During the week of the March 2 Open House, Larry will be in Germany participating as an invited speaker at two workshops related to pragmatics. The first is a workshop (“Arbeitsgruppe”) on diversity in pragmatic inferences that’s part of the DGfS (the annual conference of the German version of the LSA) meeting in Hamburg. The second is a workshop at ZAS in Berlin on degree expressions and polarity.
The Yale Latino Networking Group organized a panel to discuss why speaking a language other than English at work can engender negative reactions (poster for the event). Claire Bowern and Raffaella Zanuttini were part of the panel and offered the linguists’ perspective on the issue. The event generated a fruitful exchange of ideas and provided the opportunity to share experiences and discuss how to react to negative attitudes toward speaking languages other than English.
Claire Bowern and Douglas Duhaime (from Yale’s Digital Humanities Lab) presented their recent work on a rapid prototype grant, using neural network models to identify similar photographs in a large collection of images. They talked about the Voynich manuscript and its background, as well as the digital project and recent work in digital humanities.
Matthew Tyler and Jim Wood have published an article in the most recent issue of Linguistic Variation. The article is entitled “Microvariation in the ‘have yet to’ construction”, and reports on results from the research of the Yale Grammatical Diversity project. The ‘have yet to’ construction refers to sentences like ‘I have yet to visit my grandmother’, meaning ‘I have not visited my grandmother yet’.
Veneeta Dayal has published a paper in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. The paper, which is entitled “Polar question particles: Hindi-Urdu kya:“ (link to paper), represents joint work with Rajesh Bhatt (UMass Amherst). After drawing a distinction between different kinds of question particles, the paper focuses on the properties of the so-called polar question particles, and describe and analyze the Hindi-Urdu particle kya: as an example of this category.
Veneeta Dayal has published in the latest issue of the Annual Review of Linguistics. The paper, which is joint work with Yağmur Sağ at Rutgers University, discusses the syntax and semantics of bare nouns and determiners. The abstract for the paper is available on the Annual Review of Linguistics website.
Starting in 2021, Yale will co-sponsor two meetings of the African Linguistics School (ALS, link to ALS website), an organization focused on training young African linguists in theoretical linguistics, on the basis of the large number of languages spoken in Africa.
Veneeta Dayal was recently invited to teach at two one-day workshops. The first was on Identifying (In)definiteness at the University of Mumbai (India) on January 8, 2020, and the second on The Interrogative Left Periphery at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (India) on January 14, 2020.
The Yale linguistics department is well-represented at the coming Annual Meeting of the LSA, January 2-5, 2020 in New Orleans. But apart from the many current members of the department who will be attending, we are also hoping to connect with previous department members. A meet-up will be organized, with more information below:
Claire Bowern was an author along with Emily Stark and Patrice Collins on a poster at the Yale Day of Data. The poster is one of a series which charts the increasing number of female faculty in departments over the last hundred years. The Day of Data is held each year to highlight the different ways that researchers at Yale across different departments and divisions engage with data (broadly construed).
