The Seventh Newcastle-upon-Tyne Postgraduate Conference in Linguistics: Monday 26th March 2012 at Newcastle University
Presented by Newcastle University and Northumbria University.
Conference Report
The 7th Newcastle Upon Tyne Postgraduate Conference in Linguistics took place in the Research Beehive at Newcastle University on 26th March 2012. It was attended by around 100 delegates of Post-graduate students, university staff, guest speakers, and presenters. There were 27 oral presentations, 7 poster presentations, and two plenary sessions. The majority of the presenters came from European universities and universities other than Newcastle and Northumbria. The conference received very good feedback with special reference to the high quality of the presentations that covered varied areas in linguistics. The purpose of the conference was met as it provided an educational forum where delegates discussed their research with other experts and specialists in the same research area. They also got the chance to establish personal contact and explore possibilities of collaboration as the conference was concluded by dinner at El Coto restaurant where delegates had the opportunity to discuss their work in an informal setting.
In addition to the students’ presentations, the audience were immensely captivated by the plenary speakers’ talks. The first plenary speaker was Dr Hermann Moisl from Newcastle University who gave a very inspiring talk titled ‘Corpus-based generation of linguistic hypotheses using quantitative methods’ in which he discussed the relationship between theoretical and quantitative linguistics based on Popperian scientific methodology. The second plenary speaker was Professor David Crystal from Bangor University. In a very interesting and stimulating way, Professor Crystal’s talk ‘The English Tone of Voice’ deliberated the range of tones of voice which are found in modern spoken English with particular attention to regional differences and to ‘New Englishes’. Professor David Crystal’s invitation was kindly supported by the guest speaker fund from the Linguistics Association of Great Britain LAGB.
A book prize was awarded to the best poster chosen by a jury consisting of Dr Hermann Moisl and Dr Richard Waltereit. The winner of the prize was John Smith from Manchester Metropolitan University, and the title of his poster was 'Developing linguistic awareness in primary classrooms'. An e-copy of this poster is available on the conference website at http://www.ncl.ac.uk/linguistics/postgrad/conference/ . The website also contains full details of the day’s programme as well as the abstracts of all the presentations. All the students who presented at this conference will be encouraged to submit articles based on their presentations for consideration by the editors of Newcastle Working Papers in Linguistics NWPL journal.
This conference was made possible by the generous support from Northumbria University, CRILLS, LAGB, Novitas-ROYAL (Research on Youth and Language), and OUP (Oxford University Press). With the administrative support from CRILLS, this conference was run by a group of postgraduate students, Svetoslava Antonova-Baumann, Tamader Hwaidi, Terhi Nurminen (Assistant co-ordinator), Mais Sulaiman (General co-ordinator), Erica Goncalves Teixeira, and Natalie Yu-Hsien Wang. The committee members of this year found their experience as conference organisers very worthwhile where they developed their team working, problem solving and administrative skills, and they encourage students to get involved in running this conference in the coming years as the opportunity is open to all postgraduate students from Newcastle or Northumbria Universities working on any area of linguistics.
Mais Sulaiman, General Co-ordinator
On behalf of the Organising Committee
To view details on past Postgraduate Conferences in Linguistics, please click here
Conference Organising committee:
Mais Sulaiman (General co-ordinator)
Terhi Nurminen (Assistant co-ordinator)
Tamader Hwaidi (Committee member)
Natalie Yu-Hsien Wang (Committee member)
Erica Goncalves Teixeira (Committee member)
Svetoslava Antonova-Baumann (Committee member)
If you have any queries please contact us at pgconfling@ncl.ac.uk
