The nationwide summer meeting of the Linguistic Society of America is being held on campus beginning today and runs through June 25.

About 70 graduate students and professional linguists are expected to attend the event, which kicks off at the Kellogg Center, society president Sally McConnell-Ginet said.

The event will include more than 30 graduate students presenting their papers and attending panels on finding jobs, receiving grant money and getting published.

"It's a chance to present your work to some people who are going to be your colleagues throughout your career," she said.

McConnell-Ginet said the event is more intimate and less intimidating than two other events the society holds — its annual meeting in January and an institute held every two years. Between 1,000 and 1,200 people attend the January meeting, and the institute draws anywhere from 400-1,000 people, she said.

This is the first summer meeting in 24 years, McConnell-Ginet said. The event was brought back in part to focus more on graduate students, who can get lost in the mix of the two other meetings.

More than 35 papers will be presented, which were chosen from about 100 abstracts submitted from across the country. The topics will range from verb-copying construction in Mandarin Chinese to the language innovations of rapper Snoop Dogg. Three MSU students will present three different papers.

Linguistics professor Wendy Wilkins was part of the committee that chose the papers to be presented. The papers were chosen based on the quality of research, Wilkins said.

Linguistics graduate student Jim Stanford will be presenting his paper, "Dialect acquisition among Sui exogamous women."

Stanford spent several years living with various clans of Sui, indigenous people who live in mountainous and rural areas of southern China. Sui people have an ancient marriage custom in which women must leave their own clan and join their husband's clan, probably to avoid inbreeding problems, Stanford said.

An interesting finding was that the women's dialect does not adapt to their husbands' clan, and they keep virtually the same dialect of their original clan — something that is not common in the western world, Stanford said.

Women even use a different word for "me" than the men and children of the clan do, keeping their identity intact instead of adapting to the new community, he said.

"It seems like they are resisting the change," Stanford said. "Even though it's more natural that people absorb new dialects, this seems like an interesting case of their identity or social role overriding that."

Stanford said his research informs people about little-known differences and similarities between common and uncommon languages.

"I think (the Sui) give us a lot of perspective that we wouldn't have otherwise," he said.

Linguistics graduate student Bo-Young Kwon is presenting her paper on the difficulty that children of some cultures have when learning to pronounce two consonants together.

"English-learning children have a tendency to reduce consonant clusters to a single consonant — snow is 'so' or 'no,'" Kwon said in an e-mail.

The pattern is typical among English- and Dutch-speaking children learning their first language, or Korean, Mandarin Chinese or Japanese children learning English as a second language, Kwon said.

Linguistics graduate student Irina Agafonova is the third presenter from MSU. Agafonova's paper is on the conjunction "a" in Russian, which does not have an English equivalent. The paper is a part of her ongoing dissertation research, she said in an e-mail.