Poster award

Evolution, Sydney Speaks

Congratulations to Charbel El-Khaissi, Research Assistant with CoEDL’s Sydney Speaks project, who has won the exceptional presentation poster prize at the 2017 ANU Student Research Conference. 

The student-led conference was held last Saturday and incorporated the ANU Honours 3-Minute Thesis competition, as well as oral and poster presentations.

Charbel’s poster “There’s all sorts of different ways of talking” makes it very easy for the non-linguist to understand how and why a linguistics student might study speech variation, specifically existential constructions like the English expression ‘there is/are’ which helps English speakers to communicate about the existence or presence of someone or something in the environment.

Charbel has been working with CI Catherine Travis on data from the Sydney Speaks project run through CoEDL. This project makes use of recordings collected for the Sydney Social Dialect Survey, which documents the spontaneous speech of Anglo, Greek and Italian teenagers and Anglo adults in 1970s Sydney (Horvath 1985). These recordings provide a baseline against which to compare the speech of today.

Perhaps one of the best results of Charbel’s poster was the discussion it generated about linguistics at the event.

Photo at top: Charbel El-Khaissi and Catherine Travis