Natural languages are highly structured, but they are never perfectly regular. In language contact situations, learners face the challenge of learning inconsistent input. Inconsistent input is a major factor in language change, like in the change of pidgin to creole. In a series of experiments, we investigated how inconsistent systems are learned, namely whether they are made more regular or learned as inconsistent, paying particular attention to the role of bias and individual differences. We taught participants an artificial language with an unexpected type of number marking (Singulative marking) mixed with a familiar system (Plural marking), using a novel paradigm, unscaled adaptive tracking. Post-training evaluation revealed that learners made systems that had more of the Plural system more regular, and systems that had more of the Singulative system were highly variable, expect when the input was already completely regular. This finding shows that individual learners bring potent biases to the task of learning in consistent systems, which determines whether they will make a system more regular or not. Consequently, languages may be changed based on what types of system are mixed, and what expectations individuals bring to the task.

Bio: Alex is a researcher for the Wordovators project. He received a B.A in Linguistics from the University of Iowa, and is currently a Ph.D in Linguistics at Northwestern University

– See more at: http://www.oerc.ox.ac.uk/languagechange
~Seminar, open to all, coffee and cakes provided,

Photos and tales on the highs and lows of life in the field. Intrepid Explorers was co-founded at King’s College London by Briony Turner to provide an informal opportunity to share fieldwork experiences. The program has subsequently been nominated for an ESRC impact champion prize and the hope is to expand it to the School of Geography and the Environment at Oxford University. The highs and lows of research in the field will be shared by members of SoGE, including fascinating photographs from around the globe.

Visualise the world in the 21st century in seven new maps! Geographers Ben Hennig and Danny Dorling present some of the key challenges and questions relating to the future of people across the world, using a series of seven thought-provoking maps about our lives on the planet.

Ludo, snakes & ladders and draughts are all popular pastimes, but in the past couple of decades a new generation of board games from designers with backgrounds in maths and science has begun to break the Monopoly monopoly. Perhaps the most successful of these is multi award winning Reiner Knizia, who joins mathematician Katie Steckles and board game lover Quentin Cooper to discuss how you develop a game which is easy to learn, hard to master and fun to play time after time. With a chance to have a go at some of Reiner’s latest creations and other top games afterwards.

Book here: http://www.oxfordshiresciencefestival.com/tuesday.html

Date/Time: Friday 1 July 13:00
Venue: Holywell Cemetery, St Cross Road, Oxford
Admissions: Free, Drop-In
Suitability: 14+
Find out more: http://www.oxfordshiresciencefestival.com/friday.html

The wide range of rock types used for gravestones means that cemeteries can be geological treasure-troves – and provide a wonderful introduction to geology and other sciences. Social history comes into it too. Join geologists Nina Morgan and Philip Powell on a geological walk through Holywell Cemetery, one of the cemeteries described in their book, The Geology of Oxford Gravestones. You’ll never look at cemeteries in the same way again!

Join us for a sensational evening of cabaret – an alchemy of acts delivered by Science Oxford’s network of creative science performers. If you love science, stage and stand up, you’ll be in your element with our periodic table-themed cabaret including science presenter and geek songstress Helen Arney and compered by award-winning science communicator Jamie Gallagher. See the everyday elements that make up the world around us in a new light, watch in disbelief as gold is created before your eyes, and learn about their origins and how they behave inside our bodies. Get your tickets now – once they are gone they argon!

Ian Shipsey, Particle Physicist and Professor of Physics, Oxford University, has been profoundly deaf since 1989. In 2002 he heard the voice of his daughter for the first time thanks to a cochlear implant. These implants have instigated a popular but controversial revolution in the treatment of deafness. Learn the physiology of natural hearing, the function of cochlear implants, and experience speech and music heard through a cochlear implant. Ian Shipsey was one of the leaders of the experiments that discovered the Higgs particle in 2012.

Nicola Blackwood, local MP, is Chair of the Science and Technology Committee of the House of Commons. Science and technology are central for the development of the region, and fundamental for the country: boosting innovation and enterprise,
developing employment, advancing health and promoting knowledge. Engage in a conversation chaired by Hannah Devlin, science correspondent for the Guardian. Get insights from your local MP and take part in a reflection about the future of science and technology in the UK.

Colette Morgan works for SAFE! as the Child on Parent Violence Project Development Manager. Sadly, Child-on-Parent violence is on the rise and this fascinating talk will show us how SAFE! tackles this problem and works with families to cultivate respectful family relationships, for the benefit of all society.

We will even provide you with a free sandwich and a cuppa.

This presentation explores the discourse of adoption through an analysis of how adoption is linguistically and visually delineated in a corpus of picture books. The aim is to understand how adoption is portrayed, and what the concerns and viewpoints of the three main participants are: child, adoptive parents, and birth parents, as well as those of the voices that surround them.

The study combines a quantitative and qualitative analysis, in which computer-based software is combined with the closer analysis of the individual texts.

The project lies under the umbrella of the major enterprise of understanding how adoption is conceived, the words and patterns used to talk about it, how it is visually represented, and in what ways these choices depict, challenge, and reshape society’s understanding of parenthood and families.

Dr Coral Calvo Maturana is English Lecturer at the University of Cádiz in Spain. Her research interests include stylistics, (critical) discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and multimodality. Her doctoral thesis: ‘Motherhood and Poetic Voices in The Adoption Papers by Jackie Kay: a corpus stylistics study’, resulted in her special interest in the discourse of adoption, and its multimodal representation in both literary and non-literary texts.

The Symposium focuses on drought and water scarcity in the UK and globally. A range of expert speakers give their perspectives from an academic and practisers view on the impact of drought and how to manage drought risk in the Up and beyond.

This event is organised and subsidised by the MaRIUS project, and so has a very low price of either £25 for the conference incl. lunch and a drinks reception; or £35 for conference, lunch, drinks reception and dinner!

More information on the event can be found here: http://www.mariusdroughtproject.org/news/

Brookes Centre for Global Politics, Economics and Society seminar series

Denis Bridoux (past editor of Mallorn, founder of the 1992 Tolkien centenary conference committee, convener of the Amon Sul branch of the Tolkien Society) will be visiting Oxford to give his talk entitled “Laketown, or How a mythology for Switzerland came to contribute to a Mythology for England”

Refreshments will be served after the talk

Synopsis:
“Laketown is one of the most iconic places in The Hobbit, but where did Tolkien get the idea? The concept of palafites (lacustrian dwellings), whereby people lived on platforms built on wooden stakes and piles above lake waters in prehistoric times, was first identified in Switzerland in the 1850s. It was soon included in all history schoolbooks , and it is indeed most probably the source for Laketown, but might not Tolkien have had a more personal inspiration? Denis Bridoux’s slideshow entitled Laketown, or How a mythology for Switzerland came to contribute to a Mythology for England, will attempt to answer those questions.”

A free afternoon of artist talks.

3-5pm at OVADA Warehouse, Osney Lane.

Our guest speakers will be independent publishing house Hurst Street Press and fine artist Tommy Watkins.

This event is part of the exhibition ‘Blue Fades into the Invisible’ by Klick Oxford-Leiden.

This July, a team of four from Oxford travelled high into the Arctic Circle to ski from East to West across the island of Spitsbergen.

For the first time in ninety-three years they retraced the route of a groundbreaking 1923 expedition that pioneered the exploration of this remote polar land.

Over the course of thirty-two entirely unsupported days they tracked down and repeated the photos from 1923, conducted scientific surveys and pursued mountaineering objectives old and new whilst capturing it all in film for an upcoming feature documentary.

Hosted by the Oxford University Exploration Club, join the Spitsbergen Retraced team to learn more about a journey into one of the last truly wild corners of our increasingly crowded planet.

svalbard2016.com

Free entry to members of the OUEC and, for this week only, OUMC members too. OUEC membership can be bought on the night.

Dr Brenda Boardman will speak at the Neighbourhood Forum AGM on ‘How we can deliver a low carbon future for Summertown and St Margaret’s’.
Please come along. All welcome. Entry free.

8 countries, 50 days, 2300km, countless encounters – Between March and May of this year Christian cycled from Munich along the Western Balkan refugee route to Athens. Attempting to understand what European and national politics meant for people fleeing their homes, he engaged with NGOs, border guards and refugees along the route. He described and portrayed his fascinating encounters and experiences bilingually under https://chrisbikes.wordpress.com/ and on Facebook (www.facebook.com/chrisbikestoathens/).

On Thursday, 17 November, Chris will talk about his insightful tour, his touching impressions and the lessons to be drawn from his journey in the context of European and national migration and border policies.

Martin Barker (Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at Aberystwyth University, Director of the Global Hobbit Project) will be visiting Oxford to discuss the results of the landmark Global Hobbit Project, a research initiative examining the popular reception of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit Film trilogy.

Synopsis:
“Tolkien aficionados may have disagreed somewhat among themselves about the value and achievements of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. But any frustrations – or celebrations – over the 2001-3 films were nothing compared to the overwhelming sense of let-down occasioned by the Hobbit trilogy. But your disappointments are, I am afraid, grist to the mill of an audience researcher like me. In 2014 I led a consortium of researchers in 46 countries across the world, to gather responses to Peter Jackson’s second trilogy. We managed to attract just over 36,000 completions of our questionnaire. Of course, when we conceived and planned the project, we couldn’t know what the films would be like, or what range of responses and debates they might elicit. In this presentation I will (briefly) explain why and how we carried out the research, and offer some of its major findings. These can act, I hope, as a kind of mirror to the depths, and also the significance, of the sense of disappointment experienced by even the most hopeful and forgiving viewers. And they open an important agenda about the changing role of ‘fantasy’ in our contemporary culture.”

Please join us at 7pm on Thursday of 7th Week (November 24th) for a presentation by Daniel Castro Garcia and Thomas Saxby on their recent publication ‘Foreigner: Migration into Europe 2015–2016’.

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“The photographs are a protest against those who so
readily attack refugees and migrants entering Europe
without taking into consideration the dangers faced
during the journey.” (Foreigner: Migration into Europe 2015–16 by John Radcliffe Studio www.johnradcliffestudio.com)

For more information please read the press release below:

‘Foreigner: Migration into Europe 2015–2016’, is a photography book that documents the lives of people at various stages of their migration to Europe. The book is divided into three sections, focusing on migration to Italy from North Africa, migration to Greece and through the Balkans from the middle east, and the migrant camp in Calais known as ‘The Jungle’. Alongside the photography, written texts serve both as a context, and a means to share the stories of the people we met during the project.
The book was created in response to the imagery used in
the media to discuss the issue of migration, which we felt was
sensationalist, alarmist and was not giving people the time and
consideration they deserved. We wanted to approach the subject from a calmer perspective, using medium format portrait photography as a means of meeting the people at the centre of the crisis face to face – and of learning something about their lives.

John Radcliffe Studio is the creative partnership of Thomas Saxby and Daniel Castro Garcia. We specialise in photography, film and graphic design and have spent the last year documenting the refugee and migrant crisis in Europe.

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The Moser Theatre is fully accessible, with access to gender netural toilets, and the event will be **FREE** to attend. Oxford for Dunkirk will be collecting donations before and after the event in aid of La Liniere Refugee Camp, Dunkirk, France: please see our page for more details! (www.facebook.com/oxfordfordunkirk)

Engaging with the Humanities: Katrin Kohl
Creative Multilingualism – the hidden value of linguistic diversity
Wednesday 30 November 2016, 12.15 – 1.15pm

Oxford Saïd is pleased to welcome Katrin Kohl to the School on Wednesday 30 November as part of our Engaging with the Humanities series.

Today there is an almost exclusive focus on functional skills in language learning in UK schools and society as a whole. The innate connection between creativity and languages tends to be overlooked. In her talk Professor Katrin Kohl will introduce Creative Multilingualism, a major new research programme investigating and showcasing the creative dimension of modern languages in a wide range of areas.

Working with teams in other universities (Birmingham City, Cambridge, Pittsburgh, Reading, SOAS), and external partners (including the British Council, GCHQ, Business in the Community and Punch Records) her research programme focuses on key areas of the communicative process to investigate how creativity interacts with linguistic diversity. A key aim of the programme is to enhance the perceived value of the linguistic diversity in our midst.

About the speaker
Katrin Kohl is Professor of German Literature in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages and Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded Creative Multilingualism programme. Katrin studied at Westfield College, University of London, obtaining a BA in English and German, an MA in 20th Century German Literature, and a PhD in German. She also has an MA in General Linguistics from the University of Westminster. She was a Lecturer at Westfield College, University of London (1984-88), and worked as a Researcher and then Consultant on German language courses for BBC Television (1983-1988). She became a Fellow of Jesus College in 1988.

Registration
Please remember that registration is required to attend this event. The seminar is open for anyone to attend and will take place at Saïd Business School.
Check in will open at 11.45am with lunch served from 11.45-12.15pm, the talk will begin promptly at 12.15pm and conclude by 1.15pm.
Registration is essential so please click ‘Register’ above to confirm your attendance.

Please note that filming, live streaming and photography will be taking place during this event. By entering and participating you are giving your permission to be recorded and for the School to us the media in future.

A twenty minute talk to introduce the topic, followed by Q&As and about an hour’s discussion. All welcome.

From Lesotho Rock art to Peruvian orchids, multi-award winning fine art photographer Quintin Lake will share his highlights from visiting over 70 countries.

Quintin will speak on his approach to expedition photography having photographed for expeditions to Greenland, Iran, Peru, Namibia and closer to home on various UK walks. This includes his ongoing project, The Perimeter, to walk the 10,000 km of coast around Britain, through which he has come to understand that exotic locations are not a prerequisite for adventure and discovery.

Mary Keen, Paradise and Plenty – the How and Wow of Lord Rothschild’s private garden on the Waddesdon Estate

Mary Keen is a writer, lecturer and renowned garden designer and will talk about the garden, its dedicated gardeners, past and present, and her book, which celebrates the tradition of excellence at Eythrope.

Katherine Stoessel has worked in the field of restorative practice for over 20 years in the UK, the USA, West Africa, the Balkans and Eastern Europe and she is a regular facilitator and trainer for the Thames Valley Restorative Justice Service. She is privileged to work with these powerful and meaningful processes and they underpin her deep commitment to restorative approaches and the profound difference they can make to people’s lives.

Cyclist and author Emily Chappell has been travelling by bicycle for many years. Here she shares some of her more noteworthy adventures, from surviving the frozen Alaska Highway to winning the 4,000km Transcontinental Race across Europe.

Jonathan Metzger (KTH, Sweden) will talk about the necessity of exclusion in environmental planning.

Abstract: A more-than-human sensibility is founded upon an awareness of the fundamentally entangled fates of humans and non-humans, from the individual body to the planetary scale. The purpose of this presentation is to probe some of the implications of such insights on planning theory and methodology, and to explore potential ways of studying the degree to which such insights actually influence existing planning practices.

In the first part of the presentation I briefly review some currently fashionable ‘radical’ planning theories from the angle of how they may contribute to enacting a more-than-human sensibility within planning processes. I suggest that their oft-repeated ambition of producing benefits ‘for all’ are deceitfully misguiding, since such claims effectively serve the function of covering up the ever-present biopolitical dimension of planning practice and the radical exclusions that necessarily must take place.

In the second part of the presentation I sketch the outlines of a research program investigating how urban planning and design professionals relate to the more-than-human biopolitical dimension of planning. I argue that it is necessary to focus not only on the degree of displayed reflectiveness regarding this type of issues, but also if/how this comes to affect their concrete professional practice.

Lord Browne of Madingley is presently Chairman of L1 Energy, the Chairman of Trustees of both the Tate and the QEII Prize for Engineering, and Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University.

With Rory Stewart OBE MP, Minister of State at the Department for International Development and Conservative MP for Penrith and The Border.

Semantics and the Resurgence of Populism

Dr Timothy Michael is a Tutorial Fellow in English Literature at Lincoln, whose research explores the intersection of literary and intellectual history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His first monograph – British Romanticism and the Critique of Political Reason (2016) – offers a groundbreaking analysis of how writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Percy Bysshe Shelley critique the faculty of reason in its political capacities to test the kinds of knowledge available to it. His current project explores the rise of philosophical criticism in the long-eighteenth century, examining how developments in rhetorical and literary theory gave rise to the institution of criticism itself.

After completing a degree in mathematics at Lincoln, Kate Smurthwaite became a political activist and award-winning stand-up comedian. Kate has performed in comedy venues around the world, and in 2013 her long running Edinburgh Fringe show – ‘The News at Kate’ – won the prestigious Three Weeks Editor’s Choice Award. She has published journalism in The Guardian and Cosmopolitan, and frequently appears on major news shows to discuss her campaign work for groups such as No More Page Three and the National Secular Society. She is also the Vice Chair and Media Spokesperson for Abortion Rights UK, and teaches stand-up comedy through the City Academy in London

David Rochat will be examining the resurgence of populism through the lens of contemporary literary theory. David completed his undergraduate degree at the University in Lausanne, Switzerland, with a year at the University of Canterbury, before working as an academic intern at the Embassy of Switzerland in Qatar. He then came to Oxford to complete his MSt in Modern Languages, and develop his research interests in postcolonialism, life-writing and theories of literature.