The Five-minute Linguist is sponsored by the Department of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin.

The LSA is pleased to announce the finalists in the new plenary contest event debuting at the 2017 Annual Meeting: the Five-minute Linguist.  

These eight abstracts were selected from among the 84 submitted for consideration for this event by a panel of members of the LSA's Public Relations Committee.

• Carina Bauman (New York University): Back GOAT in Asian American English
• Rachel Steindel Burdin (University of New Hampshire): This you call a rise fall?
• Rabia Ergin (Tufts University): Emergence of verb classes in a young village sign language
• Jeff Good (University at Buffalo): Local dynamics to high level Patterns in Bantu   
• Heidi Harley (University of Arizona): Node sprouting and root suppletion in Korean
• Kirk Hazen (West Virginia University): Southern vowels and shifting Appalachian identities
• Carmel O'Shannessy (University of Michigan): What do children do in contact induced language change?
• Gregory Scontras (Stanford University): Subjectivity predicts adjective ordering preferences

Alternate:

Rachel Dudley (University of Maryland), Meredith Rowe (Harvard University), Valentine Hacquard (University of Maryland), Jeffrey Lidz (University of Maryland): Distribution cues to factivity in the input

The actual presentations will be made in a plenary session emceed by John McWhorter (Columbia University) and  will be videorecorded.  Each participant will be given five minutes for a presentation that will receive constructive, friendly feedback from a panel of three journalists, including the two most recent recipients of the LSA Journalism Award and a local journalist.   The final judging will be done by the audience.