Grad Students

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:

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Grad Students