Caribbean Linguistics: Theory and Applications
From Tuesday to Saturday of this week, the Society for Caribbean Linguistics will be holding a conference on the theme 'Caribbean Linguistics: Theory and Applications' at the St. Augustine campus of The University of the West Indies. Linguists and language educators from the Caribbean and further afield will be presenting not only papers on a variety of theoretical and practical issues in the description of Caribbean speech and writing, but also colloquia and workshops on the teaching and learning of English in our Creole-speaking context. It promises to be a week of exciting scholarship, stimulating networking, and expanded public awareness of Creole as a language, with some fun and relaxation thrown in.
Most of the conference will be taken up with papers that treat different topics in Caribbean language in a technical style that is unlikely to attract the general public, and these papers will be delivered from Thursday to Saturday. But on Tuesday and Wednesday, there will be colloquia and workshops on educational and awareness issues, which are designed for the general public, especially teachers and writers, and which they are invited to attend at the token fee of TT$100 for each colloquium/workshop or part thereof. For example, on Wednesday there will be a colloquium on various aspects of the structure of Creole (as systematically different from the dialect known as Standard English), which interested laypersons, such as my friends Colin, Stephan, and Bas, could benefit from. This colloquium will be conducted in the morning and supported by a question-and-answer panel discussion in the afternoon.
Other colloquia/workshops will treat topics such as 'Linguistics and the Educational System in the Caribbean', 'Communicative Language Teaching', 'Teaching Culture', and 'Promoting Innovations in Second Language Teaching and Learning'.
The sterner technical stuff, from Thursday to Saturday, will treat topics such as the following:
·The effects of vernacular instruction on the development of biliteracy abilities of native speakers of French Creole
·The grammatical status of tense, mood and aspect markers in Jamaican Creole
·Socio-economic arguments for a gradual and heterogeneous development of Patois in Jamaica
·Creoles as typical languages - Evidence from phonology
·The silent victims of lenition - Giving [voice] to /p, t, k] in Modern Caribbean Spanish
·Language in early Trinidadian fiction
·Prepositions in Tobagonian Creole with special reference to the preposition 'a'
·Indefinite pronouns in Vincentian Creole and English - A comparative approach
·Preparation of the Dictionary of English Creole of Trinidad and Tobago - Selected problem areas
·The predicate system of Garifuna.
Thursday evening (from 7.30 at UWI's LRC) will be special. Three books will be launched:
'A Caribbean Multilingual Dictionary of Flora, Fauna and Foods in English, French Creole and Spanish' by Jeannette Alsopp; 'Ivory Towers', by Robert Le Page; and 'The Languages of Tobago: Genesis, Structure and Perspective', by Winford James and Valerie Youssef.
What? Winford James? Who is that fella?
The keynote address will be given by UWI Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, Trinidadian Mervyn Alleyne, who will speak on the indigenous languages of the Caribbean.
Try and come to at least one of the colloquia/workshops, man!
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