Hudson Lecture 2018: “Scaling up: Getting to ‘language’ from individual differences”
The Wellington Branch of the Royal Society Te Apārangi presents the Hudson Lecture 2018 with speaker Professor Miriam Meyerhoff FRSNZ.
Presented by
Description
Linguistics studies the structure of human languages and how languages are used. Professor Meyerhoff's particular interest lies in the field of language contact. What happens when speakers of languages (or dialects) collide? How do speakers bridge their individual differences? And how does the way they resolve those differences shape what we come to call separate ‘languages’?
Professor Meyerhoff will outline partial answers for these questions, drawing on data from a number of diverse fieldwork sites: urban centres in the UK and Auckland, and smaller communities in Vanuatu and the Caribbean. Professor Meyerhoff will also share the innovative methods she has developed for modelling the bridge between differences at the level of individuals and at the level of dialects/languages.
She will also talk about how communities of speakers ‘scale up’ in order to identify their ways of talking as a distinct language by drawing on ongoing research in northern Vanuatu.
The Hudson Lecture is the Royal Society Te Apārangi Wellington Branch’s premier annual lecture. The Hudson Lecturer is awarded in recognition of the Lecturer’s achievements in Science or the promotion of Science and Technology. It honours George Vernon Hudson (1867 – 1946) who was a distinguished amateur naturalist and scientist. He was an original Fellow of what is now the Royal Society Te Apārangi and served on its Council from 1923-46. Hudson was President of the Wellington branch (then the Wellington Philosophical Society) in 1900-01 and 1911-12. A formal obituary and photograph appear in the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand 76, 264-266.
Speaker Bios
Professor Miriam Meyerhoff works in the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. Miriam is a leading sociolinguist, a discipline that studies how the use of language can affect aspects of society. Her research has focused on language use in New Zealand, the Pacific and the UK, with her latest work looking at variation in the English of Auckland citizens, a richly linguistically diverse community. Miriam was made a Fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi in 2017.