NACLO

The North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad will take place on Thursday, January 31, 2013.  Interested students should register at:  http://www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu/reg_student.php 

Last year Milwaukee had the second highest number of students compete in NACLO, coming in after Carnegie Mellon University where the competition began.

I also recommend googling "NACLO Sample Problems" to print out problems from the last few years of competition.  (The answer keys are available, too--phew!)

How To Write a Daily Language Observation

Every day Linguistics students are expected to be keen observers of language, making notes about the interesting things they hear.  From time to time, students need to write up a more formal language observation.  They need to describe the context of the situation where they observed something interesting, they must explain in detail exactly what they heard, they must create a hypothesis about why the interesting thing was said in the way it was, and finally they must figure out a way that they could potentially test or do research to determine if their hypothesis was correct.  Recent topics that students have written about include the use of the words "finna" and "yous," as well as a list of the most recent slang being spoken in New York City from a student who visited recently.

Body Language

My students showed an interest in learning more about the role of body language in communication, so I purchased the Secrets of Body Language DVD (2009) put out by the History Channel.  We started watching it yesterday and over the weekend students are focusing their observations of language on body language. We will finish the documentary on Tuesday and discuss what students observed.  The film started by saying that only seven percent of human communication comes directly from language itself and the other 93 percent comes from tone, pitch, microexpressions, and gestures.