Grad Students
Jeremy Johns' language work featured in magazine article
Jeremy Johns’ work in language revitalization and documentation has been featured in Arizona-based magazine, Golden Corridor Living. In the story Jeremy discusses goals and challenges of Indigenous language revitalization and maintenance.
Andy Zhang accepts a position at Google
Andy Zhang, who will officially be receiving his PhD this December, will be starting a new position at Google (Los Angeles). With the job title of Linguist, he will be working with the Human Evaluation and Signals team.
Congratulations Andy!
Yale linguists at the Annual Meeting on Phonology
There were four Yale presenters at the Annual Meeting on Phonology last weekend (Oct 1-3).
How to find and work with a linguist
The Fieldwork Working Group has published the first in a series of videos aimed at connecting language communities with pertinent information about working with linguistics. The first video features information about how to find and work with a linguist as well as a list of the types of projects and tasks linguists can support language communities with. The Fieldwork Working Group is also taking suggestions for topics to discuss in future videos to be added to the series. The Fieldwork Working Group is headed by Natalie Weber. A link to the first video in the series is available below.
Michael Stern Publishes in Brain Sciences
Michael Stern published a paper with co-authors LeeAnn Stover (CUNY Graduate Center), Ernesto Guerra (University of Chile), and Gita Martohardjono (CUNY Graduate Center) entitled “Syntactic and Semantic Influences on the Time Course of Relative Clause Processing: The Role of Language Dominance”.
Yale Linguists Publish in PLC Proceedings
Five papers were published by Yale linguists in the Proceedings of the 44th Annual Penn Linguistics Conference:
Samuel Andersson: Abkhaz Stress as a Segmental Property
Joseph Class: Causee Case in Gipuzkoan Basque
Catarina Soares and Jim Wood: Locative Causatives in European Portuguese as Voice Alternations
Kullilli Language Work Featured in News Article
Claire Bowern and lab members (including Juhyae Kim and Sam Lopez) have been working with Toby Adams and Kullilli community members of language support. They have been writing language lessons and working on the Kullilli dictionary. This work was recently featured in an article written by Maddelin McCosker for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s news.
Yale Linguists Present at WCCFL
Three presentations were given by Yale linguists at the 39th meeting of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL).
Samuel Andersson publishes paper on Abkhaz
Sigríður Sæunn publishes a paper in Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði [Icelandic language and general linguistics]
Sigríður Sæunn Sigurðardóttir published a paper entitled, “’Haf góðan dag’ Um uppkomu nýrrar kveðju út frá hugmyndum um talgjörðir” [‘Have a nice day’ The emergence of a new leave-taking term in Icelandic in the light of Speech Act Theory] in Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði 41.-42. The paper is on the leave-taking term Hafðu góðan dag (‘Have a nice day (ACC)’), which has become prominent in Modern Icelandic but has been prescriptively deemed “improper Icelandic” due to its being influenced by English Have
Claire Bowern and Sarah Babinski present at The 7th International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation (ICLDC)
Sarah Babinski and Claire Bowern both presented at The 7th International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation (ICLDC): Recognizing Relationships, which was hosted virtually by University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa on March 4-7, 2021.
Jeremy Johns presents at Newberry Consortium in American Indian Studies Graduate Student Conference
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:
