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Linguistic Voices on Campus was first designed as instructional material for the course "The Structure of English", taught by Anja Wanner at UW-Madison. In this podcast series, she invites scholars and students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison to discuss common beliefs about language through the lens of their own research. |
| Podcast #1 | Feral Children | |
© National Gallery of Art |
Mark
Louden, Professor of German at UW-Madison, talks about the history
of "feral children", also known as "wolf children, i.e.
children who grew up abandoned or isolated, and without learning a language.
Will they acquire language later in life? What can linguists learn from
their language development? Cases that are discussed include that of Victor
("The Wild Boy of Averyon"), Genie, and Kaspar Hauser. |
click
here to start you can listen to each podcast on your computer, or you can subscribe to the series on iTunes |
| Podcast #2 | American Dialects | |
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Joan Hall, Chief Editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), explains why studying dialects is not just for linguists. She talks about the history of DARE and its contribution to solving a criminal case. She gives lots of examples of old and new regionalisms. Listen -- and you won't have to scratch your head if you ever get invited to a scramble. |
click
here to start
podcast (20 mins., 18 MB) |
| Podcast #3 | There Are No Primitive Languages | |
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Photo: Michael Forster Rothbart, |
Monica Macaulay, Professor of Linguistics at UW-Madison, discusses the myth that not all languages are created equal and that there are languages with little grammar and hardly any complexity. She talks about her research on Native American languages and takes a stand against the assumption that the structure of languages determines our perception of the world (Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis). And what's up with those dozens of words the Eskimo are supposed to have for "snow" anyway? | click here
to start podcast (22 mins., 20 MB) |
| Podcast #4 | The Grammar of Shakespeare, Part I: "Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle" | |
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Richard Knowles, Professor of English at UW-Madison and one of the editors of Shakespeare's plays for the New Variorum Edition (published by the Modern Language Association), discusses characteristics of Shakespeare's grammar and of Early Modern English in general. Part I of this podcast focuses on Shakespeare's vocabulary -- invented words, borrowed words, derived words, inkhorn words, puns, and malapropisms. |
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| Podcast #5 | The Grammar of Shakespeare, Part II: "Thou speakest wiser than thou art ware of" | |
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This is part II of a conversation with Shakespeare scholar Richard Knowles, Professor of English at UW-Madison, about linguistic aspects of Shakespeare's works. This podcast focuses on grammar -- the usage of pronouns ("thou" vs. "you"), the rise of the auxiliary "do", the point of double negation, and the distinction (or lack thereof) between adjectives and adverbs. It also provides you with advice on creative swearing! | |
| Podcast #6 | What's Up With Slang? | |
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In this podcast, a project for English 338 (Linguistic Perspectives on the Study of Words in English), UW-Madison English linguistics graduate students Nora Dahl and Scott LaFaive discuss English slang -- what it is, where it comes from, how it is dealt with in dictionaries. | |
| Podcast #7 | Falling Down a Button Hole | |
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In this podcast, a project for English 338 (Linguistic Perspectives on the Study of Words in English), Craig Allan and Cheng-Wen Huang, both (graduate) students at UW-Madison, discuss how the meaning of words changes over time and how new words are formed. Learn about the history of notorious, buttonhole, and checkmate. | click
here to start
[Music and play excerpt are from Sutton, S. (Producer, 2001): Shakespeare: The Two Gentlemen of Verona. BBC Television production. New York: Ambrose Video Pub.] |
| Podcast #8 | Who's right? On Linguists and Language Mavens | coming soon |
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| Don't miss our next podcast - subscribe to Linguistic Voices on Campus! |  |
| Help - I've never done this before. How exactly do I subscribe to a podcast? | click here
for instructions |
Acknowledgments: |
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This
project is supported with an Engage
Award from DoIT, the Division
of Informational Technology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and
is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs2.5 License. Music is from
ccMixter ("Sunrise" by DeutscheUnschuld).
Special thanks to Ron Cramer from L&S Learning
Support Services for making professional studio recordings of the
interviews. |
