Grad Students
Jeremy Johns interviewed by Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity & Transnational Migration
Jeremy Johns is recently interviewed by the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity & Transnational Migration, as a RITM Graduate Fellow.
As described by the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity & Transnational Migration, in order to attract the best graduate students to Yale and to support their work, the Center designates a select number of incoming doctoral students annually as RITM Graduate Fellows. These Fellows are nominated by their departments upon admission and are selected by an RITM committee.
Sigríður Sæunn Sigurðardóttir publishes paper in Nordlyd
Sigríður Sæunn Sigurðardóttir has published a paper on some work she has done here. The paper appears in a special issue of Nordlyd that features papers from the 34th Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop (CGSW 34) that was held at the University of Konstanz in 2019.
Maria Piñango profiled for 50WomenAtYale150
Prof. Maria Piñango was profiled as a part of “Firsts and Founders in the FAS: A Series in Celebration of 50WomenAtYale150” as the first woman and the first person of color to receive tenure in the Linguistics Department. Her profile was written by PhD Candidate Sarah Babinski and can be found here.
Several Yale linguists present at AMP 2020
Several phonologists are presenting at the Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP) 2020.
Jason Shaw is presenting a paper co-authored with Sejin Oh (Yale-affiliated, at Haskins), Alexei Kochetov & Karthik Durvasula: “Distinguishing complex segments from consonant clusters using gestural coordination”
There are also three posters:
Sarah Babinski: “Intrinsic f0 and sound change: Evidence from Australian languages”,
Mike Stern and Veneeta Dayal present poster at ELM 2020
Mike Stern and Veneeta Dayal presented a poster, along with their colleagues Gita Martohardjono and Ming Chen at the CUNY Graduate Center, titled “Discourse versus syntax: The interpretation of ungrammatical bare nouns in L2 English” at ELM (Experiments in Linguistic Meaning) 2020 on 9/17.
Sarah Babinski presents work at virtual LabPhon17 Conference
PhD Candidate Sarah Babinski presented a talk titled “Lexical stress: Phonetic variation under phonological stability in Australian languages,” at LabPhon17, the biennial conference of the Association for Laboratory Phonology, which was held virtually from July 6-8 2020. In this talk, she presented preliminary results from her dissertation research on the comparative phonetics of stress marking across Australian languages.
Matt Tyler defends dissertation
On Thursday, July 23rd, Matt Tyler successfully defended his PhD dissertation. The defense, which was held virtually on Zoom, presented Matt’s dissertation entitled Argument Structure and Argument-Marking in Choctaw, supervised by Jim Wood. The committee members were Raffaella Zanuttini, Bob Frank, and Aaron Broadwell. Congratulations, Matt!
Martín Fuchs and Josh Phillips co-edit a special issue of the Proceedings of the LSA
Martín Fuchs and Josh Phillips co-edited the first special issue of the Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, entitled ‘Formal Approaches to Grammaticalization’.
Parker Brody defends dissertation
On Friday May 29, Parker Brody successfully defended his PhD dissertation. The defense, which was held virtually on Zoom, presented Parker’s dissertation entitled “Computational Phylogenetic Reconstruction of Pama-Nyungan Verb Conjugation Classes”, supervised by Claire Bowern. Congratulations, Parker!
Congratulations to our new graduating PhDs!
The linguistics department sends warm congratulations to all of our students graduating this year! The graduating cohort consists of Rikker Dockum, Dolly Goldenberg, and Martín Fuchs. Congratulations to all of you! While the in person celebration will happen later, a virtual celebration will be hosted on the afternoon of May 18.
Larry Horn and Martín Fuchs publish chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Negation
Professor Emeritus Larry Horn published two chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Negation (link to online version). In “Negation and Opposition: Contradiction and contrariety in logic and language”, he addresses the complications that arise from equating Aristotle’s semantic category of contradictory opposition with the syntactic category of sentence (vs. constituent) negation.
Matthew Tyler gives colloquium talk at UMass Amherst
Last Friday Matt Tyler gave a colloquium talk at UMass Amherst entitled “Internal arguments disguised as external arguments: Lessons from an active alignment system”. Information about the talk, including an abstract, can be found on the UMass website: link to website.
Sigríður Sæunn Sigurðardóttir presents a talk at DGFS
Sirrý Sigurðardóttir gave a talk at a workshop during the DGfS (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft) last week. Sirrý’s talk, entitled “The Anti-Occam’s Razor: The distinction between pronouns and expletives in Icelandic” (link to abstract), was presented at the workshop “Theoretical approaches to grammatical (non-)identity in synchrony and diachrony.”
Parker Brody publishes in Journal of Historical Linguistics
Parker Brody has published an article in the most recent issue of Journal of Historical Linguistics. “Morphological exceptionality and pathways of change” explores the notion of analyzing cross-linguistically uncommon morphosyntactic structures in terms of their historical development. What may seem extraordinary in the synchronic snapshot of a language can often be clearly accounted for through diachronic considerations.
Matt Tyler and Jim Wood publish in Linguistic Variation
Matthew Tyler and Jim Wood have published an article in the most recent issue of Linguistic Variation. The article is entitled “Microvariation in the ‘have yet to’ construction”, and reports on results from the research of the Yale Grammatical Diversity project. The ‘have yet to’ construction refers to sentences like ‘I have yet to visit my grandmother’, meaning ‘I have not visited my grandmother yet’.
Martín Fuchs teaches a course on meaning change at the Buenos Aires Summer School in Linguistics
During the first week of February 2020, Martín Fuchs taught a course on meaning change and its cognitive and communicative underpinnings at the Buenos Aires Linguistics Summer School. The goal of the course was to introduce graduate students to theories of semantic change that aim at uncovering the forces that produce the regularities that are observed in this domain.
Yale at the LSA Annual Meeting
The Yale linguistics department is well-represented at the coming Annual Meeting of the LSA, January 2-5, 2020 in New Orleans. But apart from the many current members of the department who will be attending, we are also hoping to connect with previous department members. A meet-up will be organized, with more information below:
Martín Fuchs to give an invited talk at Utrecht University
PhD Candidate Martín Fuchs will give an invited talk this coming Monday, December 9th, at Utrecht University, as part of the Leiden Utrecht Semantics Happenings (LUSH) Series.
Martín Fuchs and Josh Phillips present at FoDS IV
Martín Fuchs and Josh Phillips presented their research at FoDS IV (Formal Diachronic Semantics IV) in Columbus, Ohio, a conference organized by former Yale faculty member Ashwini Deo. On Friday, November 15th, Josh gave a talk entitled “Negation, reality status & the Yolnu verbal paradigm: towards a formal account of the porousness of tense and modality”.
Yale linguists present at AMP
A group of Yale linguists traveled to Stony Brook to attend the Annual Meeting on Phonology earlier in October. There were a total of four Yale presentations, listed below with links to the abstracts:
Josh Phillips presents at NELS
At the 50th meeting of the North East Linguistic Society at MIT, PhD candidate Josh Phillips presented some of his work on privatives in Australian languages. Josh’s poster, entitled ““Privative case” : displacement & renewal in the negative domain”, discusses forms with a meaning like ‘without’ or ‘-less’ in several Australian languages.
Samuel Andersson is giving a talk in Tromsø
Graduate student Samuel Andersson is presenting at the workshop on Segmental Processes in Interaction with Prosodic Structure (SPIPS) at the University of Tromsø next week. Their talk is entitled “Are There Boundaries between Segmental and Prosodic Phonology?”, and discusses their work on the segmental and prosodic phonology of Makah, an indigenous language spoken in Washington.
Yale and Haskins linguists present at ICPhS 2019 in Melbourne
Many students, faculty, and alumni of Yale linguistics, as well as colleagues from nearby Haskins Laboratories, presented their work at the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS) in Melbourne, Australia, earlier this month. They contributed at least 14 talks and posters to the conference and enjoyed a full week of presentations about phonetics, connecting with colleagues and friends from all over the world.
Yale linguists present at ACL
Seven Yale linguists presented six posters and two invited talks, highlighting their own research as well as projects from CLAY.
Matt Tyler publishes paper in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory
The most recent issue of Natural Language & Linguistic Theory includes an in-depth article on Choctaw by PhD candidate Matthew Tyler. The paper is entitled “Absolutive Promotion and the Condition on Clitic Hosts in Choctaw.” This paper originated as his second Qualifying Paper, and has been extensively developed and revised since then, in part in connection with his dissertation work, which draws on original fieldwork he has been conducting in Mississippi on Choctaw.
Matt Tyler publishes paper on Choctaw in Studia Linguistica
The most recent issue of Studia Linguistica includes an article by PhD candidate Matthew Tyler. The paper is entitled “Choctaw as a Window into the Clitic/Agreement Split”. In this paper he draws on original fieldwork he has been conducting in Mississippi on Choctaw in connection with his dissertation work. He develops a series of tests, some specific to Choctaw, to argue that most “agreement” morphemes on the Choctaw verb are really clitics (essentially pronouns like I/you/we/etc. that are attached to the verb).
Sigríður Sæunn Sigurðardóttir publishes paper in Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax
The most recent volume of Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax has published a paper by PhD student Sigríður Sæunn Sigurðardóttir, entitled “Syntax and Discourse - Case(s) of V3 orders in Icelandic with temporal adjuncts.” This paper discusses the results of some research she has been conducting as part of her PhD coursework (and was also recently presented at the 34th Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop in Konstanz).
Samuel Andersson, Sirrý Sigurðardóttir, Rikker Dockum, and Claire Bowern present at ICHL24
A contingent of Yale linguists has traveled to Canberra, Australia this week for the 24th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, hosted at the Australian National University. Participants from our department include Professor Claire Bowern, PhD candidate Rikker Dockum, and PhD students Sirrý Sigurðardóttir and Samuel Andersson.
Their talks, with links to abstracts, are as follows:
Claire Bowern, Sarah Babinski, and Rikker Dockum present at the 5th Workshop on Sound Change at UC Davis
This past weekend (June 21-23), the 5th Workshop on Sound Change (WSC 5) took place at UC Davis. Yale Linguistics was represented by Professor Claire Bowern, PhD candidate Rikker Dockum, and graduate student Sarah Babinski, who all presented at the workshop. Claire Bowern gave a talk entitled “Language, Culture, and Australian Exceptionalism,” while Rikker and Sarah gave posters.
