For the last few years, Yale linguistics participated in the New Haven Reads Spelling Bee. Last year, we were eliminated in the final round (with the Australian work quokka). This year, the Yale Linguistics Team LingBuzz were victorious! Congratulations to all our participants!
Luke and Matt went to CoLang in Gainesville Florida from June 18-29. Luke took classes on programming native language apps, mapping language variation, translating popular media, and the interaction between linguistics and healthcare. Matt worked extensively with the Mississippi Choctaw lexicon project (including giving some talks on Choctaw syntax) and took classes on conducting fieldwork and using lexicon-building and interlinearization software.
Ph.D. candidate Rikker Dockum delivered an invited talk at his undergraduate alma mater, Dartmouth College. His talk, titled “The Tonal Comparative Method: Leveraging Lexical Tone in Historical Linguistics”, deals with his work extending the traditional Comparative Method to deal with evidence from sound change in tone systems.
Ph.D. candidate Matthew Tyler has recently published two journal articles concerning his work on clitics in Choctaw (Muskogean). One, published in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, is titled “Absolutive Promotion and the Condition on Clitic Hosts in Choctaw”; this article proposes a morphosyntactic analysis of Choctaw clitics.
Yale’s Linguistics Department, in conjunction with Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Office of Student Development and Diversity (OGSDD) hosted a free webinar for prospective graduate students. Students and faculty from the department discussed the admissions process, life in the department, research opportunities, and living in New Haven. The webinar was recorded and is now available for later viewing here.
Graduate Student Sarah Babinski and Professor Claire Bowern recently published a paper on mergers and contextual probability in sound change in the journal Linguistics Vanguard. The journal special issue – on predictability in shaping sound patterns in human language – was co-edited by linguistics department faculty member Jason Shaw and Shigeto Kawahara.
Martín introduced his dissertation work to an audience in Mexico, where he is currently conducting research on the imperfective domain in Spanish.
We are excited to work with Caitlyn Antal, Marisha Evans, Randi Martinez, and Jared Sharp as they pursue their graduate studies!
Sean’s dissertation, supervised by Professor Raffaella Zanuttini, investigates the accusativus cum infinitivo construction in Latin.
Jason Shaw, Chris Geissler, and Samuel Andersson spoke about various topics in phonetics and phonology at the Manchester Phonology Meeting.
Based on field research and a translation of the Bible, Joshua’s paper investigates the difference between the first-person pronouns ai and mi.
In just three minutes, Dolly explained to audiences how we use our sense of touch to help us hear and understand speech.
Chris Geissler and Kevin Zhang joined nine collaborators from Yale and other institutions to study a gene that may influence the way we perceive consonants.
The two graduate students spoke about syntax in Choctaw and prosody in Southern East Cree, respectively.
María Piñango, Martín Fuchs, and Sara Sánchez-Alonso discussed their results on variation and change in Spanish with Ashwini Deo of the Ohio State University.
Results on syntax and phonology by Jim Wood, Matt Tyler, and Yiding Hao were showcased at the Penn Linguistics Conference in March.
Graduate students Sarah Babinski and Samuel Andersson and PhD candidate Chris Geissler discussed the relationship between phonology and phonetics.
Raffaella Zanuttini, Jim Wood, Jason Zentz, and Larry Horn’s open-access article introduces the motivation, methodology, and results of the YGDP.
Faculty members Claire Bowern, María Piñango, and Jim Wood and PhD candidate Rikker Dockum will be holding a panel discussion on the issue of reproducibility.
Raffaella Zanuttini, Jim Wood, and Jason Zentz spoke to the Center for Teaching and Learning on the pernicious effects of linguistic prejudice and ways to combat it.
Sixteen presentations and posters from current and former Yale faculty and students were showcased at the annual meeting of the LSA.
Claire and Rikker showcased their results from the Pama-Nyungan Laboratory at the Association for Linguistic Typology.
Sarah traveled to Montreal to speak about stress assignment in Southern East Cree.
Graduate students from Stony Brook University, NYU, and CUNY came to Yale University’s main campus in New Haven, Connecticut.
Rikker talked about how tonal systems change over time, using statistical analysis on a large dataset he compiled to identify a strong phylogenetic signal.
The 2017 Stony Brook–Yale–NYU–CUNY conference will be held at Yale’s Dunham Laboratory.
Jim Wood, Matt Barros, and Matt Tyler presented two talks and a poster.
Scholars from a wide range of institutions and disciplines came to Yale to discuss the cognitive foundations of variation and change in meaning.
Claire spoke about how she applies methods from computational phylogenetics to study the history of the Pama-Nyungan languages.
