Professor Veneeta Dayal will teach a course on comparative semantics at the 5th African Linguistics School (ALS5) at Rhodes University. From June 30 to July 13, the two-week African Linguistics School will take place at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. Veneeta Dayal will teach a semantics course on noun phrases, entitled “Comparative Semantics: The Noun Phrase Across Languages.”
Professor Veneeta Dayal has given presentations on “The Fine Structure of the Interrogative Left Periphery” in the US and the Netherlands. In April, she gave a colloquium talk on this topic at UMass Amherst, as well as an invited presentation at a meeting of the Semantics Group at NYU.
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.
Raffaella Zanuttini attended “Person & Perspective 2019: A workshop honoring the work of María Luisa Zubizarreta” held at USC, May 3-4, 2019. She presented a talk entitled “Person, politeness and the embeddability of imperatives”, joint work with Paul Portner and Miok Pak.
PhD candidate Martín Fuchs presented joint work with Prof. María Mercedes Piñango at the 49th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), at the University of Georgia, in Athens, GA.
Prof. Claire Bowern will be hosting a Peabody Science cafe conversation with Geology & Geophysics graduate student Daniel Gaskell on environmental adaptation on April 30, 2019. The title of this event is “A linguist and a paleontologist walk into BAR” and will be hosted at BAR at 7PM. The description of the event from the Peabody is below:
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.
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.
Raffaella Zanuttini gave an invited talk last week at a workshop at NYU entitled “Antisymmetry and Comparative Syntax: Celebrating 25 years of antisymmetry and 75 years of Richard S. Kayne,” more informally referred to as “RichieFest.” The workshop celebrate’s Richard Kayne’s 75th birthday, as well as the 25th anniversary of his highly influential 1994 monograph The Antisymmetry of Syntax.
Professor Veneeta Dayal, the newest member of the department’s ladder faculty, has been appointed the Dorothy R. Diebold Professor of Linguistics. This endowed professorship was most recently held by Professor Emeritus Steve Anderson, who retired in 2017. Read the University’s announcement here.
PhD candidate Martín Fuchs and Prof. María Piñango presented two posters at the 32nd Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing held in Boulder, Colorado.
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 candidate Martín Fuchs and Professor María Piñango recently published a paper in the proceedings of the last Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. Their paper provides an account of the synchronic variation between the use of the Simple Present marker and the Present Progressive marker in the expression of the habitual reading in Modern Spanish.
Claire Bowern adds an article on the origins of Pama-Nyungan to The Conversation.
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.)
Prof. Jim Wood will give an invited talk at the ninth European Dialect Syntax Workshop (Edisyn IX) in Glasgow, Scotland. The title of his talk is “Microvariation and the set of possible grammars.” In it, he will discuss the work of the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project broadly, along with some specific results and case studies, including verbal ‘rather’, the ‘have yet to’ construction, personal datives and dative presentatives.
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.
Prof. Raffaella Zanuttini and her co-authors Paul Portner (Georgetown) and Miok Pak (GWU) have a paper in the most recent issue of Language, “The Speaker-Addressee relation at the syntax-semantics interface”.
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.
Historical Linguist Claire Bowern was one of the contributing experts on WNYC’s postcast RadioLab, in their “Asking for a Friend” segment. She, along with Wilbur Cross Medalist and Yale Alum Sally Thomason, answered questions about how far back in time one can go to find a word that is unchanged, that would be understandable to people far in the past.
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.
2018 marked the 20th anniversary of the publication of the article by Nikolaus Himmelmann, which introduced the distinction between “language documentation” and “language description” (or analysis). In this Open Access special publication in the journal Language Documentation and Conservation, linguists reflect on the changes to the field, to fieldwork practices, and to the state of language records and endangerment across the world.
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:
Yale Linguistics welcomes three new members to the Department this semester. Welcome to all!
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.
For the last few years, Yale linguistics participated in the New Haven Reads Spelling Bee. Last year, we were eliminated in the final round (with the Australian work quokka). This year, the Yale Linguistics Team LingBuzz were victorious! Congratulations to all our participants! Click here to see photos
Raffaella Zanuttini was an invited speaker at this year’s Workshop in Altaic Formal Linguistics (WAFL 14), held at MIT October 19–21.
Jason has published an article in the Association for Laboratory Phonology’s journal and presented a talk at its annual meeting.
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.
