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
