Faculty

Veneeta Dayal gave a talk on April 26th at a meeting of the Indefiniteness Across Languages of the Mercosul Group (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay).

Three presentations were given by Yale linguists at the 39th meeting of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL).

Sarah Babinski and Claire Bowern both presented at The 7th International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation (ICLDC): Recognizing Relationships, which was hosted virtually by University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa on March 4-7, 2021.

Veneeta Dayal gave an invited talk on “(Alternative) Polar Questions, Bias and Embedding” at a workshop on Biased Questions: Experimental Results and Theoretical Modelling”, held on February 4-5, 2021 at ZAS (Berlin) under the Speech Acts

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

Claire Bowern presented work at the American Philosophical Society’s 2020 Native American Scholars Initiative conference: Relationships, Reciprocity, and Responsibilities: Indigenous Studies in Archives and Beyond. Co-presenting with Australian colleagues George Hayden, Denise Smith-Ali and Sue Hanson, they discussed the Yale grammar bootcamps and ways of making long-distance collaborations work to augment community-based local language reclamation efforts.

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”,

Veneeta Dayal was an invited guest at the hangout session on “How you got into linguistics and why semantics”, moderated by Daniel Altshuler at Sinn und Bedeutung 25, on September 6, 2020.

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.

Former Pama-Nyungan lab member Catherine Sheard (lead author), department PhD alum Rikker Dockum, Claire Bowern, and Bristol Anthropology Professor Fiona Jordan, recently published a paper in the journal Evolutionary Human Sciences using phylogenetic methods to study the ways that different kinship systems change across the Pama-Nyungan family.