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April 10, 2012 "Language, Style, and the Adolescent Social Order"
SRI Menlo Park Click here for map and directions Adolescents and preadolescents provide the linguistic primordial soup from which most vocal trends and popular slang emerge. A prime example is the conversation filler “like.” Use of “like” is now widely adopted, moving from the Valley Girls of the 1980s, across the gender boundary and all the way up the age range. To commemorate this, “like” made its way into the Webster’s New World College Dictionary (Fourth Edition), described as use “apparently without meaning or syntactic function, but possibly as emphasis.” A similar linguistic influence spreading relentlessly from the San Fernando Valley is “high rising terminal” (uptalk). At our April café, we are pleased to host Stanford Linguistics Professor Penny Eckert. Her current research concentrates on social motivations for the spread of sound change. She has done extensive ethnographic studies in high schools and elementary schools, examining how current sound changes function as a resource for the construction of styles and identities. Dr. Eckert will discuss how linguistic innovation arises as teenagers develop identities that are independent of their families, and how this takes place in the broader context of the age cohort's development of an independent social order. Dr. Eckert is Professor of Linguistics and, by courtesy, Anthropology, at Stanford University. She received her BA from Oberlin College, and her MA and PhD from Columbia University. She is author of Jocks and Burnouts, Linguistic Variation as Social Practice, and Language and Gender (with Sally McConnell-Ginet). Café Scientifique events are open to all free of charge. No reservations are necessary.
Sponsored by Altos Therapeutics and SRI, Café Scientifique is a place where anyone can come to explore the latest ideas in science and technology and debate science issues outside a traditional academic context. We meet monthly to discuss a variety of science topics. Feel free to forward this message to anyone you think could be interested. Join us at SRI in Menlo Park Coffee, tea and biscotti will be complimentary, provided by SRI Courtesy of Kepler's there will be a drawing for a $30 gift card for books or merchandise at Kepler's on El Camino Real in Menlo Park. Those who choose to enter the drawing will have their names added to the Kepler's mailing list. Special thanks to Kepler's for supporting Cafe Sci. Café Scientifique is a place where anyone can come to explore the latest ideas in science and technology. The Café provides a forum for debating science issues outside a traditional academic context. We are committed to promoting public engagement with science and to making science accountable - all spoken in plain English. There is no admission charge to attend our events. Building on its great success outside the United States, Café Scientifique Silicon Valley is the first such Café on the West Coast. We meet monthly to discuss a variety of science topics. |
