Welcome to MAYFEST! Schedule Organizers
Minority Languages in the Twenty-first Century:
Perspectives on Basque Language
May 20 to 22, 1998
University of Maryland at College Park
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Welcome to MAYFEST! Schedule Organizers
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Every year, the Linguistics Department organizes MAYFEST, a colloquium where speakers are invited to report on a variety of issues related to one theme.
This year's Mayfest at the University of Maryland at College Park will be dealing with the important issue of minority languages in the immediate future, concentrating on the Basque case. From a purely linguistic point of view it is obviously worth looking at this particular minority language for its unrelated typological facts, which apart from being interesting in themselves, provide us with crucial testing grounds for current linguistic theories. More broadly, however, Basque constitutes an excellent example of a language in danger of extinction, a risk faced by about ninety per cent of the world's current languages. Apart from a scientific disaster, the immediate prospect is a phenomenal socio-political tragedy.
The main goal of this year's Mayfest is to discuss these issues candidly and realistically, with the intention to seriously delve into the present reality of Basque and, starting there, to pose the question of what is ahead. Representatives of various Basque institutions, including the Autonomous Basque Government, linguists and computer scientists from the private and public Basque universities, and the Basque Center for Language Research have been invited to present their points of view, as well as other various researchers in the US. Maya Honda, from Wheelock College, and Wayne O'Neil, from MIT have been invited as general commentators, and to provide a broad perspective. The hope is that a face to face discussion of an issue that concerns all linguists and many citizens of the world who belong to a minority (most of us) will at least shed some light into what the present situation really is, whether the relatively successful Basque case (which includes a lot of serious theoretical work by linguists and various computational implementations) can be extrapolated to other communities.
Schedule
= Preliminary Organization of the Mayfest =
| SESSION 1: TOPICS IN BASQUE PHONOLOGY | ||
| 9:30-10:25a.m. | Jose Ignacio Hualde University of Illinois, Urbana |
'Pitch-accent and Focalization in Western Basque' |
| 10:25-10:40a.m. | COFFEE BREAK | |
| SESSION 2: TOPICS IN BASQUE SYNTAX | ||
| 10:40-11:35a.m. | Pablo Albizu University of the Basque Country Basque Center for Language Research |
'The Syntax of Impersonal Contructions in Basque: An Alternative Hypothesis' |
| 11:40-12:35p.m. | Jon Ortiz de Urbina University of Deusto Basque Center for Language Research |
'Force Phrases, Focus Phrases and the Left Periphery in Basque' |
| PARTY: Conjoined with the Blackwell Lectures Details to be announced |
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| SESSION 3: COMPUTATIONAL ISSUES I | ||
| 10:00-10:55a.m. | Arantza Diaz de Ilarraza University of the Basque Country |
'Integration for NLP Tools for Basque: Applications' |
| 10:55-11:10a.m. | COFFEE BREAK | |
| 11:10-12:05p.m. | Kepa Sarasola University of the Basque Country |
'Work on Computational Linguistics in Basque: Foundations, Tools and Applications in IXA Group' |
| 12:05-1:25p.m. | LUNCH BREAK | |
| SESSION 4: COMPUTATIONAL ISSUES II | ||
| 1:30-2:25p.m. | Kutz Arrieta LOGOS Corp. |
'Basque Nominalizations: A Computational Implementation in a Machine Translation System, LOGOS' |
| 2:25-2:40a.m. | COFFEE BREAK | |
| 2:40-3:35p.m. | Michael B. Kashket Morgan Stanley Dean Witter |
'A Parameterized Parser for English and Warlpiri' |
| SESSION 5: SOCIOPOLITICAL CONCERNS I | ||
| 9:30-10:25a.m. | Benal Oyarcabal Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique |
'The Basque Language in France' |
| 10:25-11:40a.m. | COFFEE BREAK | |
| 10:40-11:35a.m. | Inaki Camino University of the Basque Country |
'Preservation, Loss and Recuperation of the Basque Language in Navarre' |
| 11:40-12:35p.m. | Maya Honda Wheelock College |
(Title to be announced) |
| 12:40-1:55p.m. | LUNCH BREAK | |
| SESSION 6: SOCIOPOLITICAL CONCERNS II | ||
| 2:40-2:55p.m. | Nicholas Gardner Representative of the Basque Government |
'Basque in the Educational System of the Autonomous Basque Community' |
| 3:00-3:55p.m. | Response by Wayne O'Neil (MIT) | |
| 4:00- 5:30p.m. | Round Table Moderator: Myriam Uribe-Etxebarria (University of the Basque Country) |
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Aitziber Atutxa (sener@wam.umd.edu)
Juan Carlos castillo (castillo@wam.umd.edu)
Elixabete Murguia (emurguia@wam.umd.edu)
Itziar San Martin (itziarsm@wam.umd.edu)