Superlinguo

Last Friday we celebrated Australia’s Biggest Morning Tea in the Linguistics Department to raise money for the Cancer Council. We decided the theme should be “bake your thesis,” and I’m pleased to say that everyone did a great job! I’ve got a couple of highlights photographed below. Above is Rosey’s stunning cake, representing her phonetic study of Lopit (from South Sudan), which involves really cool advanced tongue root vowels.

Aidan’s lemon slice Tiwi verb templates were tasty and interactive:

When Jill isn’t studying LOLcats with me she’s studying attitudes towards the Irish language from people who speak it in Ireland and the diaspora in other countries. Not only did she carve a whole country out of a cake, but the cake has Guinness in it:

Sara decided to make a cake diorama to represent her study of Sherpa child language acquisition - but it was the mini yaks that won our attention:

Erin’s study of English discourse markers was presented in cupcake form:

I decided to not go for an iconic representation, and made chai cupcakes to represent the enormous amounts of tea involved in my fieldwork:

Baking is a great metaphor for thesis writing, all morning there were lots of jokes about theses being half-baked, overdone, unpalatable and flops. It was a great morning and a novel way to share our work with the rest of the department.