"'You Have Hissed All My Mystery Lectures'" - A Look at Slips of the Toungue". Dr.  Ellen Thompson, Linguistics / FIU. February 15, 2005.

  In this talk, I argue that slips of the tongue, which may seem to be little more than a nuisance in speaking, can in fact help us to understand the structure of human language, and can provide evidence about how we produce and understand language. Sigmund Freud argued that that slips of the tongue reveal our unconscious wishes and desires, and discussed the error committed by a member of the House of Commons who referred to another member as the honorable member for Central Hell, instead of Central Hull. Linguists have long noted that the errors that are observed are not random; the structural units, rules and processes that linguists posit in order to account for the phenomena of natural language are affected in speech errors. We observe errors which affect phrases, such as, "I have to smoke my coffee with a cigarette", instead of the intended, "I have to smoke a cigarette with my coffee". Errors occur which affect words, such as, "What child will a grammar learn?", instead of, "What grammar will a child learn?" We also observe errors which affect the meaningful units of which a word is composed; for example, George Bush said, "The government is not the surplus's money, Vice President.", instead of the intended, "The surplus is not the government's money, Vice President". Errors affecting sounds are observed, such as Bush saying, "If the terriers and bariffs are torn down, this economy will grow", when he intended to say, "If the barriers and tariffs are torn down, this economy will grow." I conclude the talk with discussion of the implications of observed errors for the theory of language production and language processing.

" The Old English V2 Process: An Analysis of Modern Theories". Leslie Bofill, Linguistics / FIU. February 17, 2005

The presentation explores the verbal syntax of Old English. Various theories that seek to explain the structure of the "Verb Second" process in Old English is discussed, and the history of the loss of "Verb Second" in English is presented. 

"  From Ice Cream to aisakulimi: The Adaptation of Consonant Clusters in Loan Words".Dr. Estefan Engelberg, University of Wuppertal/ Germany. March 3, 2005.

Loanwords usually undergo a number of adaptations when they enter the borrowing language. Phonemes unknown to the borrowing language are replaced, features are altered, and accent and tone patterns are modified. This talk will be dealing with the adaptation of consonant clusters when loans from German and English enter non-Indo-European languages which have stricter constraints on clusters. Data will come mainly from Estonian, Kyrgyz, Mokilese, Samoan, Kusaiean and Arabic