Previous DALDs
Since 2018 the AVT and Anéla invite one or more plenary speakers to address the DALD audience, varying between more theoretical and more applied topics.
2023 Annemiek Hammer and Martine Coene
The keynote was by Annemiek Hammer and Martine Coene (Language and Hearing Center Amsterdam, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Language is a vehicle for participation in community. The ability to receive and produce messages is central to human interaction, from enabling us to communicate about our basic needs to allowing us to share our most complex thoughts and ideas with those around us. As the freedom to express ourselves through language is a fundamental human right, all humans should be able to send and receive communicative messages, regardless of their age or capacity (McLeod 2018).
For individuals who have reduced access to spoken language effective communication may be compromised. It is well known that barriers to communication particularly affect children and elderly adults, individuals who do not speak the dominant language of their community, and people with reduced auditory, visual or communication abilities.
In this talk, we would like to provide an overview of the challenges that individuals with hearing disabilities are facing when accessing spoken communication. Over the years, we have set up various studies providing insights on potential facilitators and barriers to communication experienced by children, adolescents, students, working adults and elderly people with hearing loss.
The common thread connecting these different populations involves an increased adverse effect of noise on speech understanding as compared to hearing peers. Across the lifespan, noise is omnipresent in many aspects of daily life and is known to interfere with oral communication. In addition to acoustic factors, speech understanding is influenced by linguistic features of the target language and by cognitive features of the language users. Regarding linguistic features, our experimental work with children and adults provides evidence that one of the crucial factors determining perceptive accuracy is syntactic complexity. When listeners are confronted with passive sentences or embedded clauses against a background of noise they will produce significantly lower numbers of correct repetitions than when they are asked to repeat simple SVO sentences. In elderly listeners with a hearing loss, the observed ‘syntactic complexity’ effect is even more pronounced and may be linked to age-related declines in inhibitory control. As for children enrolled in primary and high school education and students enrolled in higher education programs, we will present a similar adverse effect of noise on communication performance and overall academic success. We will provide evidence coming from a variety of studies based on different populations of Dutch-speaking children and young students between 3 and 25 years old enrolled in mainstream and special education programs.
Finally, during this talk we will also address the way in which everyday communication and interactions have been fundamentally reshaped by the social restrictions and safety measures which have been adopted in response to Covid-19 induced social distancing measures and personal protective equipment. We will present the results of the NWO-financed project ‘Erbij Horen’ investigating the way in which these changes have exacerbated communication barriers faced by different populations with hearing loss living in the Netherlands. The results of this project illustrate not only the complex nature of speech understanding in day-to-day conditions but also the importance of equal accessibility to communication in view of the participation of all individuals in society at any age.
2022 Jacomine Nortier & Gerrit-Jan Kootstra
In April 2021, we suffered a tremendous loss when Pieter Muysken passed away. We miss him as a friend, a colleague, a most distinguished linguist and our guide. In the 2022 keynote discussion, Gerrit Jan Kootstra (Radboud University Nijmegen) and Jacomine Nortier (Utrecht University) explored the impact of his work and person on the field of linguistics and the language sciences in general.
"It is impossible to cover the full range of activities and research that he initiated or actively participated in. After an introduction where we focus on Pieter as a person and how that related to his work, we will highlight his integrative approach to language research, which had an impact on many disciplines of language research (linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, historical linguistics). We do this in the form of a discussion where both of us give examples of how Pieter’s lines of work influenced our own work and the language sciences in general. We strongly believe that Pieter’s integrative approach to the language sciences should be continued and expanded. Together with the audience we hope we will be able to envisage future directions in which Pieter Muysken’s legacy will inspire us."
2021 Rebecca Clift & Martina Wiltschko
For this year's Annual Linguistics Day we had an exciting new format for our keynote presentation. Dr. Rebecca Clift from the University of Essex and prof. Martina Wiltschko, ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, both presented a short keynote talk using the same data. By using several short video clips of social interaction, they explored the ways in which embodied interaction intersects with talk, and examined the conceptual underpinnings of talk as social action. Dr. Rebecca Clift focused on the intersection of talk and embodiment whilst Prof. Martina Wiltschko discussed embodied interaction and the social and cognitive underpinnings. The presentations were followed by a discussion between the two keynote presenters, led by dr. Mark Dingemanse from Radboud University.
2020 Pia Quist
Dialect and multi-ethnic youth style in a suburban social housing area – style variability and belonging
For the 2020 plenary lecture, Pia Quist presented the results of her empirical study into the youth language in Vollsmose, an ethnically and linguistically diverse neighbourhood in Denmark, characterised in Danish media as a 'ghetto'. Using an analysis of linguistic properties of this multi-ethnic youth language, she showed that it is used in complex interactions that vary systematically with the social organisation of the youth. Additionally it was demonstrated that some of the youth are eminent style-shifters. Her conclusion argues for an inclusion of speakers’ embodied histories and attachments to places into the study of style-variability.
2019 Martin Haspelmath
Under the title 'Towards an IPA for morphosyntax', Martin Haspelmath set himself and our field the challenging task of setting up a general vocabulary for morphosyntax. Just like we have a universal standard for representing sounds in the IPA, in this talk, Martin argued that we need an analogous set of conventions for morphosyntactic notion or terminology, an “IMA” – a set of definitions for some basic terms (such as “adjective”, “reflexive pronoun”, “serial verb construction”). This is desirable given the widespread terminological inconsistencies and uncertainties in the literature, but a hard task. Nevertheless, Martin suggests that this becomes much easier once one recognizes (i) that giving definitions of general terms is very different from finding the natural kinds of universal grammar, and (ii) that much of the confusing diversity of terminological usage comes from a premature conflation of language description and general grammar. A lively discussion followed, with plenty of food for thought!
2018 Ray Jackendoff
The title of the first plenary lecture at the GTD was 'The Texture of the Lexicon: Relational Morphology in the Parallel Architecture'. Jackendoff addressed the question 'What does a language user store in the lexicon, and in what form?', exploring this question in the context of the Parallel Architecture (Jackendoff 2002). Within this outlook, lexical items are pieces of phonological, (morpho)syntactic, and semantic structures, and morphology is the grammar of word-sized pieces of structure. This leads to a new perspective on productive patterns: the principles used to build novel structures are simply a subset of the schemas in the lexicon. Connecting the model to larger issues, Jackendoff concluded that we need to reconsider Humboldt's 'infinite use of finite means.'
