Morphology

Christopher Geissler (Ph.D. 2021) has taken a position as a postdoctoral researcher in the English Language and Linguistics section at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. He is working with newly-appointed professor Kevin Tang, a former postdoc at Yale’s linguistics department. This semester, Chris is teaching intermediate morphology and an advanced seminar in the phonetics-phonology interface.

Chris’ website can be accessed at the following link: https://campuspress.yale.edu/geissler/

Jim Wood gave an invited talk at JENom 9 “The 9th Workshop on Nominalizations,” which was held online June 17–18. This workshop brought together a wide variety of theoretical perspectives and research methodologies on nominalizations, and focused on a number languages including English, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Slovenian, Swedish, Turkish, Basque, Old English, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Kwa languages.

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!

Linguistics faculty member Claire Bowern recently appeared on the linguistics podcast “Distributed Morphs.” The podcast is aimed at linguistics undergraduate and graduate students and discusses different aspects of morphology. Claire talked about morphology and language change, along with rapid (and not so rapid) change in the verb morphology of Bardi, an Indigenous Australian language from northern Australia. 

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.

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”.

Graduate student Samuel Andersson has published a paper in Glossa titled “(*)ABA in Germanic verbs”.

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.

Jason is now responsible for overseeing review processes for academic departments as well as ladder faculty tenure and appointments.

Raffaella Zanuttini, Jim Wood, Jason Zentz, and Larry Horn’s open-access article introduces the motivation, methodology, and results of the YGDP.

Graduate students from Stony Brook University, NYU, and CUNY came to Yale University’s main campus in New Haven, Connecticut.

Assistant Professor Jim Wood published a paper in the journal Syntax and co-authored a chapter in the book Syntactic Variation in Insular Scandinavian.

Professor Raffaella Zanuttini and Assistant Professor Jim Wood presented research from the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project at Dartmouth College and Virginia Tech.