Prof. Claire Bowern will be hosting a Peabody Science cafe conversation with Geology & Geophysics graduate student Daniel Gaskell on environmental adaptation on April 30, 2019. The title of this event is “A linguist and a paleontologist walk into BAR” and will be hosted at BAR at 7PM. The description of the event from the Peabody is below:
Graduate student Sigríður Sæunn Sigurðardóttir and her collaborator Thórhallur Eythórsson have contributed a chapter in the recent book The Determinants of Diachronic Stability, on stability and change in the history of Icelandic weather verbs. The paper was originally presented at the pre-conference workshop of DiGS 18 (19th Diachronic Generative Syntax conference) in Ghent, 2016. The abstract for this chapter is given below:
PhD candidate Martín Fuchs and Professor María Piñango recently published a paper in the proceedings of the last Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. Their paper provides an account of the synchronic variation between the use of the Simple Present marker and the Present Progressive marker in the expression of the habitual reading in Modern Spanish.
Claire Bowern adds an article on the origins of Pama-Nyungan to The Conversation.
A lesson by Claire Bowern on the basics of historical linguistics and the origins of the English language has been turned into a TedEd animation. Watch and listen to the animation to see English has evolved through generations of speakers. (Director: Patrick Smith; Narrator: Addison Anderson.)
Historical Linguist Claire Bowern was one of the contributing experts on WNYC’s postcast RadioLab, in their “Asking for a Friend” segment. She, along with Wilbur Cross Medalist and Yale Alum Sally Thomason, answered questions about how far back in time one can go to find a word that is unchanged, that would be understandable to people far in the past.
Graduate student Samuel Andersson has published a paper in Glossa titled “(*)ABA in Germanic verbs”.
Many members of the Yale linguistics department made a mass exodus to the the recent LSA annual meeting in New York City, where they gave 19 oral and poster presentations at the main meeting, workshops, and sister society meetings. These included:
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.
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.
