Professionalization workshop

• January 17th - Job search
• Job talk Monica Nesbit

January 17th - Job search

Why this is important:

• Grad students interact directly with the faculty
• A number of professors have retired or will be retiring soon.

some facts about IU linguistics

• IU ling department is historically gender imbalanced

  • Neither female faculty members were full time in the linguistics department (in 2000)

• Lack of certain subfields

  • No semantics
  • applied linguistics was getting split off
    • under the school of education in the 1960's
    • moved under linguistics in the 1970's
    • 2006: divorce of linguistics and applied linguistics

• Currently, no one in sociolinguistics at IU

• Faculty who are still year and were here in 2000 will probably be retiring in the next 5 years

should new hires reflect the traditional strengths of the department or cutting edge research?

• African linguistics is a particular subfield that is a historic strength but may not be an area of cutting edge research

The talk on the 26th is a sociolinguistics talk, all the others are syntax talks.

if you have thoughts then you should contact Nils or Samson

Syntax job search

• 68 applicants

Quality of candidates is important

Fit in the department is equally important

• Trying to find someone with a secondary specialty that fits well with the department
• Specialities in languages other than English

Be careful when searching for a job

• It's a serious decision for the institution and the applicant
• academia works in much slower hiring cycles, it takes up to a year to remove someone who was just hired

After job talks the whole remainder of the afternoon is for grad students

• We'll just assemble in the seminar room
• You'll get a picture of how scholars interract with grad students
  • This is important for candidates because involvement with grad students is essential
• if you can't make it to the job talk or the after discussion, send Dr. DeJong a note and see if something can be arranged

What should we do to prep?

• What the faculty care about and what we care about is just different
• Our role is to go to every event we can. even if we're not interested in syntax because it impacts everyone.
  • Going to talks you don't understand is a great way to learn and it's also important
• Don't come into this cold, read up on their work on google scholar a bit to get an idea of what they're into
• A campus visit is like a marathon. Campus visits are grueling.
  • Be considerate of the candiates, they are humans and they probably need things like coffee, the bathroom whatever
  • Personal things are off limits for conversation
• Pretty dramatic difference applying before your dissertation is complete.

We may have a debriefing session after them?

Job talk Monica Nesbit

Lansing speech corpus:

• 106 interviews
• Sociolinguistic interviews conducted every 2 years
  • Examining different situations
• Oral histories
  • collected during early 2000's
  • only casual conversation

Had to exclude people

• Non-white
• Rural people
• These groups do not normally show the northern city shift

none of the younger speakers show the hallmarks of the northern city shift.

is ash [+tense]?

People generally don't want to have syllables without codas for lax vowels. What do people from Lansing, Michigan do?

Younger northern inland speakers pattern more closely to the candian model.

Widespread perception that inland northern speech is 'correct'

• More recently, there have been discussions that are less positive towards the northern city shift.

• Interviewed people have some strong negative comments when they hear older Norther City speakers.

• Perception that people with northern city shift are uneducated but hard working.

Lansing: auto town

• original home of oldsmobile
• headquarters of gm for 20 years.
• many factories closed after the move from Lansing
  • Shift to service type industry
• With the shift to a service industry, blue collar workers went from being prestigous to marked
• Dialect attrition is happening across the northern inland region

Low back merger shift is a western change shift. Does the chain shift happening in California match the northern city shift? Turns out no not really? Loss of local dialects paralleled in New England as well (rsearch at Dartmuth).