Yale linguists present at 2016 LSA Annual Meeting

January 14, 2016

Several Yale linguistics faculty, students, and alumni presented at the 90th Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America (LSA). This large conference is held in parallel with meetings of several other societies in which Yale linguists also participated, including the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) and the Society for Pidgin and Creole Lingustics (SPCL).

Congratulations in particular to professor Raffaella Zanuttini, who presented an Invited Plenary Address!
 
Presentations

Thursday, January 7:

  • Undergraduate alumna Amalia Skilton (BA ’13, UC-Berkeley), along with Stephanie Farmer (UC-Berkeley) delivered a talk entitled “Getting personal: life-history variables and variation in Northern Máíhɨ̃kì” at the Documenting Variation in Endangered Languages Symposium. This research was also presented as a poster with Stephanie Farmer (Macalaster College) with the same title.

Friday, January 8:

  • Professor Raffaella Zanuttini delivered an Invited Plenary Address “Dialect Syntax in American English” discussing the methods and findings of the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project (YGDP). She was joined onstage by YGDP colleagues, professor emeritus Larry Horn and postdoc Jim Wood.
  • Graduate student Matt Tyler presented his poster, “Two types of locality in indexical shift” at the Plenary Poster Session.
  • Graduate student Chris Geissler joined colleagues Doug Whalen (Ph.D. ’82; Yale, Haskins Laboratories, CUNY), Christian DiCanio (University at Buffalo, Haskins), and Hannah M. King (Haskins) in a presentation of their research at SSILA, titled “Acoustic realization of a distinctive, frequent glottal stop: the Arapaho example.”

Saturday, January 9:

  • Lecturer Claire Moore-Cantwell presented “Phonological learning in the laboratory: ERP evidence” at the Plenary Poster Session, a project co-authored by Joe Pater (UMass-Amherst), Lisa Sanders (UMass), Robert Staubs (UMass), and Benjamin Zobel (UMass).
  • Graduate student Jason Zentz delivered a presentation “The biclausal status of Shona clefts” at the On the Left Periphery session.
  • Professor Emeritus Larry Horn participated in the Symposium, “Panel on the Legacy of Joseph H. Greenberg,” with his talk, “Negation through a Greenbergian lens: on “marked categories” and “the order of meaningful elements”
  • Undergraduate alumna Amalia Skilton (BA ’13, UC-Berkeley) presented a talk in the Vowel Harmony session titled, “Uvular-triggered harmony in Aymara as agreement by correspondence.”
  • Graduate student Chris Geissler presented a talk at SPCL titled “Identifying semi-creoles in Tibeto-Burman.”
  • Also at SPCL, recent graduate alumna E-Ching Ng delivered a talk titled “Transmission bias, language contact and sound change.” Later, she joined John Singler for their SPCL presentation, “The paradox of paragoge in the interior basilect of Vernacular Liberian English”
  • Graduate student Ryan Kasak participated in a joint presentation at SSILA, “A preliminary study on accentuation in Hidatsa” alongside John Boyle (Cal State-Fresno), Sarah Lundquist (UW-Madison), Armik Mirzayan (South Dakota), Jonnia Torres (CU-Boulder), and Brittany Williams (UW-Madison).

Also presenting at the conference were a variety of other alumni, including graduate alumna Marianne Mithun (Ph.D. ’74, UC-Santa Barbara), who delivered another Invited Plenary Address, “Where is Morphological Complexity?” Other alumni who presented at the Meeting or its parallel sessions include Sally Thomason (Ph.D. ’68), Elizabeth Zsiga (Ph.D. ’93, Georgetown), William Salmon (Ph.D. ’09, University of Minnesota Duluth), and Erich Round (Ph.D ’09, University of Queensland).