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/

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:

• How does case marking constrain event representations?
  Talk at SAFAL-1 by Eva Wittenberg, Mohit Gurumukhani and Ashwini Vaidya
• Non-Linguistic Context Affects Processing of Ambiguous Speech
  Poster #313 by Daniel Kleinman, Rachel Ostrand, Adam Morgan, Mohit Gurumukhani, and Eva Wittenberg
• Multiple Meanings of Doubling Up: Mandarin Verbal Reduplication
  Poster #152 by Catherine Arnett and Eva Wittenberg
• Form-specific preferences of proforms and demonstratives referring to events
  Poster #213 by Joshua Wampler and Eva Wittenberg

Emily Clem, who just joined our department as one of our two new syntacticians, has a new paper on “Amahuaca ergative as agreement with multiple heads” that just appeared in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 37(3): 785–823. 2019. [open source version] [published version]

Sharon Rose taught at the 5th African Linguistics School at Rhodes University in South Africa this summer. The school provides African linguistics students from across the continent the opportunity to take two weeks of courses with international and Africa-based faculty.

SemanticsBabble, the interdisciplinary discussion group on formal and experimental approaches to language meaning that is lead by Ivano Caponigro (Linguistics) and Jonathan Cohen (Philosophy), has just been awarded its 7th annual grant from the UCSD Institute of Arts and Humanities. The grant will help with inviting scholars and students from other institutions to present and discuss their current research on language meaning during the academic year 2019-2020.

Congratulations to Nese Demir, who has been awarded a 2019 Friends of the International Center fellowship. Nese will use the funds to conduct fieldwork in Eastern Turkey this summer.

Claudia Duarte-Bórquez was awarded a Triton Research and Experimental Learning Scholarship (TRELS) for Spring Quarter, 2019. Claudia is working under the guidance of Justin McIntosh on a project documenting and describing San Juan Piñas Mixtec, an Oto-Manguean language spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico and in San Diego county. This project began in the context of LIGN 139, ‘Field Methods’, taught in the Spring 2018 in collaboration with Ms. Claudia Juárez, a native speaker of this language. This May, Claudia will present the results of her investigation in the 22^nd annual Workshop on American Indigenous Languages (WAIL) at UC Santa Barbara. Her research project will also be showcased at UCSD’s Undergraduate Research Conference on May 18^th. Claudia is an undergraduate Language Studies major in her final quarter at UCSD and has plans to attend graduate school to study documentary and descriptive linguistics. Congratulations, Claudia!!!

Mohit Gurumukhani, a Research Assistant in the Language Comprehension Lab, just won a Triton Research and Experiential Learning Scholarship (TRELS) award for Spring Quarter, 2019. Mohit is working under the guidance of Eva Wittenberg on a project that investigates the role of Hindi case-marking. While Mohit is a Computer Science Major, the training provided by the lab has uniquely qualified him to tackle a complex problem in linguistics. Congratulations, Mohit!