Yale linguists present at PLC, PhoNE

April 10, 2016

A number of Yale linguists presented at PLC 40, the Penn Linguistics Colloquium at the University of Pennsylvania:

Graduate student Sara Sánchez-Alonso, alongside collaborators Ashwini Deo and Maria Piñango, presented “Processing Spanish Copulas: Discourse and Gender-Based Differences,” based on data from experiments conducted in the Language and Brain Lab

Postdoctoral Associate Jim Wood presented “Deriving Obligatorily Reflexive Applicatives” [abstract], which draws on a variety of language data, including Southern Presentative Datives, also the subject of investigation by the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project. Another YGDP phenomenon, Have Yet To, was the subject the joint presentation by Jim and graduate student Matt Tyler, “Micro-Variation in the Have Yet To Construction.” On his own, Matt presented “Swiping Without Sluicing.”

Also in syntax, Faruk Akkuş presented “Unergative-Unaccusative Distinction: A Case Study of Sason Arabic,” an endangered dialect of Arabic spoken in Eastern Turkey. Additionally, Faruk and professor Bob Frank presented “Imposters: A New Piece of Evidence for Local vs. Non-Local Persons Contrast,”

The following weekend, graduate student Chris Geissler delivered a talk at Phonology of the Northeast (PhoNE), this year held at NYU. “Explaining Vowel Harmony in Lhasa Tibetan,” builds on Chris’ work eliciting primary data from Tibetan-speaking residents of New York City.