Postgraduate Linguistic Lunch Seminar Series
Tuesday, 9 April 2019, 12:15 – 1:45pm 
A guest lecture by Dr Jeffrey Kallen (TCD) and papers by Annie C. Humphrey (TCD), Tingting Hu (TCD) and Jason Marrott (TCD) as part of the Postgraduate Linguistic Lunch Seminar Series.
Dr Jeffrey Kallen, Place, genre, and community in the Linguistic Landscape: lessons from an Irish pub
This presentation looks at place, genre, and community within the Linguistic Landscapes of overseas 'Irish pubs' in New York, Chicago, Montréal, Liverpool, Vienna, and elsewhere. I suggest that the significance of Irish-linked elements in these pubs lies less in their contribution to the ethnolinguistic vitality of Irish in the diaspora than to their construction of authenticity within the Irish pub genre. Consistent with the genre concept, these Irish Pubs are neither identical nor mass-produced: local variations establish the link between the individual site and the genre, and the genre in turn indexes the Irish diaspora, the Irish homeland, and associated values. I suggest that these elements are also applicable for other situations of Linguistic Landscape and diaspora communities.
Jeffrey Kallen came to Trinity College in 1979 to do a PhD and has been here ever since. As a member of the CLCS and the department of Clinical Speech and Language Studies, he has taught in nearly every area of linguistics and has supervised a wide range of PhD and Masters students. His research on the English language in Ireland has given rise to many journal articles and book chapters, and to two published volumes; he was the co-director of the Irish component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-Ireland). More recently, he has focused on Linguistic Landscapes (the use of text in the public space) in a variety of settings, and is currently working on a sociolinguistic introduction to Linguistic Landscape research.
Annie C. Humphrey, Names for the Norse in Irish Literature c. 1100
Several examples of Irish historical literature from the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries served wealthy Gaelic patrons by glorifying their prominent ancestors. These semi-historical heroes were valorised by hostility against the Vikings in Ireland. At the same time, the descendants of the Vikings, the Hiberno-Norse, were important members of Irish society, providing mercantile, naval, and fiscal power to the same Gaelic dynasties. The depiction of the Norse in this later literature reveals attitudes and conceptions about the contemporary Hiberno-Norse. This talk is a brief overview of the words used and attitudes encoded in these Irish texts.
Annie C. Humphrey is a recipient of an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postgraduate Studentship. She earned a Certificate in Irish Studies from University College Cork, a Bachelors in History and Medieval Studies from Rutgers University, and a Masters in Medieval Studies from the University of Connecticut. She worked in museum education at Higgins Armoury Museum and the American Swedish Historical Museum, and taught Old Norse in Massachusetts and ancient and medieval world and European history in New Jersey, before moving to Dublin with her three-year-old son to pursue a PhD in history supervised by Seán Duffy.
Tingting Hu, What does the Linguistic Landscape tell us about our city?
As one young and vibrant sub-field of sociolinguistics, the Linguistic Landscape (LL) research has attracted scholars from multiple disciplines such as applied linguistics, ethnography, urban sociology, cultural anthropology, social psychology and the like. This report will start with a brief introduction to some theoretical context of the field. Then, a case study at Dublin Airport will be presented as to demonstrate how the LL approach can be applied to examine the symbolical construction of urban space. This report aims to indicate the LL’s contribution to the study of the relationship between language and society.
Tingting Hu is a PhD student in the Centre for Language and Communication Studies of the School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences. Her research of interest is in the Linguistic Landscape studies of sociolinguistics. Her current research focuses on the Linguistic Landscape of recurrent cultural events and its implications for further inquiries regarding language, stance-taking and identity reinforcement in a multilingual context. This research project is funded by the Trinity Immigration Initiative (TII) programme.
Jason Marrott, Solitude in the German Romantic Era
This presentation will focus on a few 'case studies' of solitary figures in a selection of novellas from the German romantic era. Specifically, it will use Speech Act Theory to examine the ways in which these figures' practice of solitude is still expressed in terms that betray a need or desire to perform their seclusion for an audience and in a way that relies on and at times satisfies the ideological understandings of the society they purport to have left behind.
Jason is PhD student in the Germanic Studies department. Having come from an undergraduate background of Linguistics and German Literature, he is interested in the ways in which the two disciplines are intertwined. Specifically, his research seeks to explore the ways in which social performativity is expressed through language and communication in general. His main area of focus is in the novellas and Kunstmärchen (modern fairy-tales) of the German Romantic era, but further areas of interest include contemporary Greek cinema and Central European cultural studies.
Campus Location: Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute
Accessibility: Yes
Room: Neill Lecture Theatre
Event Category: Conferences, Lectures and Seminars, Workshops and Training
Type of Event: One-time event
Audience: Undergrad, Postgrad, Alumni, Faculty & Staff, Public
Cost: Free
Contact Email: linguisticlunch@gmail.com
