The Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) sponsors a colloquium series each summer as part of its program at the University of North Dakota. Following is a list of speakers and titles from past summers. (See also the announcement for the current summer.)

2008

• June 12: Cathy Marlett, SIL International
  Mollusks in the Seri culture
• June 19: Tom Headland, SIL International
  Population Instability and Injustice in a Philippine Hunter-Gatherer Society: How Demographic Data Can Tell the Story in Cyberspace
• June 26: Steve Parker, SIL International and GIAL
  The naturalness and density of phonological rule interactions
• July 10: Steve Parkhurst, SIL International
  The Ebb and Flow of Linguistic Forces
• July 17: Xiaozhau Huang, UND
  A Case of Sociolinguistic Significance of Academic Discourse
• July 24: Inga McKendry, SIL International
  Where do floating tones come from and where do they go?
• July 30 (Wed) and July 31 (Thu): Special Guest Lecturer
  John J. McCarthy, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
  An introduction to Optimality Theory

  Optimality Theory has had a big impact on the field of phonology and other areas of linguistics as well. This two-part lecture will cover the what and why of OT (Wednesday) and the rationale for OT's central premise, constraint violability (Thursday).

  John J. McCarthy is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of A Thematic Guide to Optimality Theory (Cambridge, 2002), Hidden Generalizations: Phonological Opacity in Optimality Theory (Equinox, 2007), and Doing Optimality Theory (Blackwell, 2008). He has edited or co-edited five books and is the author or co-author of over one hundred articles. His Boston accent returns in unguarded moments, and he'll be drawing on evidence from that dialect in one of his lectures.

2006

• June 15: Ken Olson, SIL International
  The (inter)dental approximant
• June 22: Jan Allen, SIL International
  The ubiquitous, anomalous -om- infix in Kankanaey
• June 29: Adam Baker, SIL-UND and University of Arizona
  Do bad, ban, and bang all have the same vowel?
• July 6: Tom Headland, SIL International
  Pythons and people as predators and prey
• July 20: Chen Yi-Ting, Arizona State University
  ESL program or TOEFL?
• July 27: Elizabeth Parks, SIL International
  “He’d Rather Kill Himself Than Go Back To School”: A Sociolinguistic Profile of Deaf and Hard of Hearing Homeschoolers
• August 2 (Wed): Gary Simons, SIL International
  Ensuring that digital data last
• August 3: Gary Simons, SIL
  Empowering digital data to interoperate

2005

• June 9: Stephen Parkhurst, SIL
  Optimality Theory and the Formational Constraints of Signed Languages
• June 16: Susan Hasselbring
  It is for us! The Acceptance of Written Standards
• June 23: Emma Pavey
  Basically, what it is is this
• June 30: Steve Parker, SIL
  Rhinoglottophilia and the affirmation grunt—a universal tendency
• July 7: Steve and Kelly Walter, SIL
  English Instruction in the Schools of Eritrea
• July 14: Dan Everett, University of Manchester and SIL-UND
  Ethnogrammar—Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognitioni n Pirahã
• July 20: Dan Everett, University of Manchester and SIL-UND
  Plato's Problem vs. Aristotle's Problem in Theories of Language
• July 21: Dan Everett, University of Manchester and SIL-UND
  Ethnophonology: On culture and the sound system of Pirahã
• July 28: Keith Snider, SIL and CanIL
  Pitch and Vowel Quality in Chumburung: An Instrumental Study

2004

• June 10: Diana Weber, SIL and UND
  The Permanent Forum in Indigenous Issues
  Special Focus: Indigenous Women
• June 17: Albert Bickford, SIL and UND
  1-Handed Persons and ASL Morphology
• June 24: Adam Baker, University of Arizona
  Physiology of the Tongue
• July 1: Michael Beard, UND Department of English
  Z is for Saffron: From a Study of the Arabic alphabet
• July 8: Larin Adams, SIL
  Doing Structural Semantics in a Cognitive World
• July 15: Stephen Parkhurst, SIL
  How the Iconic Nature of Signed Languages Affects Sociolinguistic Survey
• July 22: David Weber, SIL, UND, and
  Curso Internacional de Lingüística, Traducción y Alfabetización, Universidad Ricardo Palma
  Site of attachment and trajectory in Quechua and Bora
• July 29: Mary Morgan, SIL
  Community-Based Literacy in Nepal

2003

• June 12: Adam Baker, University of Arizona
  Reduplication As Minimal Copying to Fill Empty Prosodic Structure
• June 19: Albert Bickford, SIL
  The Signed Languages of Eastern Europe
• June 26: Thomas Headland, SIL
  Hunter-Gatherer Peoples of the Philippines: Their Rain Forest Is Gone:  What Now?
• July 2: Diana S. Weber, SIL
  A mixed-method study of constructivist learning in pre-service teachers in Huánuco, Peru
• July 10: Alan D. Boydell, University of Colorado
  Ludlings and Secret Languages: A Case Study of French ‘Verlan’
• July 17: Bill Bright, Professor Emeritus, UCLA, and University of Colorado
  Writing systems: Origins, types, choices
• July 24: Keith Snider, SIL and Trinity Western University
  Tonal Phenomena in Chumburung: An Instrumental Study
• July 31: Greg Thomson
  What Makes L2 Speech Appear Grammatical?

2002

• June 18: David Weber, SIL
  A Tale of Two Translation Theories
• June 25: Steve Parker, SIL
  Quantifying the Sonority Hierarchy
• July 2: Mike Cahill, International Linguistics Coordinator, SIL
  Some Universals of Tone
• July 9 (Gamble 1): Mary Morgan, SIL
  Languages Worth Writing
• July 16: Claire Ramsey, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
  Deaf Infants in the Modern World: Newborn Screening, Cochlear Implants, Full Inclusion, and Bilingualism
• July 23: Diane Lillo-Martin, University of Connecticut
  The Structure and Intonation of WH-Questions in American Sign Language
• July 30: Dennis Malone, SIL
  Stabilizing Indigenous Languages: Can it be Done, Should it be Done?
• August 6: Richard Swanson, University of Minnesota
  The Concept of 'person' or 'human being' among the Gourmantche of Burkina Faso

2001

• June 14: Susan Malone, SIL
  Mother tongue education for social integration / language maintenance
• June 21: Thomas Headland, SIL
  Did anthropologists cause deadly epidemic in Amazon tribe?
• June 28: Daniel Everett, SIL
  Asymmetrical embedding in Wari and the ontology of syntax
• July 5: Stephen Marlett, SIL
  Reanalysis of passive and negative prefixes in Seri
• July 12: Joan Baart, SIL
  Modeling the melody of speech: the analysis-by-synthesis approach to the study of intonation and tone
• July 19: Peter Ladefoged, Professor Emeritus, University of California at Los Angeles
  The linguistic use of different types of phonation
• July 26: Carolyn Miller, President SIL International
  The Tiger Mother's Child and the Cow Mother's Child: exploring cultural values through folk literature
• August 2: Lars Dyrud, SIL
  Stress in Hindi-Urdu: are there any acoustic correlates of stress apart from the effects of intonation?

2000

• June 20: Stephen A. Marlett, SIL
  Quantification with 'all' in Seri
• June 27: Jan Buckwalter, Ph.D. student, Language Education, Indiana University
  But 'b' is not 'Book': Emergent Biliteracy in Chinese and English
• July 6 (Thursday): J. Albert Bickford, SIL
  Academic Publication on the Web: the SIL-Mexico Experience
• July 11: Greg Thomson, University of Alberta
  Do Adults Acquire Second Language Inflectional Morphology?
• July 18: Daniel L. Everett, SIL
  Grammar & Evolution: Problems for the Darwinian Model
• July 25: Steve Walter, SIL and Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics
  Theory and Practice in Bilingual Education: How extensible?
• Aug 1: David Marshall, UND
  A Conversation About Linguistic Configuration and Its Utilization for Research

1999

• June 15: Stephen Levinsohn
  Three Ways of Reporting Speech in Koine Greek
• June 22: Steve Parker
  Bora Vowels and Distinctive Feature Theory
• June 29: Greg Thomson
  Language Learning from a Processing Perspective
• July 6: Aaron Shryock
  Language Classification and Subclassification
• July 13: Lindsay Whaley
  What's Cross-linguistic about Quantifier Float?
• July 20: Dr. James Emejulu and Dr. Nzang-Bie Yolande
  Linguistic Perspectives in Gabon
• July 22: Lindsay Whaley
  Reduplication in Oroqen in an Altaic Context
• July 27: Heather Walker
  Student Participation in the Academic Discourse Community
• August 3: Steve Walter
  After the Decade of Literacy, What Next?

1998

• June 9: John Clifton
  Problems in Testing Russian Bilingualism
• June 16: Steven Bird
  When Marking Tone Reduces Fluency: An Orthography Experiment in Cameroon
• June 23: Stephen J. Barber
  The adaptation of Literacy to Social Environment
• June 30: Mark Karan
  Language Vitality Assessments
• July 7: David Weber
  Bora Classifiers: Their Use and Grammatical Status
• July 14: Alla Yeliseyeva
  Bilingualism and Language Planning in Ukraine
• July 21: Dick Montag
  Ethnography--They Will Tell You
• July 28: Yasuko Nagai
  Community-Based Curriculum and Staff Development in the Recent Education Reform in Papua New Guinea