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« John McCarthy and Ellen Woolford in Japan | Main | UMass Amherst Linguists at the BU Child Language Conference»

Roepers in Africa

Tom Roeper, Laura Holland, and their son Tim Roeper were in Africa this summer. Tom filed this report about the language and the linguisics of the trip:

After a week working on demonstratives at ZAS in Berlin and watching soccer demonstrations around the World Cup (obviously derivationally connected), Laura and I went to South Africa (and later Tanzania and Zanzibar to visit our son Tim, working on an economics project there).

In July 5-7, at the University of Durban in South Africa I gave the keynote lecture at a joint meeting of the South African Theoretical Linguistics Society and Applied Linguistic Society on the topic of "How Fundamental Principles of Linguistic Theory Connect to Applied Work" where I used the DELV test to discuss how the "variable" property of questions can be examined in 1st, 2nd language acquisition, disorders,and fieldwork.

The conference was terrific--about 100 people came so there was a lot of cross-attendance at talks which ranged from very modern work on syntax/semantics to school teachers discussing how Zulu plays a role in classrooms. One topic was South African Black English. A textbook in physics that covered topics in English, Afrikaans, and Zulu all at once was launched. Every child is required to learn English, Afrikaans, and one Bantu language---TV soap operas often have people code-switching between English, Zulu, and Afrikaans at once. News is given in code-switching style in Zulu and English in the EAst, Xhosa in the West. Classes at Stellenbosch have to be 50% English, 50% Afrikaans. We have a lot to learn from their efforts at language policy.

I also gave workshops on nominalizations, wh-iterativity, and then on applied issues to graduate students at Durban and then Stellenbosch.

Tom

September 7, 2006 1:00 PM | 04:20 (2006-09-07) , faculty news