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!
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!
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.
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:
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”.
At the 50th meeting of the North East Linguistic Society at MIT, PhD candidate Josh Phillips presented some of his work on privatives in Australian languages. Josh’s poster, entitled ““Privative case” : displacement & renewal in the negative domain”, discusses forms with a meaning like ‘without’ or ‘-less’ in several Australian languages.
On Friday, April 5th, Jim Wood spoke at the 2nd Princeton Symposium on Syntactic Theory (PSST), organized by Byron Ahn and Laura Kalin. The theme for the meeting is “counterexamples”. Jim Wood’s talk, entitled “Prepositions, Nominalization and Allosemy,” connects with this theme through the lens of his recent research on Icelandic deverbal event nouns, and what such nouns tell us about the interaction between syntax and lexical meaning.
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 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.
The translations make available some of the earliest writings on the theory of word formation.
Jason is now responsible for overseeing review processes for academic departments as well as ladder faculty tenure and appointments.
The two graduate students spoke about syntax in Choctaw and prosody in Southern East Cree, respectively.
Raffaella Zanuttini, Jim Wood, Jason Zentz, and Larry Horn’s open-access article introduces the motivation, methodology, and results of the YGDP.
Sixteen presentations and posters from current and former Yale faculty and students were showcased at the annual meeting of the LSA.
Graduate students from Stony Brook University, NYU, and CUNY came to Yale University’s main campus in New Haven, Connecticut.
We are delighted to welcome Samuel Andersson, Sigríður Sigurðardóttir, and Randi Martinez to our department!
Assistant Professor Jim Wood published a paper in the journal Syntax and co-authored a chapter in the book Syntactic Variation in Insular Scandinavian.
Ph.D. candidate Rikker Dockum presented research on the Tai Khamti language at the 2017 meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society (SEALS).
Professor Raffaella Zanuttini and Assistant Professor Jim Wood presented research from the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project at Dartmouth College and Virginia Tech.
A chapter by Assistant Professor Jim Wood, co-authored with Professor Alec Marantz of New York University, has been published in a book entitled The Verbal Domain.
Two linguists were honored at this year’s Yale University Commencement.
The Department of Linguistics recently held a symposium celebrating the retirement of Professor Emeritus Steve Anderson.
Two Yale graduate students have been awarded fellowships in recognition of their outstanding work.
Throughout the month of April, Yale linguistics graduate students presented their qualifying papers in a series of Friday Lunch Talks.
The crossword puzzle that appears in today’s New York Times is the creation of senior linguistics major Tom McCoy, a member of the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project.
His talk was titled "Double marking in Tai Khamti: Reanalysis and reinforcement."
