Faculty

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.)

Members of the Pama-Nyungan lab recently published a write-up of their results on forced alignment algorithms. Their paper on “A Robin Hood approach to forced alignment: English-trained algorithms and their use on Australian languages” was recently published in the proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. They show that for some purposes, English-trained models can be used without crucial loss of accuracy.

Steve Anderson, Yale’s Dorothy R. Diebold Professor of Linguistics, has pledged to match all donations up to $10,000 to the Linguistic Society of America’s Open Access Publications Fund. This fund supports the LSA’s open access journals, such as Semantics & Pragmatics, Phonological Data & Analysis, and the online version of Language. The “Anderson Match” will be in effect until December 2019.

A memorial service is to be held to celebrate the life and memory of Stanley Insler (1937-2019), Edward E. Salisbury Professor Emeritus of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology. The service will be held on April 13, 2019, at the Quinnipiac Club, 221 Church St., New Haven, CT. It will begin at 4:00PM, preceded by half an hour of music and followed by a reception. 

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:

Long-time Yale faculty member Stanley Insler (PhD ‘63) passed away on January 5th. Apart from his many contributions to the field, his many students and colleagues remember his brilliant teaching, sharp wit and joie de vivre. Past and present members of Yale Linguistics remember him fondly and mourn his loss.

Raffaella Zanuttini was an invited speaker at this year’s Workshop in Altaic Formal Linguistics (WAFL 14), held at MIT October 19–21.

Yale’s Linguistics Department, in conjunction with Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Office of Student Development and Diversity (OGSDD) hosted a free webinar for prospective graduate students. Students and faculty from the department discussed the admissions process, life in the department, research opportunities, and living in New Haven. The webinar was recorded and is now available for later viewing here. 

Prof. Maria Piñango gave a plenary talk at a conference in Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, Spain. Her talk focused on ‘mismatches’ as context construal demands and described recent lab work on child language acquisition and semantic change in the Spanish copulas estar and ser. 

Jason Shaw, Chris Geissler, and Samuel Andersson spoke about various topics in phonetics and phonology at the Manchester Phonology Meeting.

María Piñango, Martín Fuchs, and Sara Sánchez-Alonso discussed their results on variation and change in Spanish with Ashwini Deo of the Ohio State University.

Graduate students Sarah Babinski and Samuel Andersson and PhD candidate Chris Geissler discussed the relationship between phonology and phonetics.

Faculty members Claire Bowern, María Piñango, and Jim Wood and PhD candidate Rikker Dockum will be holding a panel discussion on the issue of reproducibility.

Raffaella Zanuttini, Jim Wood, and Jason Zentz spoke to the Center for Teaching and Learning on the pernicious effects of linguistic prejudice and ways to combat it.

Claire and Rikker showcased their results from the Pama-Nyungan Laboratory at the Association for Linguistic Typology.