Here are some of the exciting LSO events from the past two years:

Bake Sale - featuring homemade linguistics-themed valentines... "All you need is Labov," "0 > <3 / me___you," and "p t k b d g: You stop my heart" were a few of the slogans.

Hip-Hop Workshop - During this one-day workshop, eight specialists from universities across the US and Canada and ten UIUC faculty and graduate students came together to explore different aspects of the interface between language and hip hop culture. Several of the grad students who gave papers at the conference were later accepted to present them at a conference in Amsterdam the following spring.

Daniel Everett - Controversial field linguist Daniel Everett gave two talks entitled "Wari pronouns, quotatives, and the theory of phrase structure" and "Culture, grammar, and the nature of language." The second talk attracted a packed house of cognitive scientists as well as linguists and members of the community.

Volleyball - a small contingent of LSOers won our second game against the History department! Unfortunately, we lost the first and third games, but it was a good effort.

Bake Sales - The red T-shirts sold out at the first bake sale, while the first ever Noam Chomsky "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" travel mugs were a hit at the second bake sale, amidst the usual array of baked goods.

William Labov - The LSO was honored to host eminent sociolinguist William Labov as our first invited speaker. Dr. Labov showed us his latest project, the online Atlas of North American English, and demontrated how American dialects have diverged to the point where samples of gated speech are perceived as different words by speakers of different dialects. Video from his talk is coming eventually to this page.

Video clip in RM