Veneeta Dayal gave an invited talk at SALT 30, Cornell University on “When does a clause become a question? On the fine structure of the interrogative left periphery” on August 20, 2020. She also participated at a Retrospective on SALT 1- SALT 30.
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.
A new article collection has been launched in Frontiers, co-edited by Maria Piñango, Anastasia Smirnova, Petra Schumacher (‘04) and Ray Jackendoff. This article collection is for high-level, data-grounded work in linguistics seeking to bridge linguistic, cognitive and computational approaches to linguistic structure and the architecture that supports it.
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.
Natalie Weber presented a paper titled “The case for NonInitiality” at the annual meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association, which was virtual this year. A recording of the talk will be available for a limited time on the conference website. The handouts or slides for most other talks are also publicly available, so check them out!
Claire Bowern was a panelist recently discussing remote fieldwork, community support, and ethics, as part of the University of Melbourne’s “Linguistics in the Pub” series. Approximately 100 participants from all over the world got together to listen to reflections about Covid-19 based changes to field practices, what linguists can do to most effectively support the communities they work with, and the additional ethical challenges that arise when working remotely. The panelists discussed a range of field situations.
Linguistics faculty member Claire Bowern recently appeared on the linguistics podcast “Distributed Morphs.” The podcast is aimed at linguistics undergraduate and graduate students and discusses different aspects of morphology. Claire talked about morphology and language change, along with rapid (and not so rapid) change in the verb morphology of Bardi, an Indigenous Australian language from northern Australia.
Earlier this semester Veneeta Dayal gave a joint virtual presentation with Rajesh Bhatt (UMass, Amherst) entitled “State of the field for South Asian Linguistics.” The talk was given at (F)ASAL 10 ((Formal) Approaches to South Asian Languages; link to program), on March 22, hosted by Ohio State University.
