The LSA is pleased to announce the finalists for the fourth annual Five-minute Linguist to be held at the 2020 Annual Meeting.  The Five-minute Linguist presentations must be done without notes or a podium and they must be informative, engaging, and accessible to a non-specialist audience.  This has become one of the most popular events at our annual meeting; join us this year for these dynamic presentations.  The finalists for 2020 are: 

• Natasha Abner (University of Michigan), Carlo Geraci (Ecole Normale Supérieure), Justine Mertz (University of Paris 7, Denis Diderot), Jessica Lettieri (Università degli studi di Torino), Shi Yu (Ecole Normale Supérieure): A Handy Approach to Sign Language Relatedness
• Soubeika Bahri (City University of New York): Tamazight baby talk in Ettounsi: language contact and stability of a register
• Jonathan Gutmann (Tulane University): Determining Word Length Through Context: A Cross-Linguistic Information-Theoretic Approach
• Alyssa Kampa, Catherine Richards, and Anna Papafragou (University of Delaware): Preschoolers interpret pictures using pragmatic principles
• Ian Maddieson (University of New Mexico): Climate shapes language
• Asako Matsuda (Ochanomizu University):  We
• Laura Wagner (The Ohio State University): How Time Semantics Links to Mental Cognition
• Emily Williams (University of Texas at Arlington): Pragmatic Extension in Computer-Mediated Communication: The case of ™ and #

Each participant will be given five minutes for a presentation that will receive constructive, friendly feedback from a panel of judges. The final judging will be done by the audience and a judging panel including journalists.  The event will be emceed by LSA member and Public Relations Committee Chair John McWhorter.

Watch the video from the 2017, 2018 and 2019 editions of Five-minute Linguist.