I had a great time in PEI last year at the APLA conference. A highlight was my first radio appearance discussing academic work. Karen Mair interviewed me for Mainstreet PEI She was an excellent host and I really enjoyed the experience. Here's the sound file if you want to listen to it:
billyonmainstreet_cbc_121111.MP3
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Billy and Tim on prosody and procedural meaning
Finally uploaded our talk on procedural meaning and prosody from the conference in Madrid in October.
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pala2009_billyandnicky_final.pps
Here's the presentation from the paper Nicky and I worked on which I presented at PALA in Middelburg,
Billy
Clark and Wharton, ICLCE 3 paper on intonational meaning
Here's the powerpoint for our talk at the ICLCE3 conference this week.
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(Remember to see the film before you read or listen to any reviews but ...)
Following his recent mockery of Simon Mayo for pronouncing the first 'a' in Indiana Jones in the same way as posh people pronounce the 'a' in 'bath' (my hypothesis is that this might be to do with foreign word pronunciation, btw), I was really pleased to hear Mark Kermode starting his review of Wall-E by pointing out not only that it is not pronounced the same as 'wally' but that in fact anyone who's seen the film will find it hard not to say it in the same way as Wall-E himself does, before carrying on to talk pronunciation for large parts of the programme.
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We had a really enjoyable workshop at Middlesex last week, on pragmatic stylistics. There was a nice friendly and positive atmosphere among a group of people with different ideas about pragmatics, about stylistics and about pragmatic stylistics. I guess what everybody shared was an interest in working out how texts communicate effects to readers. All of the talks were clear and engaging and gave everyone lots to think about.
We've just launched a new website on pragmatic stylistics where we'll be publishing news and discussions and other things that people think would be useful.
Let me know if you want to join in,
Billy
I just got back from a really fun week teaching a residential course on linguistics to A level students. The course was called 'The Language Detective' and themed around the idea that linguists are investigators, looking for clues, etc. This is me and Graeme with the magnifying glasses the students gave us at the end of the week. I'll be uploading presentations soon and writing a report. One of the best things about the course was that no-one ever had to rush off anywhere so there was time to carry on talking through interesting and tricky topics.
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