An important feature of the intellectual
life of the department is the many regular talks and research group meetings,
most of which are student-organized or focused on student research. The Linguistics
Colloquium series brings 8-12 speakers per year from North America and abroad.
The series is fully student-organized, and speakers typically spend much of
their visit meeting individually with students about their research. The Computational
Linguistics Colloquium series meets weekly during the semester, with a mix
of local and outside speakers, jointly organized by linguistics, computer science
and library and information science faculty. CNL
Lunch talks are held weekly during the semester, covering research in psycholinguistics,
language acquisition, and neurolinguistics, primarily by UMd students and postdocs,
with occasional outside speakers. Syntax-Semantics
Lunch talks are held weekly during the semester, and feature mostly research
presentations by students. In addition, there are weekly lab meetings in three
areas, all of which are organized by multiple faculty members and widely attended:
Computational Linguistics (Resnik, Weinberg); sound++
covers psycho/neurolinguistics, with focus on sound systems and lexical processes
(Poeppel, Idsardi); psycholinguistics lab meetings cover psycho/neurolinguistics
The department also organizes two additional events on an annual basis. The Blackwell/Maryland Lectures in Language and Cognition (Fall) bring a distinguished speaker to campus for 3 days of talks. Speakers have been: 1998 - David Lightfoot (Maryland); 2000 - Noam Chomsky (MIT); 2001 - Morris Halle (MIT); 2002 - Lila Gleitman (UPenn); 2003 - Randy Gallistel (Rutgers); 2004 - Hans Kamp (Stuttgart); 2005 - Mark Baker (Rutgers); 2006 - Marc Hauser (Harvard); 2007 - Jerry Fodor (Rutgers). The Maryland Mayfest (Spring) is an annual workshop that has been organized in the department since 1993, and has covered rotating topics of interest to the department: 2001 - Cognitive Neuroscience of Language; 2002 - Semantics meets Language Acquisition; 2003 - Advances in Minimalist Syntax; 2005 - WH-fest; 2006 - Input in Language Learning; 2007 - Hierarchical Structure in Language; 2008 - The Nature of Island Constraints. The department also occasionally hosts national conferences, such as the Association for Computational Linguistics (1999), and the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference (2004).
Linguistics students also attend talks in a number of affiliated departments and units, such as Hearing & Speech Sciences, Second Language Acquisition, Neuroscience and Cognitive Science, Psychology, and the National Institutes of Health.