The Linguistics graduate students at U of I just hosted the 16th Annual Meeting of the Illinois Language and Linguistics Society! The annual academic conference took place on March 1st – 2nd at the I Hotel & Illinois Conference Center and attracted over 180 attendees. Attendees came from all over the world to join us at ILLS, with presenters traveling from Chicago, Wisconsin, Michigan, California, Iowa, Louisiana, Florida, and internationally from Canada, Japan, and Hong Kong.
In light of this year’s theme, “Language, Mind, and Society”, ILLS16 brought together experts in a variety of subfields for four outstanding plenary talks:
- Michael Tanenhaus (University of Rochester): A context constructivist account of contextual diversity and word frequency
- Rajka Smiljanic (University of Texas at Austin): Speaking to be understood: Insights into Speech Processing and Effective Communication
- Ruth Kramer (Georgetown University): The Case Against Phonological Gender Assignment: Crosslinguistic Evidence from Hausa, Guébie and Beyond
- Salvatore Callesano (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign): Monolingual expectations, bilingual realities: Sociolinguistic perceptions and Latinx languaging
The two conference days also featured 21 competitive talks and 11 poster presentations on a diverse range of work with experimental and computational methods, topics on sociolinguistics, phonology, syntax, pragmatics, language and disability, and the processing of first and second languages.
This year, ILLS also hosted conference dinners on both days: a reception dinner at the I Hotel on March 1st and a second dinner at the Big Grove Restaurant in downtown Champaign on March 2nd.
We extend our warmest thanks to the generous sponsors and funders that helped us raise a total of $13,326 in funds for ILLS16:
Beckman Institute, Center for Advanced Study, Center for East Asian & Pacific Studies, Center for Global Studies, Center for Global Studies (U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant), Center for Social and Behavioral Sciences, Department of Classics, Department of Communication, Department of English, Department of French and Italian, Department of History, Department of Linguistics, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, European Union Center (U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant), Humanities Research Institute, Illinois Dad’s Association, Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center, School of Literatures, Cultures & Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education (SLATE), Student Organization Resource Fee, The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Women and Gender in Global Perspectives Program
Last, but certainly not least, a huge thanks to over 50 graduate and undergraduate student volunteers who made ILLS16 run smoothly, and to the wonderful ILLS16 organizing committee, who worked for months in preparation for the event and during both days of the conference!
Co-Chairs: Katherine Kwak, Mingyue Huo
Committee: Sibel Arikoglu, Maialen Casquete De La Puente, Ryan Corrigan, Joshua Dees, Paul De Nijs, Araceli Pantoja, Amelia Tighe, Luis David Gaytán-Soto, Isela Silvera, Costanza Vallicelli