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The British Academy have just published this press release about their support for the UK Linguistics Olympiad
The young olympians have just completed Round 1. We had 900 entrants (up from around 600 last year). Pretty impressive for only our second year.
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The International Association of Linguistics Students (pronounced /aɪlz/) is just getting going. As a colleague pointed out, English Language students count, so join in!
Billy
Our 'Talk About Language' speaker last night was Cat Davies from Cambridge. An excellent talk about experimental work investigating the extent to which children are aware of notions of informativeness (as employed in the Gricean maxims of quantity (which say, roughly, 'give enough information but not too much'). Cat's evidence suggests that children have an awareness of over-informativeness even if they are more tolerant of over-informative utterances than adults. The discussion afterwards was really interesting and Cat had some fun examples, some of which which I intend to steal for teaching purposes.
As ever, our speaker was impressed by our extremely beautiful campus and she had the added bonus of seeing one of our elusive muntjac deer on the way in.