Report on the student conference
The student conference in linguistics took place on October 13th-14th, 2024 in Bern. In our room at the UniS building, we had the pleasure of listening to twenty contributions in functionalist linguistics from a range of different subfields: Besides the classic domains of grammar such as phonology, morphology and (morpho-)syntax, there were contributions to phonetics, tonology, typology, (machine) translation, discourse analysis, psycholinguistics, historical linguistics and more. The methodologies were also quite diverse: Some employed qualitative, some quantitative methods, some relied on available grammars or corpora, some undertook their own fieldwork or experiments in the lab. Different language families featured in the talks, though Trans-Himalayan/Tibeto-Burman (and especially its South-Central/"Kuki-Chin" subgroup) left quite an impression – which is not surprising when considering that Prof. Linda Konnerth was the one who encouraged many of the participants to submit an abstract. Overall, I think the thematic and methodological variety represented at the conference was mutually beneficial and gave rise to enriching discussions and fruitful cross-disciplinary questions.
The three keynote speeches were particularly fascinating. Dr. Maria Bardají i Farré (Universitat de Barcelona; Universität zu Köln), our first keynote speaker, provided a glimpse into child-directed speech in Totoli, a language spoken in Indonesia, by way of vivid audio and video examples. Dr. Sandra Auderset (Universität Bern) demonstrated the complex ways tone may interact with various domains of grammar, which are not adequately captured by current typological databases. To counteract the widespread fear of describing a tone language, Sandra offered valuable advice and encouragement, reassuring us that initial struggles to hear tone contrasts are normal and that with time and practice, even complex tone systems can be mastered. Our last keynote speaker, Prof. Gwendolyn Hyslop (The University of Sydney), presented intriguing quantitative data on the emergence of tone contrasts in Kurtöp, a language of Bhutan. Gwen's data came from a production study as well as a perception study, tracing how tone develops faster in certain syllables depending on the onset consonant (sonorants before fricatives before stops, with place of articulation also playing a role).
