Language Documentation and the Treatment of Spoken Language

| Zadar, March 21-24, 2018 |

Program | Programme


Description of the courses can be found here.

Here you can download the printable pdf-version of the conference programme and here you can download the printable pdf-version of the spring school programme. The programmes will be included in the conference materials handed to you at the registration.

Here you can download the book of abstracts.

Wednesday, March 21 (conference)


8:30 – 9:00 Registration (Aula Magna, University of Zadar, 2nd floor – Obala kralja Petra Krešimira IV 2, HR-23000 Zadar)

09:00 – 09:05 Opening session Lucija Šimičić, head of the Department of Linguistics of the University of Zadar

09:05 - 10:00 Invited talk Nikola Vuletić, University of Zadar: Experience in ethnolinguistic data collection for Linguistic atlas of maritime culture in Dalmatia and Kvarner

10:00 - 10:25 Eszter Tamasko: Methodological issues in the documentation of an endangered Croatian dialect in Hungary

10:25 - 10:50 Mislav Čaljkušić: The Vlachs toponimy in Žumberak

10:50 - 11:15 Mateja Šporčić: „Pomalo, pomalo, mladi su isli ća“ – Dokumentiranje govora Lubenica (Documenting the local idiom of Lubenice)

11:15 - 11:25 Coffee break

11:25 - 11:50 Ottavia Tordini: Investigating phonetic attrition and inter-language influence in Italian-Australian migrants

11:50 - 12:15 Isabella Matticchio: What do rhythm metrics tell us about Croatian and Italian monolingual and bilingual speech?

12:15 - 12:40 Claudia Roberta Combei: Challenges and benefits of collecting and analysing spoken non-native Italian

12:40 - 13:05 Antonia de Castro Burica: Say it any way you want. Challenges of spoken data-collection

13:05 - 14:30 Lunch break

14:30 - 14:55 Julie Rouaud: Extending spoken corpora for the study of loanword adaptation in bilingual contexts: The example of Montreal English

14:55 - 15:20 Alice Brunet: To what extent does parental input and discursive context influence how French-English bilingual children use the past-tense?

15:20 - 15:45 Ana Matić: Specialized corpora of spoken language – multiple gains on top of methodological challenges

15:45 - 16:10 Marija Vukšić: How doctors should (not) talk: Conversation strategies in medical encounters as perceived by patients

16:10 - 16:30 Coffee Break

16:30 - 19:00 10th Anniversary of the Department of Linguistics

Invited Talk (17:00 – 18:15) Ranko Matasović, Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Zagreb, Member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences: Čemu služi lingvistika? / What's the use of linguistics?


Thursday, March 22 (spring school)


09:00 - 11:00 Vincenzo Galatà

11:00 - 11:15 Coffee break

11:15 - 13:15 Vincenzo Galatà

13:15 - 15:00 Lunch break

15:00 - 17:00 Eugenio Goria

17:00 - 17:15 Coffee break

17:15 - 19:00 Fieldwork experiences: roundtable with the talks by Jeroen Willemsen, PhD student, Aarhus University and Alessio Muro, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies


Friday, March 23 (spring school)


09:00 - 11:00 Eugenio Goria

11:00 - 11:15 Coffee break

11:15 - 13:15 Eugenio Goria

13:15 - 15:00 Lunch break

15:00 - 17:00 Zvjezdana Vrzić

17:00 - 17:15 Coffee break

17:15 - 19:00 Dijana Ćurković, Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics: Field research in Croatian dialectology - from data collection to scientific analysis


Saturday, March 24 (spring school)


09:00 - 11:00 Zvjezdana Vrzić

11:00 - 11:15 Coffee break 

11:15 - 13:15 Zvjezdana Vrzić

13:15 - 15:00 Lunch break

15:00 - 17:00 Vincenzo Galatà

17:00 - 17:15 Coffee break

17:15 - 19:00 Question time - wrap up / school ends
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Radionice | Courses


Eugenio Goria, Ph.D. (University of Bologna)

The use of ELAN in language documentation: transcribing and annotating spoken corpora


The course is intended as a three-step approach to the use of ELAN for language documentation and, more generally, for the treatment of oral data. At the end of the course, the participants will be able to use ELAN for different purposes with a particular focus on three different and partly independent tasks: transcribing spoken data, creating a set of annotations and performing various types of queries.

During each lesson, an introductory part concerning one specific function of ELAN will be followed by a training session of variable length where the students will have the opportunity to practice with the transcription and annotation of real data in order to get more acquainted with the software. For this reason, the participants are strongly invited to bring their computers to get the most of the course. See the specific requirements below:

Software requirements:
The latest version of ELAN can be downloaded at this link: https://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/. Minor parts will involve the use of PRAAT http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/ and Audacity https://www.audacityteam.org/download/

Hardware requirements:
The participants must bring their laptop computers as well as well as their personal headphones. ELAN works better with keyboard shortcuts, so a mouse is not essential for the training part; however, beginners usually find it easier to use the mouse, especially while transcribing.

Course materials:
All audio materials and transcription samples needed for the training sessions will be provided at the beginning of the course.

The last session will be organized as a question-time where everyone can submit specific questions concerning their own datasets and get practical help. This is addressed to either beginners who already have some recordings and want to figure out a way to treat them with ELAN and to intermediate users who already have worked with ELAN and want to get improvements in specific parts of their work. For this reason, the participants are strongly encouraged to bring their own data and share their experiences in transcribing and annotating data.

List of the topics that will be dealt with in each lesson:

22/01 15:00 – 17:00
Introduction to ELAN: overview of the basic functions and interface
How to start a transcription (Tiers and annotations; Segmentation mode or annotation mode?; If my audio has poor quality; What conventions should I use?; Common mistakes)

23/03 09:00 – 11:00
Annotating with ELAN (Different annotations for different purposes; Tier, types and stereotypes; Controlled vocabularies; Manual POS tagging and morphological glosses; The annotation of multilingual interactions)
Going in and out of ELAN (The Export function; Multiple exports; The Import function)

23/03 11:00 – 13:00
How do I search my corpus? Searching single files; Regular expressions; N-grams; Searching multiple files; Complex searches


Vincenzo Galatà, Ph.D. (ISTC-CNR, Padua)

Best practices in language documentation: designing, building and managing your corpus of spoken data


Corpora are, in general, powerful resources able to document various aspects of language diversity and change. Yet, contrary to a common belief, building a corpus for spoken language documentation and research is a time-consuming and costly work that goes far beyond the “simple” collection of a certain number of recordings. Indeed, the construction of a corpus of spoken data opens up a myriad of options from which the researcher can choose, and there are many variables at play during the whole process of corpus design, collection and management. 

In this course, we will address and learn how to deal with the different aspects of this process: aspects that in the end may (positively or negatively) characterise your corpus as a resource.

Factors addressed will range from stimulus selection, elicitation techniques, participant sampling, recording conditions, recording equipment and software, recording characteristics, to data coding and management.

The course will also address and consider the use of different tools for specific pre- or post-processing operations on the collected data. Taking advantage of the interoperability that characterises some of the most known tools, the course will further provide:

1) practical “tips and tricks” consisting of (often) simple solutions contributing to a drastic reduction of possible human errors and at the same time ensuring the overall quality of the final resource (be it an audio recording or a time-aligned transcription or annotation);

2) possible solutions and procedures which may help you in significantly speeding up the completion of repetitive operations on hundreds of files thus reducing the time consuming workload implicit in the preparation and processing of resources of recorded speech.

At the end of the course, participants will have acquired key skills and best practices that will be useful to them in the creation and management of their own collected resources by further ensuring that the data gathered is valuable, and usable, even in other research domains not previously considered.

Where appropriate, short hands-on sessions will allow the attendees to grasp the key concepts and direct consequences of the choices made. To this end, please bring your own recording device with you (if you have one that is portable) and a copy of at least 5 of your own recordings (files) on which we will try and test a few things we will address and discuss during the lessons (if time allows it).

Bring your own laptop and headphones. Please also make sure you install the following tools on your computer before the school begins (follow the instructions on the download pages and select the appropriate version for your computer’s operating system):
- Praat v. 6.0.37: http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/
- Audacity: https://www.audacityteam.org/ 
- Advanced text editor; e.g. Notepad++ (Windows): https://notepad-plus-plus.org/download/v7.5.4.html, BBEdit (Mac): http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/
- Meld (Windows and Mac: check the download page for details): http://meldmerge.org/
- File renaming tool; e.g.: Bulk Rename Utility (Windows): http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/Download.php, NameChanger (Mac): https://mrrsoftware.com/namechanger/ 


Assistant professor Zvjezdana Vrzić (University of Rijeka)

Introduction to FieldWorks Language Explorer (FLEx)


FLEx is a software tool for language documentation and description and it is used to create dictionaries and glossed text collections, among others. Participants will gain familiarity with the main FLEx work areas, Lexicon (used to create a dictionary) and Texts and Words (used to create glossed texts) as well as Grammar and Lists. They will learn how to create, open and back up a project, how to create lexical entries and add examples, variants and crossreferences to them, how to create and edit texts and add translations to them, how to analyze texts grammatically and add and edit grammatical categories, how to insert lexical entries and examples form the texts into the dictionary, and how to format, export and print dictionaries and interlinearized texts. The course will include hand-on practice with the FLEx software. Under the guidance of the instructor, participants will do work on sample texts from Vlashki/Zheyanski (Istro-Romanian) and Gurung. They are encouraged to bring their own text in any language of interest to them to practice on.

Course plan:

Session 1: Friday, March 23, 2018, 15:00-17:00
What is FLEx and what is it used for? Example projects. Getting familiar with the FLEx window and its areas and how to create, open and back up a project.

Session 2: Saturday, March 24, 2018, 9:00-11:00
How to create lexical entries and add examples to them, how to add variants and cross-references, how to use and modify grammar category edit and dialect labels, how to create and edit texts and add translations to them, how to analyze texts grammatically and add and edit grammatical categories, how to insert lexical entries and examples form the texts into the dictionary.

Session 3: Saturday, March 24, 2018, 11:00-13:00
How to format, export and print dictionaries and interlinearized texts. Additional hand-on practice with the FLEx software on assigned or own data under the guidance of the instructor.

Before the workshop, participants should download and install onto their laptops the latest stable edition of FLEx (8.3.10 or higher, Fieldwork SE Full): http://software.sil.org/fieldworks/download/fw-8311/.

Participants should also download (and optionally print out) the FLEx workbook, developed by the CoLang team, available at: http://www.uta.edu/faculty/cmfitz/swnal/projects/CoLang/courses/FLEx_1/CoLang_FLEx1_Handout.pdf.

Additional materials for download (such as data files) will be placed in the course drive to be shared with registered workshop participants.

For different sources of help provided by SIL, the software developer, visit:
https://software.sil.org/fieldworks/support/getting-help-and-training/
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Registracija | Registration

Please scroll down for English version.

REGISTRACIJA SUDIONIKA JE OTVORENA
Poštovani sudionici ZLF-a,

otvorili smo postupak registracije. Svi sudionici ZLF-a (izlagači, izlagači postera, slušači) registriraju se plaćanjem kotizacije u iznosu od 250 HRK. Plaćanje se obavlja općom uplatnicom ili internetskim bankarstvom. Podatci za uplatu iz Hrvatske su sljedeći:

Primatelj: Sveučilište u Zadru, Mihovila Pavlinovića 1, Zadar
IBAN primatelja: HR5323300031100163243
Model i poziv na broj odobrenja: HR 00 50003-OIB platitelja
Opis plaćanja: KOTIZACIJA ZLF2018

Molimo vas da kotizaciju uplatite do 28. veljače 2018. godine. Potvrdu o uplati bit će potrebno predočiti prilikom registracije na dan konferencije. Molimo vas da nas o uplati kotizacije obavijestite e-mailom. Ako imate bilo kakvih pitanja o postupku registracije ili o plaćanju kotizacije, obratite nam se na zadarlinguisticforum@gmail.com.

Lijep pozdrav,

Organizacijski odbor ZLF2018
PARTICIPANT REGISTRATION IS OPEN

Dear ZLF participants,

official registration is now open. All participants (presenters, poster presenters, non-presenting participants) should register for the ZLF by paying the conference fee in the amount of 35 EUR. The conference fee can be paid by bank transfer to the following account:

Recipient name and address: Sveučilište u Zadru, Mihovila Pavlinovića 1, Zadar
Recipient IBAN: HR5323300031100163243
SWIFT/BIC code: SOGEHR22XXX
Bank name: SOCIETE GENERALE SPLITSKA BANKA, ŠPIRE BRUSINE 19, ZADAR
Remittance info/Remarks: 50003-YOUR NAME
Proforma invoice: 50003

Participants from abroad are required to cover all bank transfer fees. We kindly ask you to pay the fee by February 28, 2018. You will be required to present the receipt of payment at the registration desk. Once you have paid the conference fee, please let us know via e-mail. If you have any questions regarding registration and the registration fee, do not hesitate to contact us at zadarlinguisticforum@gmail.com.

Best regards,

ZLF2018 Organizing Committee
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Drugi poziv | Second Call


5th ZADAR LINGUISTIC FORUM
Language Documentation and the Treatment of Spoken Language
March 21-24, 2018, Zadar, Croatia
The Department of Linguistics at the University of Zadar hosts another event dedicated to some crucial topics in the domain of Language Studies. The 5th ZADAR LINGUISTIC FORUM: Language Documentation and the Treatment of Spoken Language consists of a conference and a spring school, which will be held from the 21st to the 24th March 2018. This four-day event will be focused on language documentation and on the elaboration of spoken language data with special emphasis on methodologies and tools used in this domain. 
Language endangerment is a well-known issue and the disappearance of many undocumented languages is a loss that many scholars of different domains have denounced. Less dramatic but nonetheless urgent is the need to consider spoken language as crucial in achieving better understanding of linguistic phenomena related to discourse and to the emergence of grammatical features. Language documentation and, more generally, the ability to gather, manage and analyse spoken language are two areas which display an increasing importance in applied linguistics and linguistics in general: they are at the core of this spring school and conference.
The conference will open the event on the 21st March. Doctoral students and young researchers are invited to submit abstracts for participating at the conference on subjects including, but not limited to the topics of language documentation and of spoken language research.
A 3-day training school will follow the conference from the 22nd to the 24th March. It will provide a unique opportunity for participants to get acquainted with some basic software used in language documentation and get some practical hands-on experience on how to collect, record, transcribe, and analyze spoken data. Experienced researchers working on language documentation and on the treatment of spoken language will be in charge of three courses that will guide the participants through the first steps in the use of several tools for the acquisition, treatment and management of spoken language data with a special attention to the issues connected to language documentation.
The event is thus aimed at doctoral students of linguistics and related disciplines (Croatian and Slavic Studies, English Studies, German Studies, Italian Studies, etc.), doctoral researchers who investigate different aspects of language and young researchers, but graduate students interested in language documentation are also encouraged to apply.

COURSES

Vincenzo Galatà, Ph.D. (ISTC-CNR, Padua)
Best practices in language documentation: designing, building and managing your corpus of spoken data

Contrary to a common belief, building a corpus for spoken language documentation and research is a time-consuming and costly work that goes far beyond the “simple” collection of a certain number of recordings. Indeed, the construction of a corpus of spoken data opens up a myriad of options from which the researcher can choose, and there are many variables at play during the whole process of corpus design, collection, acoustic elaboration and management of the data. In this course we will address, and learn how to deal with, the different aspects of this process also with hands-on sessions involving the use of open-source software.

Eugenio Goria, Ph.D. (University of Bologna)
The use of ELAN in language documentation: transcribing and annotating spoken corpora

This course will provide an introduction to the basic functions of ELAN and is conceived as a set of practical tutorials. Particular attention will be given to the typical issues arising at the first experience with the study of spoken language materials. At the end of the course, the participants will be able to use ELAN to: make a transcript, create a multi-level set of annotations, build a small corpus and perform various types of corpus searches.

Assistant professor Zvjezdana Vrzić (University of Rijeka)
Introduction to FLEx - software for language documentation

The workshop will present the possibilities and the use of the Fieldworks Language Explorer (FLEx), open-source software for creating dictionaries and interlinearizing texts. The participants will get to know how to make their own professional looking dictionaries, perform morphosyntactic text annotation and simply export lexical and text files into other software applications for language documentation and annotation.

APPLICATION AND ABSTRACT SUBMISSION

The participation to the meeting can follow two modalities:
        conference + training school;
        only training school.
The attendance of the training school is limited to 30 participants while the slots available for oral presentations at the conference on the first day will be a total of 15. The papers will be selected on the basis of two criteria: 1) quality of the proposal, and 2) relevance for the topic of the conference. After the selection, the authors whose paper is ranked after the first 15 on the basis of the aforementioned criteria will be invited to participate at a poster session.
Papers are formal presentations of original research, lasting a total of 20 minutes (15 minutes for presentation and 5 minutes for discussion). Posters offer an opportunity for an individualized, more informal presentation and discussion of the research.
English and Croatian are official languages of the workshop. Authors should apply for presenting at the conference by submitting an abstract of their presentation. Abstract proposals (200 – 400 words) may be submitted either in English or in Croatian and English. Each presenter may submit only one abstract proposal, co-authored by one or more authors. Abstract proposals should be carefully checked and proofread. All accepted abstracts will be subsequently available in an electronic form.

IMPORTANT DATES

Applicants for both the school and the conference should fill in the application form available at the Zadar Linguistic Forum website. The deadline for application and abstract submission is January 20, 2018. Authors will receive a notification of acceptance no later than January 31, 2018. Registration of participants will be open from February 1, 2018 until February 28, 2018.
A registration fee in the amount of 250 HRK (or 35 EUR) should be paid at the time of the registration and the payment receipt must be shown on the day of the conference. It will not be possible to pay the registration fee during the event itself. All information on the process of registration and payment will be available online. The fee includes training materials and coffee breaks.
Since during the training school computer tools will be used, the participants of the training school are kindly asked to bring their own laptop. Further information about the software to be installed will be provided later on.
All additional information about the 5th ZADAR LINGUISTIC FORUM: Language Documentation and the Treatment of Spoken Language, including the application form and contacts, may be found on the Zadar Linguistic Forum website:
https://zadarskilingvistickiforum.blogspot.hr/


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Prvi poziv | First Call



5th ZADAR LINGUISTIC FORUM
Language Documentation and the Treatment of Spoken Language
March 21-24, 2018, Zadar, Croatia
The Department of Linguistics at the University of Zadar hosts another event dedicated to some crucial topics in the domain of Language Studies. The 5th ZADAR LINGUISTIC FORUM: Language Documentation and the Treatment of Spoken Language consists of a doctoral conference and a spring school, which will be held from the 21st to the 24th March 2018. This four-day event will be focused on language documentation and on the elaboration of spoken language data with special emphasis on methodologies and tools used in this domain.
Language endangerment is a well-known issue and the disappearance of many undocumented languages is a loss that many scholars of different domains have denounced. Less dramatic but nonetheless urgent is the need to consider spoken language as crucial in achieving better understanding of linguistic phenomena related to discourse and to the emergence of grammatical features. Language documentation and, more generally, the ability to gather, manage and analyse spoken language are two areas which display an increasing importance in applied linguistics and linguistics in general: they are at the core of this spring school and PhD conference.
The doctoral conference will open the event on the 21st March. Doctoral students are invited to submit abstracts for participating at the conference on subjects including, but not limited to the topics of language documentation and of spoken language research.
A 3-day training school will follow the conference from the 22nd to the 24th March. It will provide a unique opportunity for participants to get acquainted with some basic software used in language documentation and get some practical hands-on experience on how to collect, record, transcribe, and analyze spoken data. Experienced researchers working on language documentation and on the treatment of spoken language will be in charge of three courses that will guide the participants through the first steps in the use of several tools for the acquisition, treatment and management of spoken language data with a special attention to the issues connected to language documentation. The event is thus aimed at doctoral students of linguistics and related disciplines (Croatian and Slavic Studies, English Studies, German Studies, Italian Studies, etc.), doctoral researchers who investigate different aspects of language and young researchers, but graduate students interested in language documentation are also encouraged to apply.

COURSES

Vincenzo Galatà, Ph.D. (ISTC-CNR, Padua)
Best practices in language documentation: designing, building and managing your corpus of spoken data
Contrary to a common belief, building a corpus for spoken language documentation and research is a time-consuming and costly work that goes far beyond the “simple” collection of a certain number of recordings. Indeed, the construction of a corpus of spoken data opens up a myriad of options from which the researcher can choose, and there are many variables at play during the whole process of corpus design, collection, acoustic elaboration and management of the data. In this course we will address, and learn how to deal with, the different aspects of this process also with hands-on sessions involving the use of open-source software.

Eugenio Goria, Ph.D. (University of Bologna)
The use of ELAN in language documentation: transcribing and annotating spoken corpora
This course will provide an introduction to the basic functions of ELAN and is conceived as a set of practical tutorials. Particular attention will be given to the typical issues arising at the first experience with the study of spoken language materials. At the end of the course, the participants will be able to use ELAN to: make a transcript, create a multi-level set of annotations, build a small corpus and perform various types of corpus searches.

Assistant professor Zvjezdana Vrzić (University of Rijeka)
Introduction to FLEx - software for language documentation
The workshop will present the possibilities and the use of the Fieldworks Language Explorer (FLEx), open-source software for creating dictionaries and interlinearizing texts. The participants will get to know how to make their own professional looking dictionaries, perform morphosyntactic text annotation and simply export lexical and text files into other software applications for language documentation and annotation.

APPLICATION AND ABSTRACT SUBMISSION

The participation to the meeting can follow two modalities:
        conference + training school;
        only training school.
The attendance of the training school is limited to 30 participants while the slots available for oral presentations at the conference on the first day will be a total of 15. The papers will be selected on the basis of two criteria: 1) quality of the proposal, and 2) relevance for the topic of the conference. After the selection, the authors whose paper is ranked after the first 15 on the basis of the aforementioned criteria will be invited to participate at a poster session.
Papers are formal presentations of original research, lasting a total of 20 minutes (15 minutes for presentation and 5 minutes for discussion). Posters offer an opportunity for an individualized, more informal presentation and discussion of the research.
English and Croatian are official languages of the workshop. Authors should apply for presenting at the conference by submitting an abstract of their presentation. Abstract proposals (200 – 400 words) may be submitted either in English or in Croatian and English. Each presenter may submit only one abstract proposal, co-authored by one or more authors. Abstract proposals should be carefully checked and proofread. All accepted abstracts will be subsequently available in an electronic form.
Applicants for both the school and the conference should fill in the application form available at the Zadar Linguistic Forum website.
The deadline for abstract submission is December 31, 2017. Authors will receive a notification of acceptance no later than 31 January 2018. Registration of participants will be open from 1 February 2018 until 28 February 2018. A registration fee in the amount of 250 HRK (or 35 EUR) should be paid at the time of the registration and the payment receipt must be shown on the day of the conference. It will not be possible to pay the registration fee during the event itself. All information on the process of registration and payment will be available on-line. The fee includes training materials and coffee breaks. The use of a PC will be assured to the students attending the training school, but the use of one's own laptop is encouraged.
All participants will receive a certificate of participation that may be used at their home institutions for the assignment of ECTS credit.
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Prijava | Application

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[ZLF 2017] Prezentacije s pozvanih predavanja i radionica | Plenaries and workshops presentations

Professor Kees de Bot 
University of Groningen, the Netherlands and University of Veszprem, Hungary
What counts as Evidence in Applied Linguistics?
Stela Letica Krevelj, PhD 
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
Ethical issues in language acquisition research
Anđel Starčević, PhD
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
The sociolinguistic interview and language ideologies: variables and challenges
WORKSHOPS:
Use of corpora in linguistic research
 convened by Nikola Ljubešić, PhD 
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
Statistical methods in linguistics
convened by professor Višnja Pavičić Takač 
Faculty of Humanities, University of Osijek
Izvori i pretraživanje literature za lingviste
Nikica Gardijan, Sveučilište u Zadru
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[ZLF 2017] Program | Programme


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[ZLF 2017] Knjižica sažetaka | Book of abstracts


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[ZLF 2017] Pozvana predavanja i radionice | Plenary talks and workshops

POZVANA PREDAVANJA | PLENARY TALKS

prof. dr. sc. Kees de Bot
Sveučilište u Groningenu, Nizozemska i Sveučilište u Veszpremu, Mađarska | University of Groningen, the Netherlands and University of Veszprem, Hungary
What counts as Evidence in Applied Linguistics?

What constitutes evidence in science has been debated for centuries and some of the leading philosophers have written about it. In this presentation some first thoughts on what is evidence will be presented. A core issue is that in the humanities as opposed to mathematics, we have no proof, only evidence. Following the American philosopher of science Peter Aichinstein, it will be argued that ultimately what matters I whether there is ‘reason to believe’ that particular evidence supports a hypothesis or not. This will be illustrated using the examples three controversial issues: ‘The bilingual advantage’, ‘the role of the non-dominant hemisphere in bilingual processing and learning’, and ‘the effectiveness of early bilingual education’.

dr. sc. Stela Letica Krevelj 
Filozofski fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagrebu | Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
Ethical issues in language acquistion research

Ethics is considered an essential part of any valid research and it is generally defined as norms for conduct that distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. However, the mere existence of numerous official guidelines, in the form of steering documents, and regulatory bodies, such as ethics committees, suggests that there is more to ethics than common sense. There are many disagreements on what constitutes ethically appropriate behaviour in research and some of them are due to different interpretations of the same ethical principle concerning the specifics of a research field and methodology. The aim of this interactive presentation is to help young researchers deal with the ethical dilemmas they are likely to face in preparing and conducting research. Reflecting on ethical issues in the study of language, or multiple languages, we will take the most basic formal tool, informed consent, to introduce researchers to important ethical principles and methods in ethical decision-making. We will discuss issues related to doing research with children and tackle some ethical issues rarely discussed in language research such as deception, participants' voices, and linguistic realities. In the presentation we will use some real cases as examples of issues that may arise and the audience is invited to share their own issues and concerns.

dr. sc. Anđel Starčević
Filozofski fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagrebu | Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
The sociolingustic interview and language ideologies: variables and challanges

The sociolinguistic interview and participant observation (Labov 1984, Tagliamonte 2006) are classical fieldwork methods which nonetheless keep spurring researchers to critical (self-)reflection. This presentation will focus on some of the fieldwork challenges which arose during the author’s research into the bilingualism of a four-person Croatian immigrant family in Toronto, Canada. It will address the following issues: 1) how do we elicit a respondent’s ‘spontaneous’ production in the non-spontaneous interview situation with asymmetrical power relations, and how do we assess the role of the researcher as a factor which influences the respondent’s responses on several levels, 2) how much of the research design should we share with the respondent, considering its possible influence on their production, 3) how do we approach those results in which the respondent’s responses differ from what has been observed by the researcher, and 4) should we allow respondents to listen to the recorded material if they ask to? Since this type of research unavoidably makes the researcher part of the situation which is the object of their study, the decisions which they make about these issues will be reflected in the research results. Given that a respondent’s language ideologies are also a major factor in their language use, researchers cannot afford to neglect this integral part of language behaviour. Typical ideologies in the field include the ideology of the standard language (Milroy 2001), the monoglossic ideology (Wardhaugh & Fuller 2015) and the ideology of the native speaker (Doerr 2009). The second part of the presentation will give an overview of some of the (normative) ideologies which are taken for granted and perceived as ‘commonsensical’ by average speakers, sometimes even by professional linguists. As a result, important information about the field is omitted in linguistic descriptions, which is why it is essential that researchers reflect on their own language ideologies, often normalized as ‘neutral’, ‘scholarly’ views on language phenomena. 

RADIONICE | WORKSHOPS

voditelj dr. sc. Nikola Ljubešić
Filozofski fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagrebu | Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
Data-driven linguistics: How to collect, process and analyse corpora

In this tutorial we will touch on the three main technical challenges in corpus linguistics: collecting (or borrowing) data for your corpus, processing the collected data with language technologies and analysing corpora with the tools available. In the first part we will consider two possible approaches: collecting your own data by crawling the web or using data dumps and APIs, or reusing data already collected by fellow researchers. In the data processing partwe will make acquaintance with available language technologies, their strengths and especially their weaknesses. Finally, in the analysis part we will primarily focus on the Sketch Engine tool for corpus search and analysis, but will touch on more potent methods such as statistical analysis, inference and data visualisation in R.

voditeljica prof. dr. sc. Višnja Pavičić Takač 
Filozofski fakultet Sveučilišta u Osijeku | Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Osijek
A Linguist's Foray into Statistics: How numbers help you discover what you want to know

This workshop will provide participants with an overview of most commonly used statistical methods in (applied) linguistic research. It will also include a demonstration of IBM SPSS software as well as examples of studies in which some of the methods were used. Drawing on the presenter's experience in discovering and learning about statistics, the workshop primarily aims at demystifying statistics and showing how it can be utilized as a useful tool in (applied) linguistic research.

voditelj Nikica Gardijan, mag. bibl.
Knjižnica Sveučilišta u Zadru | Library of University in Zadar
Izvori i pretraživanje literature za lingviste

U sklopu ove radionice polaznici će se upoznati s tehnikama pretraživanja znanstvenih informacija s naglaskom na lingvistiku i srodne znanosti. Tokom prvog dijela radionice polaznici će se na teorijskoj razini upoznati s načinima definiranja informacijskog upita – određivanja ključnih riječi za pretraživanje teme i korisnim tehnikama pretraživanja (kraćenje, Booleovi operatori itd.). Osim toga, polaznicima će biti prezentirane i dvije najveće citatne i bibliografske baze podataka (Scopus i Web of Science Core Collection) te Hrvatska znanstvena bibliografija – CROSBI te knjižnični katalozi hrvatskih i svjetskih knjižnica. U drugom dijelu radionice polaznici će se baviti praktičnim pretraživanjima u svrhu usvajanja novih tehnika koje su im prezentirane.
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