Phonology

Rikker Dockum and Claire Bowern publish paper in Language Documentation and Description

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.

Samuel Andersson, Sirrý Sigurðardóttir, Rikker Dockum, and Claire Bowern present at ICHL24

A contingent of Yale linguists has traveled to Canberra, Australia this week for the 24th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, hosted at the Australian National University. Participants from our department include Professor Claire Bowern, PhD candidate Rikker Dockum, and PhD students Sirrý Sigurðardóttir and Samuel Andersson.

Their talks, with links to abstracts, are as follows:

Claire Bowern, Sarah Babinski, and Rikker Dockum present at the 5th Workshop on Sound Change at UC Davis

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.

Sarah Babinski and Andy Zhang win student awards for ICPhS 2019

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.

Jason Shaw gives invited talk at Brown

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.

Matthew Tyler publishes paper in Glossa

PhD student Matthew Tyler has published a paper on the syntax-prosody interface in the journal Glossa.

Yalies present their work at #LSA2019

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:

Rikker Dockum gives 2018 Homecoming Lecture at Dartmouth

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 Shaw's work featured by LabPhon

Jason has published an article in the Association for Laboratory Phonology’s journal and presented a talk at its annual meeting.

Four graduate students join PhD Program

We are excited to work with Caitlyn Antal, Marisha Evans, Randi Martinez, and Jared Sharp as they pursue their graduate studies!

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Phonology