Faculty member Michelle Yuan will be giving an invited talk through the Abralin ao Vivo: Linguists Online virtual talk series. The talk, titled “Covert A-movement at the syntax-morphology interface: Insights from Inuktitut incorporation,” will be streaming live on July 27, 2022.
Have you ever been so flustered, amused, frustrated, or surprised that you… just… lkajhslkasdf?
Well, Allison Park sure has, and they’ve turned their experience with the online practice of keysmashing into a topic of serious linguistic study. In their recent paper ‘On the linguistic behavior of keysmashes’, Allison argues that keysmashes are fundamentally linguistic, behaving according to many of the normal criteria used for establishing that expression is ‘language’, like semanticity, standards of form, and arbitrariness. Then, Park goes on to evaluate the kinds of criteria which go into people’s judgements about whether a keysmash is ‘well formed’ and ‘acceptable’, finding that not only do keysmashes have to be the right length and have the right amount of repetition, but that the location on the keyboard of the characters used is crucial, along with other important characteristics.
For more information about this work, their findings, and the social, linguistic, and communicative goals of keysmashing, have a look at San Diego Linguistics Papers Issue 11 on eScholarship.
San Diego Linguistic Papers is the working papers archive of the Department of Linguistics at UC San Diego.
Anna Mai successfully defended their dissertation “Contrast, Neutralization, and Systems of Invariance” on June 16, 2022. They will start a post-doc this fall at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Andrea Martin’s Language and Computation in Neural Systems group, investigating language-specific speech sound representation in the brain. Congratulations, Anna!
Note: the following announcement is copied from the Linguistic Society of America’s Update #235.
Join us later this month, on July 21, at noon Eastern, for our next “Meet the Authors” webinar. Authors Tory Sampson and Rachel I. Mayberry challenge the common assumption that ASL has no overt copula. They present evidence that one of the functions of the sign SELF in present-day ASL is as a copula. The sign evolved into its current function by way of a grammaticalization process called the “copula cycle” (Katz 1996). Join Drs. Sampson and Mayberry as they discuss their findings as published in their recent article in Language. The presentation will be made in ASL with interpretation.