Anthropological Linguistics (LING21, ANTH020N) Syllabus

Anthropological Linguistics course description:Communication and culture mutually define one another across communities worldwide. Human linguistic diversity, language contact and language change, and face-to-face communication continue to be key areas of inquiry for both linguistics and anthropology. Colonialism, globalization, mobility, and new technologies are changing the way we transmit and conceive of cultural knowledge, community, and our selves and the natural environment. In this course we draw attention to codeswitching, creoles, language endangerment, and constructed languages as reflections of our changing societies. We also address the ethics of fieldwork as a means of investigating these important social phenomena at the interfaces of language/ecology, language/identity, Global North/South

Getting Started With COCA

In this assignment, students will learn basic methods in corpus linguistics, an emerging field at the intersection of humanities and quantitative social science. They will learn how to search large English language corpora (e.g., the 900 million word Cambridge International Corpus) to look for otherwise hidden patterns of language use. They will be able to track the emergence of new words, shifts in meaning in existing words, and note the obsolescence of some words. They will interpret their findings in light of how language usage reflects societal attitudes and social change

Spitzer Observations of Black Hole Low-mass X-ray Binaries: Assessing the Non-stellar Infrared Component

We have combined ground-based optical and near-infrared data with Spitzer Space Telescope mid-infrared data for five black hole (BH) soft X-ray transients (SXTs) in order to determine the levels of near- and mid-infrared emission from sources other than the secondary star. Mid-infrared emission from an accretion disk, circumbinary dust, and/or a jet could act as sources of near-infrared contamination, thereby diluting ellipsoidal variations of the secondary star and affecting determined BH mass estimates. Based on optical to mid-infrared spectral energy distribution modeling of the five SXTs along with the prototype, V616 Mon, we detected mid-infrared excesses in half of the systems, and suggest that the excesses detected from these systems arise from non-thermal synchrotron jets rather than circumbinary dust disks

Keck IR Spectroscopy of WZ Sge: Detection of Molecular Emission from the Accretion Disk

Time-resolved IR spectroscopy of WZ Sge was obtained using NIRSPEC on Keck II. We detect CO and H$_{\rm 2}$ emission from the accretion disk placing WZ Sge into a rarefied class of astronomical objects including YSOs and high luminosity early-type stars. During the eclipse phase, the molecular emission greatly weakens but no firm evidence for the secondary star is seen allowing new limits on its luminosity to be determined. The detection of molecular emission provides physical properties within the outer disk of T=3000K and N$_H$$>10^{10}$ cm$^{-3}$. Such a cool, dense region, not associated with areas of H I and He I emission, provides the first observational confirmation of predictions made by accretion disk models.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures. Accepted for publication in ApJ Letter

Assessment of the environmental toxicity and carcinogenicity of tungsten-based shot.

The toxicity of elemental tungsten released from discharged shot was assessed against previous studies that established a 1% toxic threshold for soil organisms. Extremely heavy theoretical shot loadings of 69,000 shot/ha were used to generate estimated environmental concentrations (EEC) for two brands of tungsten-based shot containing 51% and 95% tungsten. The corresponding tungsten EEC values were 6.5–13.5 mg W/kg soil, far below the 1% toxic threshold. The same shot loading in water produced tungsten EEC values of 2.1–4.4 mg W/L, levels that are not toxic under experimental conditions. Pure tungsten has not been shown to exhibit carcinogenic properties when ingested or embedded in animal tissues, but nickel, with which it is often alloyed, has known carcinogenicity. Given the large number of waterfowl that carry shot embedded in their body, it is advisable to screen lead shot substitutes for their carcinogenic potential through intra-muscular implantation