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
Jason Shaw gave an invited talk at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich. The talk, entitled “Tone as gesture: space, time, perception and change” featured recent work in the Yale phonetics lab on lexical tone, including graduate student projects by Chris Geissler and Andy Zhang. The talk was a part of LMU’s MAMPF (Methods and approaches of modern phonetic research) series (link to talk series). Link to abstract.
Claire Bowern is an author, headed by Jayden Macklin-Cordes and Erich Round (Ling PhD 2009) of a new study on phylogenetic signal in phonotactics. The paper uses data from Pama-Nyungan (Australian) languages to track the extent to which phoneme inventory characteristics (phoneme presence/absence, unigram and bigram frequency) show phylogenetic signal. This is relevant for claims that Australian languages do not show sound change. The paper is open access and supplementary materials are available.
Jason Shaw co-authored a paper published in Language. The paper, entitled “Phonological contrast and phonetic variation: The case of velars in Iwaidja”, presents a field-based ultrasound and acoustic study of Iwaidja, an endanged Australian Aboriginal language. This study reveals how lenition that is both phonetically gradient and variable across speakers and words can give the illusion of a contextually restricted phonemic contrast.
Natalie Weber presented a colloquium “On the misalignment of prosodic edges and syllables” (slides) as part of the ICU Linguistics Colloquium series on prosody hosted by the the linguistics lab at International Christian University (ICU). The v
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”,
Jason Shaw co-authored a paper in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America entitled “Effects of vowel coproduction on the timecourse of tone recognition”. The paper uses eye-tracking to assess whether vowel quality influences the perception of lexical tone in Mandarin Chinese. Although vowels and tones had been thought to be largely independent, recent work shows that tones have a small but consistent effect on the production of vowels (Shaw et al. 2016). This paper shows the perceptual relevance of that variation.
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.
Natalie Weber presented a paper titled “The case for NonInitiality” at the annual meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association, which was virtual this year. A recording of the talk will be available for a limited time on the conference website. The handouts or slides for most other talks are also publicly available, so check them out!
Starting in 2021, Yale will co-sponsor two meetings of the African Linguistics School (ALS, link to ALS website), an organization focused on training young African linguists in theoretical linguistics, on the basis of the large number of languages spoken in Africa.
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:
A group of Yale linguists traveled to Stony Brook to attend the Annual Meeting on Phonology earlier in October. There were a total of four Yale presentations, listed below with links to the abstracts:
Recent alumnus Luke Lindemann has published a paper entitled “When Wurst comes to Wurscht: Variation and koiné formation in Texas German.” Luke’s paper was published in the latest issue of the Journal of Linguistic Geography. It discusses dialect emergence and leveling, and focuses on the variation between [s] and [ʃ] (sh) sounds in certain contexts in Texas German.
Graduate student Samuel Andersson is presenting at the workshop on Segmental Processes in Interaction with Prosodic Structure (SPIPS) at the University of Tromsø next week. Their talk is entitled “Are There Boundaries between Segmental and Prosodic Phonology?”, and discusses their work on the segmental and prosodic phonology of Makah, an indigenous language spoken in Washington.
Many students, faculty, and alumni of Yale linguistics, as well as colleagues from nearby Haskins Laboratories, presented their work at the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS) in Melbourne, Australia, earlier this month. They contributed at least 14 talks and posters to the conference and enjoyed a full week of presentations about phonetics, connecting with colleagues and friends from all over the world.
Seven Yale linguists presented six posters and two invited talks, highlighting their own research as well as projects from CLAY.
Rikker Dockum and Claire Bowern have a new paper in the open access journal Language Documentation and Description, entitled “Swadesh lists are not long enough: Drawing phonological generalizations from limited data.” They look at the amount of data (e.g. number of words in a wordlist) required to accurately recover phonological inventory distributional generalizations and show that the typical 100-word or 200-word Swadesh lists frequently used by linguists are not usually sufficient.
This past weekend (June 21-23), the 5th Workshop on Sound Change (WSC 5) took place at UC Davis. Yale Linguistics was represented by Professor Claire Bowern, PhD candidate Rikker Dockum, and graduate student Sarah Babinski, who all presented at the workshop. Claire Bowern gave a talk entitled “Language, Culture, and Australian Exceptionalism,” while Rikker and Sarah gave posters.
Graduate students Sarah Babinski and Muye (Andy) Zhang have won IPA Student Awards for their submissions to the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 2019, which takes place in Melbourne, Australia from August 5-9. The 49 awards granted for this Congress are awards by the International Phonetic Association for the submitted conference papers based on reviews, of 368 student submissions, by the IPA Committee on Conference Sponsorships and Student Awards.
Prof. Jason Shaw gave an invited talk at Brown University’s Department of Cognitive, Linguistic & Psychological Sciences. The title of the talk was “Phonological control of time”. In it, he presented how the theory of Articulatory Phonology accounts for language-specific patterns of speech timing and two new challenges for the theory.
PhD student Matthew Tyler has published a paper on the syntax-prosody interface in the journal Glossa.
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.
Jason has published an article in the Association for Laboratory Phonology’s journal and presented a talk at its annual meeting.
We are excited to work with Caitlyn Antal, Marisha Evans, Randi Martinez, and Jared Sharp as they pursue their graduate studies!
Jason Shaw, Chris Geissler, and Samuel Andersson spoke about various topics in phonetics and phonology at the Manchester Phonology Meeting.
Chris Geissler and Kevin Zhang joined nine collaborators from Yale and other institutions to study a gene that may influence the way we perceive consonants.
