Graduate students Alex Rodríguez and Maho Takahashi, along with faculty member Grant Goodall, presented posters at the 2023 Human Sentence Processing conference held at the Univ. of Pittsburgh. Alex’s and Grant’s poster was on “Clitic Left Dislocation in Spanish: Island sensitivity without gaps”, while Maho and Grant presented two posters, one on “Island effects persist despite context: The case of double relatives in Japanese” and the other on “Crossed vs. nested dependencies and crosslinguistic variability in islands”.
Grant Goodall publishes article on constructed languages
Faculty member Grant Goodall published an article entitled “Constructed Languages” in the open-access journal Annual Review of Linguistics. The article examines philosophical languages of the 17th century, international auxiliary languages of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the languages for film and television that started to become common in the late 20th century, and the artificial languages for psycholinguistic experiments that are widely used now. The article argues that each of these types of languages presents interesting research questions and deserves increased attention from linguists.
JJ Lim receives language revitalization award
PhD candidate JJ Lim and his collaborators, Ghilyana Dordzhieva and Darina Gedeeva, were selected to be part of the 2023 cohort of the Wikitongues Language Revitalization Accelerator program. The award comes with specialized training, in-kind support, and a $2000 grant, to support projects on language revitalization. JJ and his collaborators are working to revitalize the Kalmyk language in the Kalmyk American diaspora, which is concentrated primarily in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania. They will use this opportunity to develop a first-of-its-kind conversational English-Kalmyk language course geared towards beginners, which includes a textbook, online dictionary and website with supplementary materials. Find out more about their project here.
Ebru Evcen and David Barner present at XPrag2023
Graduate student Ebru Evcen and faculty member David Barner are presenting a poster entitled Time course of conditional inferences at XPrag2023, the 10th biennial meeting of Experimental Pragmatics, which is held in Paris, France on September 20-23, 2023.
Emily Clem publishes in Languages
Faculty member Emily Clem has a new paper “The expression of time in Amahuaca switch-reference clauses” that just appeared in the open access journal Languages as part of a special issue called “Current Studies on Morpho-Syntax, Semantics, and Pragmatics: A View from the South American Lowlands and Beyond”. This paper offers a comparison of how degrees of temporal remoteness are expressed in main vs. dependent clauses in Amahuaca (Panoan; Peru), showing that in adjunct clauses markers of temporal remoteness can result in similar kinds of ambiguities that are found with tense markers in other languages.
JJ Lim and Michelle Yuan presented at WCCFL 41
Graduate student JJ Lim and faculty member Michelle Yuan presented at WCCFL 41, the 41st West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, held at UC Santa Cruz from May 5-7, 2023. JJ presented a talk titled ‘Nominalisations without DP: Dissociating genitive case assignment from possessor agreement’. Michelle co-presented a talk titled ‘Phase unlocking and the derivation of verb-initiality in San Martín Peras Mixtec’ with Andrew Hedding (University of Washington).
Ivano Caponigro receives an NEH Summer Stipend Award
Faculty member Ivano Caponigro has been awarded an NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) Summer Stipend Award. NEH received more than 800 proposals and 14% were selected for an award.
Ivano will spend Summer 2024 working on two core chapters of his intellectual and personal biography of Richard Montague (1930-1971), the philosopher and logician who fathered formal semantics and changed the way we think about the semantics of natural languages.
The book is under contract with Oxford University Press and has been previously supported by a grant from the American Philosophical Society, a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and an in-residency fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University.
Joshua Wampler and Eva Wittenberg present at CogSci23
Graduate student Joshua Wampler and former faculty member Eva Wittenberg will be presenting a poster entitled Discourse structure affects reference resolution to events in English: Evidence from a new paradigm at CogSci23, the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, which will be held in Sydney, Australia July 26-29, 2023.
Sharon Rose, Michael Obiri-Yeboah and Sarah Creel publish in Laboratory Phonology
Faculty member Sharon Rose, alumnus Michael Obiri-Yeboah (PhD 2021, currently Assistant Teaching Professor in Linguistics Department at Georgetown University) and Sarah C. Creel (faculty member in UC San Diego Cognitive Science) just published the paper “Perception of ATR contrasts by Akan speakers: a case of perceptual near-merger.” in Laboratory Phonology. The paper shows how Akan speakers can easily distinguish vowels contrasted by only Advanced Tongue Root, but have difficulty perceiving phonemic vowel contrasts that differ by both Advanced Tongue Root and height features; although such vowels have distinct articulation, they are acoustically similar.
Ivano Caponigro delivered two invited talks at UC Berkeley
Faculty member Ivano Caponigro just presented at UC Berkeley twice. He gave a colloquium talk in the Linguistics Department on Investigating Headless Relative Clauses Across Languages: Why and How on March 13 and a talk at the Working Group in the History and Philosophy of Logic, Mathematics, and Science in the Philosophy Department on Logic and Grammar: Richard Montague’s Turn towards Natural Language on March 15.