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
Claire Bowern recently gave two talks on recent linguistic work on the Voynich Manuscript, an early cipher manuscript held at Yale’s Beinecke Library. The talks covered basic material about the manuscript, as well as ways that linguistics can be used in decipherment. Both talks are now available online: talk at Beinecke; talk as Alumni association lecture.
Claire Bowern and lab members (including Juhyae Kim and Sam Lopez) have been working with Toby Adams and Kullilli community members of language support. They have been writing language lessons and working on the Kullilli dictionary. This work was recently featured in an article written by Maddelin McCosker for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s news.
Veneeta Dayal published a paper on “The Puzzle of Anaphoric Bare Nouns in Mandarin: A Counterpoint to Index!” jointly with Li Julie Jiang of the University of Hawaii. It is available on the Just Accepted section on the Linguistic Inquiry web page.
Veneeta Dayal gave an invited talk on The Cross-linguistic Expression of Definiteness: Demonstratives, Definites and Bare Nouns at the Cologne Center for Language Sciences, Germany on June 21, 2021.
Jim Wood gave an invited talk at JENom 9 “The 9th Workshop on Nominalizations,” which was held online June 17–18. This workshop brought together a wide variety of theoretical perspectives and research methodologies on nominalizations, and focused on a number languages including English, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Slovenian, Swedish, Turkish, Basque, Old English, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Kwa languages.
Veneeta Dayal gave an invited talk on The Cross-linguistic Expression of Definiteness: Demonstratives, Definites and Bare Nouns at Tsinghua University, China on June 3, 2021.
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.
The “Roger Shuy Best Paper of 2020” prize for the journal American Speech was awarded to an article (“Dative Country: Markedness and Geographical Variation in Southern Dative Constructions”) co-authored by four members of the Yale Linguistics Department: Jim Wood, Raffaella Zanuttini, Larry Horn and Jason Zentz.
Veneeta Dayal gave a talk on April 26th at a meeting of the Indefiniteness Across Languages of the Mercosul Group (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay).
The Histling Lab, led by Prof. Claire Bowern, has partnered with members of the Kullilli community in Australia to release a language app. The app is a first Kullilli dictionary and is available for iOS and Android.
Three presentations were given by Yale linguists at the 39th meeting of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL).
Veneeta Dayal will give a talk on “Puzzles from the Interrogative Left Periphery” at the Harvard Linguistics Circle on April 9, 2021. The talk presents several inter-related puzzles:
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 with Kevin Tang, former Yale post-doc, in Cognition. The paper entitled, “Prosody leaks into the memories of words”, demonstrates how the prosodic context in which a word is typically produced can have long-term influences on how it is produced in other contexts.
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.
Linguistic major Jackson Petty ‘22 and Bob Frank presented a talk on models of learning for anaphoric dependencies at the 3rd Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference (CRAC).
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
Bob Frank presented a paper “Comparing methods of tree-construction across mildly context-sensitive formalisms” at the recent NELS meeting organized by the Department of Linguistics at UQAM.
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.
Prof. Maria Piñango was profiled as a part of “Firsts and Founders in the FAS: A Series in Celebration of 50WomenAtYale150” as the first woman and the first person of color to receive tenure in the Linguistics Department. Her profile was written by PhD Candidate Sarah Babinski and can be found here.
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”,
Mike Stern and Veneeta Dayal presented a poster, along with their colleagues Gita Martohardjono and Ming Chen at the CUNY Graduate Center, titled “Discourse versus syntax: The interpretation of ungrammatical bare nouns in L2 English” at ELM (Experiments in Linguistic Meaning) 2020 on 9/17.
