Yale Linguists Present at WCCFL
Three presentations were given by Yale linguists at the 39th meeting of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL).
Faculty
Veneeta Dayal will give a talk on "Puzzles from the Interrogative Left Periphery" at the Harvard Linguistics Circle on April 9, 2021
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:
Claire Bowern and Sarah Babinski present at The 7th International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation (ICLDC)
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 will give a colloquium talk on "Puzzles from the Interrogative Left Periphery" at CUNY Graduate Center on March 11, 2021
The talk presents several inter-related puzzles:
Puzzle 1: Why does declarative syntax plus rising intonation lead to a biased question in some languages (English) but is ambiguous between a neutral and a biased interpretation in others (Hindi-Urdu)?
Puzzle 2: Why can polar questions be mono-clausal as matrix questions in every(?) language but not in at least some embedded positions in some languages (Hindi-Urdu)?
Veneeta Dayal Gives an Invited Talk
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 publishes in Diachronica
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 publishes in Cognition
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.
