Alex Rodríguez, Maho Takahashi, and Grant Goodall present at HSP 2023

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.

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).