Conference Mk II

So it would appear I'm becoming something of a conference fiend, as I attended my second in two months at the start of November - namely the Manchester Salford New Researchers Forum in Linguistics. Of course the whole point of endless conferences, other than getting your name about, is to learn something new each time - so what was different?

• The "warm-up"! As there were 5 Yorkies going to Manchester, we decided to combine forces to present our papers to the department before throwing ourselves to the conference lions. Three of us were able to present...and subsequently got rinsed by the department. Actually, that's not fair - our audience focused on the areas in which we could improve, which was crucial so that we could give the best possible accounts of ourselves. Shame there wasn't quite enough time to get onto the positives though we were assured that there were plenty of positives, and we all agreed that our papers were much the better for having that first airing.
• Collaboration! This time round, I had a co-presenter, the lovely Samir from Sheffield via Exeter. My MA thesis was based to a certain extent on his, so we decided to combine forces (and data) to hit our listeners with 40 - yes, that's FORTY - simultaneous bilingual children, 15 French-English and 25 German-English and their very best dative constructions. This was an interesting challenge, not least because Exeter is a blimmin' long way from York, but also because I was much more familiar with the material than Samir, having worked more recently on both projects. I therefore took responsibility for the early slide drafts, which Samir then fine-tuned. We also both learnt a lot about the pros and cons of using Skype to collaborate and practice - verdict? Largely very useful, as long as you can find a quiet-but-not-silent area to go to, though the face-to-face practice the morning of the talk was invaluable.
• A new topic! As I hinted above, we were presenting on a combination of our two MA theses, which were both about the acquisition of dative alternation by simultaneous bilingual children. An acquisition talk involves less hardcore formal theory than my LAGB talk, but in some ways demands a much more careful approach when interpreting results. We also had to account for a large range of factors in our methodology, such as the socioeconomic status of our participants and the ways in which we tested participants' proficiencies.
• 10 minutes fewer! At the LAGB, I wittered my half-hour talk in under 20 minutes. At the MancSalFiL, our allotted 20 minutes were filled to the brim - it's always MUCH harder to be concise than verbose...

Cupcakes (like this one) make conferences
brighter. Image from dreamstime.com

And the outcome? We were really pleased with the way our talk was received, and benefited from a wide range of different perspectives, as we had syntacticians, pragmatics and even the odd sociolinguist offering their very welcome thoughts. Hours spent on Skype turned out to be very well spent, and we think the delivery was pretty smooth, if we do say so ourselves! Here are the slides if you fancy a look yourself.

Furthermore, the entire conference itself was hugely useful for networking, looking at how other people approach their work, and an exceedingly useful careers panel from four kind, willing victims volunteers. Not to mention the aforementioned volunteers' cracking plenary talks, a constant haze of enthusiasm and some insanely good cupcakes. Well done to everyone involved, especially the three amazing organisers.

Best way to get to know your new colleagues?
A trip to Evil Eye

Good times all round, which seem set to continue, largely. There have been enough highlights so far in my 5-week-old PhD to balance out all the reading - in particular my seminar teaching, some cracking new colleagues and a new side project I'm working on with my supervisor George...more to come on that another time though.

And just before I leave you - it's official - I got a Distinction in my MA. Very pleased indeed :D

Now it just remains to try to write again before December...