrary to the hypotheses invoking anatomical limitations or the absence of recursion, I will defend the idea of limitations in the motor control enabling primates to simply name the objects of our world, a central mechanism for explaining our capacity for abstraction.

Rory Turnbull (Newcastle University, UK), Modeling linguistic networks

Network science is the study of complex systems, formalized as networks consisting of nodes and links between nodes. This course provides an introduction to the application of network science to linguistics. Network models are applicable to a wide range of topics in nearly every linguistic subfield. This course will cover the use of word networks to model semantic, syntactic, morphological, or phonological relations among words; the use of social network and epidemiological modeling to examine the spread of linguistic patterns throughout a community; and how dynamical models can be used to simulate the growth or shrinkage of such networks. As such, these models touch on various topics in phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax, first and second language acquisition, historical and sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and beyond. The course will provide hands-on experience in coding and developing network analyses. Prior experience in Python or a similar programming language is beneficial but not required. Throughout the course, students will develop a small research project tuned to their interests.

Rachel Weissler (University of Oregon), Neurolinguistic methods

The central focus of this seminar is the neural machinery that is behind our ability to produce and understand language. We investigate the brain bases for linguistic knowledge regarding as being intertwined with our knowledge about culture, society, and social interaction. We’ll take an integrated approach, drawing on a range of state-of-the-art neuroimaging techniques, as well as theories of how linguistic computations and representations can inform, and be informed by, our understanding of the brain. This course will include a lab visit field trip to get hands-on experience with fMRI, to not only enhance learning experiences for students, but also to inspire future research and critique the functionality of tools like these to answer linguistic questions. While we’ll be drawing primarily on neurolinguistic research, we will also be engaging with theories from sociolinguistics, social psychology, and psycholinguistics. As a seminar, the course is discussion-based and everyone is expected to take an active role during each session and contribute fully to the task of building and sustaining a learning community. Fundamentally, I hope we all see this seminar as a sandbox for intellectual exploration and research development.

Bodo Winter (University of Birmingham, UK), Iconicity in language

This course provides a comprehensive introduction to current and past research on iconicity, the perceived resemblance between form and meaning in linguistic signals. Examples of expressions which exhibit iconicity include onomatopoeias, such as English “bang” and “beep”, or the American Sign Language sign for ‘tree’, which mimics the shape of a tree. For much of the history of linguistics, iconicity has been thought to be a fringe topic, relegated to the margins of language. In this course, you will learn that contrary to this view, new research from the last couple decades shows that iconicity plays a role across different levels of linguistic analysis (phonetics/phonology, morphology, syntax) in both spoken and signed languages. We will review many different phenomena that exhibit iconicity, including manual gesture, prosody, phonesthemes, ideophones, writing systems, and more. And we will discuss empirical studies demonstrating that iconicity helps jumpstart new communication systems, including in language learning and language evolution. Throughout all of this, we will learn how iconicity interacts with processes of conventionalization, and how this over time can erode iconicity. Against the backdrop of all this research, we will revisit and critically reflect some of the foundational tenets of linguistics, such as the principle of arbitrariness, according to which words are lacking in form-meaning connection.

Georgia Zellou (UC Davis), Linguistic variation during human-computer interaction

We are currently in a new era of human history: people are regularly using spoken language to communicate with technological agents and generative AI systems. This course considers both the theoretical implications and the practical applications of speech communication patterns during human-computer interaction. We will examine linguistic theories accounting for variation in human language patterns in tandem with human-computer interaction frameworks which seek to understand how people interact with non-human entities. We will consider questions such as: how are people’s speech and language patterns during human-AI interactions similar to, or different from, human-human interactions?; what are the mental models people use when communicating with technological agents, and how might they vary based on user experience, context, culture, and over the lifespan?; how can linguistic variation during HCI provide insight to the cognitive and social representations underlying linguistic communication more broadly?. We also touch on the implications of this line of work for addressing major societal issues in speech technology, such as: linguistic and social disparities in the availability and functioning of language models; the role of linguistic variation in credibility and the spread of misinformation; and applications for language learning.

 

Course proposals should include:

1. Course title
2. Name(s) and affiliation(s) of the proposer(s)
3. One-paragraph description of the course (300 words max)
4. Five keywords
5. Whether the course should be a five-week course (10 sessions), or a 2.5 week course (5 sessions). If a 2.5 week course, would it need to take place during the 1^st term (July 7-22) or the 2^nd term (July 24-Aug 8), or would either term work?
6. Short statement on how the course relates to the theme of the institute and the focus areas above (could be complementary to the areas above broadening coverage, or deepening coverage, or providing an alternative perspective), and what students will get out of it (200 words max)
7. Estimated enrollment (assuming 300 students who have 5 courses available to them at any one time); Note: we only need this for room allocation – estimating a small class size will not be held against the proposal
8. Preliminary schedule with readings (and/or activities) for each class period

Link for submissions: https://oregon.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_4OTlbzcO5vKVTp4

Deadline: August 1, 2024

Selections will be made by September 1, 2024

Feel free to contact me with any questions at vkapatsi@uoregon.edu

Vsevolod (Volya) Kapatsinski on behalf of myself, Kaori Idemaru and Spike Gildea, co-directors