25.840, TraveLING Along with Featured Linguist Martin Ball

Wed Feb 19 16:26:09 UTC 2014

LINGUIST List: Vol-25-840. Wed Feb 19 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.840, TraveLING Along with Featured Linguist Martin Ball

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Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2014 11:25:16
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Let's Welcome Our First Featured Linguist for 2014: Martin Ball

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As our Fund Drive goes on, every week we are going to present you a Featured
Linguist from the current TraveLing region of the world. As our first region
is Eastern North America, please welcome our Featured Linguist from this
region - Martin J. Ball. See below what Martin has to say about his career and
love for linguistics.

Biography, by Martin J. Ball

I was born in the heart of Welsh-speaking Wales (Tywyn in Meirionydd), but my
family moved to southern England not long afterwards. This move was a cause of
some dismay to me when I first became aware of other languages (I started
French in primary school – so quite early on!). I was really miffed that we
hadn’t stayed long enough for me to acquire this interesting language. So,
from the age of 11 or so, I set to with a Teach Yourself Welsh book, BBC Radio
Wales courses (which you could hear even in Exeter, Devon), and much later on
an intensive Wlpan course in Cardiff. So, starting on a journey of learning
‘iaith yr angylion’ led me to an interest in other languages. Like others who
have written for this feature, I became a devourer of language manuals from
the local library, and eventually discovered books on linguistics.

My undergraduate degree was in Linguistics and English literature at what was
then the University College of North Wales, Bangor, and is now Bangor
University. I studied under great teachers such as Alan Thomas, Ken Albrow,
Robert Owen Jones and Tony Bladon. These scholars fostered a particular
interest in phonetics and sociolinguistics in me. I determined to follow up my
undergraduate degree with further studies in these areas, and took up a place
on the Master’s program in Linguistics and Phonetics at the University of
Essex, under the excellent leadership of Mark Tatham and Kate Morton. I was
lucky enough also to meet Chris Code at this time, then a fellow student on
the Master’s program. He is now a leading aphasiologist; back then, he helped
introduce me to the field of communication disorders, and he has remained a
lifelong friend and academic collaborator.

Almost immediately I finished at Essex I was offered an assistant lectureship
in linguistics at a university in Libya. An interesting year spent deep in the
Sahara was followed by the offer of a lectureship at the Cardiff School of
Speech Therapy – a chance to get back to Wales couldn’t be missed! Here I was
able to combine my academic interests in Welsh and in communication disorders.
Indeed, as the program was about to undergo accreditation I had to immerse
myself into the then relatively new field of clinical linguistics. Luckily, I
got help from the writings of David Crystal (later, I was lucky enough to meet
and collaborate with David), and from meetings with Pam Grunwell – a pioneer
in the field of clinical phonetics and phonology. So, by the early eighties I
felt I had a grip on teaching clinical linguistics and phonetics and therefore
enrolled part-time in a doctoral program at University College Cardiff (now
Cardiff University). I was fortunate to have Prof Glyn Jones as my Advisor –
one of the most influential linguists working on Welsh of recent times. He was
not only a great mentor and friend, but patiently helped correct my Welsh on
those occasions that I ventured to present papers at conferences or prepare
articles for publication in the language. My dissertation was a
sociolinguistic study of the initial consonant mutation system of modern
spoken Welsh. In the mid-eighties I attended a conference on minority
languages held at the National University of Ireland in Galway. There I met my
future wife, Nicole Müller, who was a scholar of medieval Irish and Welsh -
but later also became a clinical linguist. We have clearly started a trend of
moving from Celtic to Clinical!

In the late eighties I spent a few years teaching at what is now the
University of Glamorgan, and in 1992 I moved to the University of Ulster.
There I was promoted in quick succession to Reader then full Professor. I had
the opportunity to become course director of a brand new program in
Linguistics that ran alongside the Speech Pathology program. By the late
nineties I was based in Ireland (though my interests were in Welsh), and my
wife held a post at Cardiff University Wales (though her interests were in
Irish)! So, to solve this dilemma we both moved to Lafayette, Louisiana!
Instrumental in this move was our friend Jack Damico, and we have been able to
collaborate with him on various projects, including articles, books, a book
series and a journal.

Here at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette we have undergraduate,
Master’s, and doctoral programs in Communication Disorders. The ability to
work with doctoral students interested in clinical linguistics has been
especially rewarding. I’m also co-editing two journals, and two book series
with colleagues here and elsewhere in Louisiana, and these keep me busy!
However, linguistics isn’t all I have time for – as the photo shows, I also
like preserved railways. I’m on the footplate of a steam locomotive on the
Lynton and Barnstaple Railway in north Devon, England, in the picture. (Yes,
academics are just like the characters in the ‘Big Bang Theory’…)

It’s a long way from ‘Teach Yourself Welsh’ to professor of clinical
linguistics, and I have to admit to fair amount of being in the right place at
the right time. But, mostly it was having the good fortune to have good
teachers and good mentors, and parents able to help me through college and
graduate school!

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