Ivano Caponigro’s new book on Mesoamerican languages

Faculty member Ivano Caponigro has edited the volume Headless Relative Clauses in Mesoamerican languages (Oxford University Press) together with Prof. Harold Torrence (UCLA) and Prof. Roberto Zavala Maldonado (CIESAS, Mexico). The book results from a 4-year project in which a team of 21 scholars from Mexico, USA, Canada, and France investigated the morpho-syntax and semantics of several varieties of headless relative clauses across 15 languages (all from Mesoamerica but one) by adopting the same template, definitions, and data collection methodologies.
Link to the Publisher’s book webpage (with book endorsements)
Link to the project website (with video interviews to each scholar involved in the project)
Link to the book webpage within the project website (with freely available chapters)

NSF award for Eric Baković and Leon Bergen

The National Science Foundation has awarded Eric Baković, Leon Bergen, and CSE’s Nadia Polikarpova a $400K grant to continue their work building a software tool to efficiently learn phonological processes directly from data. There’s a short description on the NSF website here, and there is an even more accessibly-written piece featuring Polikarpova and her many accomplishments, with a focus on this work, here. A conference paper our research team published in 2019 is here.

UCSD Linguistics representation at AMP 2020 this weekend

Three UCSD phonologists are co-authors on two poster presentations at AMP 2020 this weekend (Sept. 18-20), to be held virtually:

  • Eric Baković & Anna Mai, “Comparing positional licensing patterns in HG and OT” (poster session 1, Friday 9/18)
  • Nina Hagen Kaldhol & Björn Köhnlein, “North Germanic tonal accent is equipollent and metrical: Evidence from compounding” (poster session 3, Sunday 9/20)

Nina Feygl Semushina co-organizes a workshop on Sign Language studies at V-NYI

Graduate student Nina Feygl Semushina organized a virtual workshop on “Sign Language Studies” on July 21-30, together with Masha Esipova (Princeton University), Philippe Schlenker (NYU/CNRS), and Valeria Vinogradova (University of East Anglia). The workshop highlighted different areas of sign language linguistics, such as iconicity, variation, language acquisition, and sign & gesture. On July 28, Nina gave a presentation on “Acquisition of number and language: does the order matter? Age of first language acquisition effects on automatic number processing.
The workshop was dedicated to the memory of Tatiana Davidenko, a pioneering Deaf teacher and researcher of Russian Sign Language, who passed away in June 2020.
The workshop was part of the Virtual Summer Institute of Linguistics, Cognition, and Culture (V-NYI), organized by Stony Brook University (NY) and Herzen State Pedagogical University (St. Petersburg, Russia). This year, V-NYI Summer Institute connected 301 students & 55 faculty members from 43 countries.

Matthew Carter, Nina Hagen Kaldhol, and Matt Zaslansky presented at SLE

Ph.D. students Matthew Carter, Nina Hagen Kaldhol and Matt Zaslansky gave talks at the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea. The conference was supposed to take place in Bucharest, but was moved online. The organizers did a great job in making a virtual program, including a welcome session with musical performances from all over Europe!

Matthew Carter. “What Licenses Polyfunctionality?: The Case of /b3/ in Ket”. https://osf.io/qhb5u/

Nina Hagen Kaldhol and Sverre Stausland Johnsen. “Grammaticalization in Somali and the shaping of prosodic types”. https://osf.io/945wh/

Matthew Zaslansky. “Persistence and variation in Turkic deponent verbs”. https://osf.io/9g745/

Three new grants for the Language Comprehension Lab

Faculty member Eva Wittenberg, PI of the Language Comprehension Lab, just received both an IBM University Award and a UCSD Innovation Grant for Inclusive Research Excellence, to better understand how the COVID-19 pandemic influences language comprehension throughout society, in an exciting ongoing project with colleagues Rachel OstrandDan Kleinman, and Adam Morgan. Dr. Wittenberg was also awarded a Yankelovich Center Book Manuscript/Grant Proposal Improvement Grant.

Language Comprehension Lab presentations at SAFAL-1 and AMLaP

Our Language Comprehension Lab has four presentations this week, one at the First South Asian Forum on the Acquisition and Processing of Language (SAFAL), and three at AMLaP: