Faculty

Bob Frank receives NSF grant to study inductive bias in neural networks

Bob Frank has been awarded a grant by the NSF on the topic of “Inductive Biases for the Acquisition of Syntactic Transformations in Neural Networks.” This work, in collaboration with Tal Linzen of Johns Hopkins, will explore the degree to which explicit innate biases are needed to learn linguistic mappings, whether between linguistic forms (e.g., active/passive or declarative/interrogative) or between forms and meanings.

Veneeta Dayal will teach a course and give a talk at the University of São Carlos

Veneeta Dayal will teach a mini-course on “The Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics of Asserting, Asking and Answering” at the University on Aug 19-21 at the University of São Carlos, Brazil. She will also be giving and invited talk on “When does a clause become a question?” at the 3rd Referential Semantics Colloquium on August 22-23, also at the University of São Carlos. The program can be found online.

Rikker Dockum and Claire Bowern publish paper in Language Documentation and Description

Rikker Dockum and Claire Bowern have a new paper in the open access journal Language Documentation and Description, entitled “Swadesh lists are not long enough: Drawing phonological generalizations from limited data.” They look at the amount of data (e.g. number of words in a wordlist) required to accurately recover phonological inventory distributional generalizations and show that the typical 100-word or 200-word Swadesh lists frequently used by linguists are not usually sufficient.

Samuel Andersson, Sirrý Sigurðardóttir, Rikker Dockum, and Claire Bowern present at ICHL24

A contingent of Yale linguists has traveled to Canberra, Australia this week for the 24th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, hosted at the Australian National University. Participants from our department include Professor Claire Bowern, PhD candidate Rikker Dockum, and PhD students Sirrý Sigurðardóttir and Samuel Andersson.
 
Their talks, with links to abstracts, are as follows:
 

Veneeta Dayal will teach comparative semantics at the 5th African Linguistics School

Professor Veneeta Dayal will teach a course on comparative semantics at the 5th African Linguistics School (ALS5) at Rhodes University. From June 30 to July 13, the two-week African Linguistics School will take place at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. Veneeta Dayal will teach a semantics course on noun phrases, entitled “Comparative Semantics: The Noun Phrase Across Languages.”

Veneeta Dayal presents on the interrogative left periphery at UMass Amherst, NYU, and the ILLC in Amsterdam

Professor Veneeta Dayal has given presentations on “The Fine Structure of the Interrogative Left Periphery” in the US and the Netherlands. In April, she gave a colloquium talk on this topic at UMass Amherst, as well as an invited presentation at a meeting of the Semantics Group at NYU.

Claire Bowern, Sarah Babinski, and Rikker Dockum present at the 5th Workshop on Sound Change at UC Davis

This past weekend (June 21-23), the 5th Workshop on Sound Change (WSC 5) took place at UC Davis. Yale Linguistics was represented by Professor Claire Bowern, PhD candidate Rikker Dockum, and graduate student Sarah Babinski, who all presented at the workshop. Claire Bowern gave a talk entitled “Language, Culture, and Australian Exceptionalism,” while Rikker and Sarah gave posters.

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