Mois : mars 2022

Le mercredi 6 avril 2022, de 10h à 11h, Maria Khachaturyan fera une présentation intitulée «Language contact and multilingual language socialization: a case study of Mano and Kpelle in Guinea».

Résumé:

This talk presents an ongoing project on multilingualism and language contact between Mano and Kpelle, two Mande languages spoken in the South-East of Guinea. It aims to address the following puzzle: while language contact can be responsible for convergence in certain structural features and yield in particular areal phenomena, languages in contact have an option to remain distinct, such that overall differences do not diminish and in some cases even increase (Evans 2019). One key to the puzzle, I argue, lies in individual language socialization trajectories, whereby transfer features in early stages of acquisition get « sorted out » and discriminated in the process of lifelong learning. Some residue of transfer effects may remain, however, leading to stable contact-induced change. I discuss language ecology and ideology as factors shaping the language learning process in complex ways. I address these questions through a case study of the acquisition of reflexive marking in Mano under the influence of Kpelle.

Lien Zoom pour assister au séminaire : https://cnrs.zoom.us/j/95654741763

ID  réunion : 956 5474 1763

Code secret : 81Llacan35

Le mercredi 23 mars 2022, de 10h à 11h, Emily Prud’hommeaux fera un exposé intitulé «Integrating machine learning in the language documentation pipeline».

Abstract:

Despite many advances in technology for capturing, transcribing, and annotating speech recordings, linguists and language communities engaged in language documentation projects continue to face the obstacle of the “transcription bottleneck”. This is especially true for endangered languages, which have few first-language speakers and often lack an established writing system. In this talk, I describe three ongoing technology-driven efforts to support the transcription and morphological annotation of three critically endangered languages indigenous to North America. We find that while documentation is often faster and more accurate when using machine learning support, individuals vary in their opinions on the utility of these technologies. In addition, our results suggest that the quality of the data used to train machine learning models is often not as crucial for accuracy as the overall quantity of data. Finally, I discuss ideas for further stimulating the integration of machine learning tools into language documentation projects.

Biography:

Emily Prud’hommeaux is the Gianinno Family Sesquicentennial Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Boston College. She received her BA (Harvard) and MA (University of California, Los Angeles) in Linguistics, and her PhD in Computer Science and Engineering (Oregon Health and Science University). Her research focuses on natural language processing and speech signal processing for small datasets, with a particular focus on endangered languages and child language.

Lien Zoom pour assister au séminaire : https://cnrs.zoom.us/j/95654741763

ID  réunion : 956 5474 1763

Code secret : 81Llacan35

Le mercredi 9 mars 2022, de 10h à 11h, Mark VAN DE VELDE et Dmitry IDIATOV feront une présentation intitulée «Une première analyse du mbula, langue du groupe Jarawan Bantu».

Résumé:

Nous présenterons une première analyse de la langue mbula. Le mbula est parlée aux bords du fleuve Bénoué dans l’état d’Adamawa du Nigeria et appartient au groupe Jarawa, dont on estime qu’elle fait partie des langues bantoues, malgré sa situation géographique excentrée. Cette classification a été faite sur la base de quelques listes de mots qui circulent depuis le début du 20ème siècle. Par ailleurs, relativement peu était connu sur les langues Jarawa jusqu’à présent. Si le mbula est clairement bantoïde de par son vocabulaire, sa structure grammaticale diffère fortement de celle des langues bantoues au sens stricte. Il n’y a plus aucune trace d’un système de classe (hormis les traces d’anciens préfixes dans les thèmes nominaux), et le système temporel riche des langues bantoues a été remplacé par un système relativement plus simple, où le domaine temporel est divisé entre futur et non-futur.

Lien Zoom pour assister au séminaire : https://cnrs.zoom.us/j/95654741763

ID  réunion : 956 5474 1763

Code secret : 81Llacan35