Eva Wittenberg gives two talks in Europe

Faculty member Eva Wittenberg is giving two talks in Europe, representing  her lab‘s cross-linguistic work.

The first talk (on November 5th) will take place at the conference Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Processing and Learning (X-PPL) in Zurich, and Eva will present joint work with Ashwini Vaidya (IIT Delhi) on processing light verbs in Hindi in the their talk Practice makes perfect: Frequency of language-wide predicational strategy eases processing cost in Hindi light verb constructions.

The second talk (on November 9th) will take place at the 14. Bayerisch-Österreichischen Dialektologentagung in Salzburg, where Eva and her collaborator Andreas Trotzke will talk about their work on a variety of Bavarian: Mogst a weng a Schnitzala? Eine psycholinguistische Untersuchung zur referenziellen Verkleinerungsfunktion in ostfränkischen Nominalphrasen. (‘Would you like a little schnitzl? A psycholinguistic study about the referential function in East Franconian noun phrases’).

Gustavo Guajardo and Grant Goodall publish article in Glossa

Alumnus Gustavo Guajardo (Ph.D., 2017) and faculty member Grant Goodall just published “On the status of Concordantia Temporum in Spanish: An experimental approach” in the open-access journal Glossa. This article is based on a large-scale acceptability experiment done in three countries as part of Gustavo’s dissertation work. Gustavo is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Linguistics at the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Our students and faculty presenting at CAMP 3, SCAMP 1, and CUSP 12

Our graduate students Catherine Arnett, Till Poppels, and Josh Wampler, and our faculty members Andy Kehler and Eva Wittenberg are presenting at CAMP 3 (California Meeting on Psycholinguistics) at UC Santa Cruz on October 26-27. Our graduate students Sihun Jung and Alex Rodriguez are presenting at SCAM 1 (Southern California Annual Meeting on Syntax) at Pomona College on November 2. Finally, Josh is also presenting at CUSP 12 (California Universities Semantics and Pragmatics) at USC on November 9-10.

Tory Sampson is awarded best student presentation at TISLR13

Our third year graduate student Tory Sampson was awarded the best student stage presentation at the 13th triennial Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research (TISLR). Her presentation focused on the copular cycle in American Sign Language (ASL) with the sign, labeled as ‘SELF’. In this presentation, Tory presented three stages in the evolution of SELF – as a demonstrative pronoun in 1850’s French Sign Language (LSF – a predecessor of ASL), as a personal pronoun in 1910’s ASL, and finally as a copula in modern ASL. She also presented the ambiguous syntactic contexts that provided for the reinterpretation and subsequent grammaticalization of SELF. A video of her presentation can be found here.