Five Minute Linguist

[Sherley]

TheFive-Minute Linguist is a high-profile event which features LSA members giving lively and engaging presentations about their research in a manner accessible to the general public. No notes, no podium, and an actual timer. A winner is chosen at the end of the event. The goal of this event is to encourage LSA members to practice presenting their work to a broad audience and to showcase outstanding examples of members who can explain their research in an accessible way.

When the call for abstracts goes out for the Annual Meeting, all LSA members will have the opportunity to prepare a 300-word pitch for the Five-Minute Linguist event. Members who submit regular abstracts for the Annual Meeting will see a checkbox which they may use to enter their pitch for this event, but abstracts will also be accepted that are not concurrently submitted for the Annual Meeting and may have been presented elsewhere, or that are being considered for presentation at one of the LSA's Sister Societies.

Please note, the Five-Minute Linguist pitch is not simply a shortened version of the main (500-word) LSA abstract. Instead, it should be written in an accessible style that would be more suitable for the target audience, namely, the general public. The Selection Committee is trying to determine how effective the speaker would likely be at giving a publicly accessible version of their talk and the pitch is used to provide guidance on that matter.

The LSA invites submissions for 5ML pitches to be presented at its 2025 Annual Meeting, which will take place in person in Philadelphia from January 9-12, 2025. 5ML pitches will be accepted through Oxford Abstracts on July 15th at 11:59 pm Pacific time.

* You will be directed to Oxford Abstract to submit your proposal. If you don't have an account with Oxford Abstracts, please create one to access the submission page. This account is different from your LSA Membership account. If you need technical support for the Oxford Abstracts platform, please visit the Guidance for Submitters on the Oxford Abstracts Support webpage.

A: The Selection Committee is composed of members of the LSA's Public Relations Committee, the Outreach Committee, the Program Committee, and recent recipients of the LSA Journalism Award. The committee views the pitches as representative of what the talk will be like, so your pitch should be accessible to a broad audience just as the talk should be. If necessary, the Selection Committee may invite authors of regular abstracts or other members of the LSA community to participate. The Committee will select eight presentations for the event.

A: Prior to the event presenters will receive coaching about how to make their presentations as accessible as possible. The public event will be video recorded for later posting online. Each participant will speak for five minutes; visual aids (powerpoint slides) will be allowed but participants are expected to speak without notes.

A. The LSA is the beneficiary of a generous donation of author royalties from the sale of the 5-Minute Linguist. Many LSA leaders and members contributed content to both the book and the radio feature. The LSA obtained permission from both the authors and the publisher to use this name for our event.

A: Questions about the 5ML pitch may be directed to the Public Relations Committee Chairs: Georgia Zellou (gze...@ucdavis.edu) and Anne Pycha (py...@uwm.edu). If you need technical support for the Oxford Abstracts platform, please visit the Guidance for Submitters on the Oxford Abstracts Support webpage or email membe...@lsadc.org.

So what does a linguist do? This competition featured eight linguists, each of whom had only five minutes to explain a bit of what they do. (We see something like this at math conferences as well, but limited to even less time than five minutes.) What makes it a competition comes at the end, when the audience and the judges vote on whose presentation was the best.

In 2021, I co-founded #LingComm21, the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, with co-chair Lauren Gawne, organizing committee members Jessi Grieser and Laura Bailey, and conference manager Liz McCullough (different spelling, no relation!). We produced the following blog posts about running better online conferences and events.

I was a writer for Crash Course Linguistics along with Lauren Gawne and Jessi Grieser (fact-checker), a series of 16 ten-minute introductory linguistics videos for the educational youtube channel Crash Course. Watch the first video below, or see the full playlist here (all captioned in English).

During the first year of the covid pandemic, when schools and universities were rapidly pivoting to online teaching, Lauren Gawne and I co-produced Mutual Intelligibility, a newsletter to compile existing online resources for teaching linguistics, with a special focus on video resources (which were the top requested category from instructors), under the managing editorship of Liz McCullough and with assorted other guest contributors.

A full list of Mutual Intelligiblity posts can be found here, including 16 companion posts for each of the 16 Crash Course Linguistics videos with exercises and further reading/watching/listening to dive deeper into each topic, 6 in-depth Resource Guides to common intro topics, and 23 short Three Links posts with three quick links about a wide variety of linguistics topics at various levels.

Linguistics in the Public Ear: Outreach via Podcasts and Radio. Panel that I organized at the Linguistic Society of America annual meeting, Salt Lake City, Utah. January 2018. I also co-presented a talk on this panel about Lingthusiasm, with my cohost Lauren Gawne. More about the panel.

Stumbling into Linguistics: Blogs and Wikipedia. Talk on a panel about Getting High Schoolers into Linguistics, which I also co-organized. Linguistic Society of America annual meeting, Austin, Texas. January 2017. My slides at bit.ly/lingwiki-lsa2017

When you consider how carefully staged and planned the debates are and how long they've been around, it's remarkable how often candidates manage to screw them up. Sometimes they're undone by a simple gaffe or an ill-conceived bit of stagecraft, like Gerald Ford's slip-up about Soviet domination of eastern Europe in 1976, or Al Gore's histrionic sighing in 2000. Sometimes it's just a sign of a candidate having a bad day, like Ronald Reagan's woolly ramblings in the first debate with Walter Mondale in 1984.

But President Obama's flop was more puzzling. Sure, there were lots of lost opportunities. Twitter recorded 10.3 million tweets over the 90 minutes of the debate, and my guess is that 500,000 of those offered zingers that Obama could have used. But there was no one moment when the debate went off the rails, which is why even the Saturday Night Live writers said they had trouble turning it into a sketch. You could hear the bewilderment in the multitude of explanations and excuses people offered for Obama's performance. He's worn down by the job. He's not used to being challenged anymore. He didn't expect Romney to be ready to rumble. It was the Denver altitude. He was sandbagging. He didn't want to be seen as an angry black man. It was a Zen thing.

I have no idea what the man was thinking. But one thing that struck me about five minutes in was that he didn't know which TV show he was showing up for. Like the other spectacles of modern public life, the televised debate re-stages a supposedly traditional ritual as a talk show. There's a minimal basic setup, with the candidates and a moderator or a panel. And after the very first Kennedy-Nixon debate, there has to be a studio audience, even if they're told to keep silent. As with any other talk show, we need a surrogate so we can imagine how the candidates' words are landing.

But beyond that, a debate can play out in a lot of ways. There are those WrestleMania smackdowns like some of this year's primary debates, where the audiences were encouraged to jeer and cheer, and the candidates spent a lot of time attacking both the moderators and each other. You think of Gingrich saying to Romney, "Can we drop a little bit of the pious baloney?" or of Romney offering to bet Rick Perry $10,000 about his position on the individual mandate.

Still, those candidate-to-candidate exchanges are pretty unusual in the history of debates between the presidential and vice-presidential nominees. True, they've provided us with some memorable moments, like Lloyd Bentsen's "You're no Jack Kennedy" rejoinder to Dan Quayle in 1988. But that was one of only two things that Bentsen said directly to Quayle over the whole debate. In fact, from the first Kennedy-Nixon debate up through the debates in recent elections, the candidates have rarely addressed each other more than a couple of times in all. The overwhelming number of remarks are addressed to the moderator or panelists, with occasional shout-outs to the audience at home.

Now, Obama may very well have been just off his game. But the strategy of avoiding direct confrontation was clearly decided in advance. And it probably wouldn't have turned out so disastrously for Obama if Romney hadn't been hammering on him with all those second-person pronouns that he wasn't responding to. All of a sudden the style that must have seemed deliberative in rehearsal came off as evasive, timid and peckish.

Things will be different on Oct. 16, when the candidates are talking directly to audience members in the town-meeting setting. Obama doesn't get professorial when he's one-on-one with members of the public. And in that setting the burden will be on Romney to make personal contact. The aggressive sallies that were effective in the first debate might make him sound like a QVC pitchman when you hear them spoken to an ordinary citizen. But I imagine they'll both do just fine. And anyway, I like to tell myself that none of these things should matter. This is a political debate, not "Battle of the Network Stars." But who am I kidding?

3a8082e126