Weekly Digest 04/30

Professor Shri Narayanan, who is jointly appointed in the Department of Linguistics, has won the 2018 Viterbi School of Engineering Senior Research Award. Congratulations, Shri!!

USC alumni were well represented at WCCFL at UCLA this past weekend, with presentations by Heather Goad (McGill), Brian Hsu (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and Saurov Syed (University of Auckland)! Guilherme D. Garcia & Heather Goad presented “Can you have stress without feet”; Brian Hsu presented “Scalar constraints and gradient symbolic representations generate exceptional prosodification effects without exceptional prosody”, and Brian Hsu & Saurov Syed presented “Variation in the co-occurrence of indexical elements: Evidence for split indexical projections in DPs.” Here’s Brian presenting:

USC was also well represented at the recent Southern California Undergraduate Linguistics Conference (SCULC), held on April 14 at UCLA! Catherine Wang gave a talk titled: “Effects of Adjective Syntax on Subjectivity Perception in News Discourse” and Mary Coates gave a poster titled “Bimoraicity of /R/ in Standard German.”

Mary Coates, who is a graduating senior, was recently selected as a recipient of a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Award in Germany next year! Congrats Mary!!

And last week, Ana Besserman gave a talk at the Chicago Linguistics Society (CLS 54) titled “The discourse status of existential implicit arguments: Investigating referent accessibility through sluicing.” Here are a few pics of gorgeous Chicago:

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Monday (04/30) at 3:30pm in the Conference Room: Syntax+! Guest speaker Ivona Kucerova (McMaster University) will give a talk titled “Associative constructions: An argument for Distributed Semantics.”

Thursday (05/03) at 11am in the Conference Room:  Psycholing lab meeting! Madhumanti Datta, Betul Erbasi and Sarah Lee will present “Bridging References from Events and Entities in online Sentence Comprehension.”

On Thursday we will also have our end of semester party!!! Please RSVP on the link our wonderful event organizers Miran and Sarah sent out earlier this month.

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Weekly Digest 04/23

Hello, linguists!

Monday (04/23) at 4pm in the Conference Room: Syntax+! Isabelle Charnavel (Harvard University) will give a talk titled Adjunct Attitudes.

And if you haven’t yet registered for classes for Fall 2018, plan to do so soon! Students should be registered for Fall classes by 4/27 (this Friday).

Weekly Digest 04/16

Congratulations to Dr. Samantha Gordon Danner, who will be (re)joining the department as a Postdoctoral Scholar beginning May 1st! She will be working in the Phonetics Laboratory focusing on the area of prosody and articulatory timing.

Last week, Yoona Yee gave a talk titled “Implicational Universals in the Typology of Consonant Harmony” and Arthur Santana presented a poster titled “Is there reduction via laxing in northern dialects of Brazilian Portuguese?” at Glow 41 in Budapest, Hungary:

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This week, at USC Linguistics…

Monday (04/16) at 3:30pm in the Conference Room: Syntax+! Tommy Tsz-Ming Lee is going to give a talk titled “Aspectual verbs in Cantonese: Overt QR and Scope Economy.”

Thursday (04/19) at 2pm in the Conference Room: Psycholing Lab Meeting! Monica Do presents “Psych verbs amaze Monica: How the conceptual structure of psych verbs influences production planning.”

and also Thursday (04/119), at 4:30pm in GFS108: ShLAC (Language & Computation) lab meeting!

Weekly Digest 04/09

This weekend USC hosted SCAMP 2018 (Southern California April Meeting in Phonology)!

Special thanks to Hayeon Jang and Charlie O’Hara for organizing and hosting an excellent conference, and many thanks to everyone who helped and attended!

 

Here are some pics:

 

Last week, as a part of SACNAS’ (Society for Advancing Chicanos and Native Americans in Science) partnership with LAUSD, Brooke Kidner gave two talks about “Careers in Linguistics” at Thomas Alva Edison Middle School for their Career Week.

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This week, you won’t want to miss…

Wednesday (04/11) from 11am-2pm in the Tutor Center: Undergraduate Research Symposium! Psycholing Lab members Catherine Wang, Carly Weaver, and Jeffrey Cho will be presenting their work at Tutor Campus Center (basement floor). Please stop by during that time to show your support and learn about the exciting research our undergrads are doing!

Thursday (04/12) at 1pm: Psycholing Lab Meeting! Ana Besserman will be giving a practice talk for the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS) titled “The discourse status of existential implicit arguments:  Investigating referent accessibility through sluicing”.

and also Thursday (04/12), at 4:30pm in GFS108: ShLAC (Language & Computation) lab meeting!

 

Weekly Digest 04/02

Many congratulations to Professor Elsi Kaiser, who has been awarded an NSF grant to investigate “Subjectivity in language processing: Linguistic and psychological aspects of perspective-taking”. This multi-year project will run until 2021! Congrats Elsi!

This past weekend, Wichita State University hosted the Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages (FASAL) 8, organized by alumna Mythili Menon!
Roumyana Pancheva was a keynote speaker, presenting “Measuring by number” Madhumanti Datta presented “Prosody-Driven Movement: Evidence from Bangla”, Bhamati Dash presented ”’Verb Stacking’ in Fragment Answers: Evidence from Hindi”, Stefan Keine and Bhamati Dash presented “Scrambling-agreement interactions and the cyclicity of Agree.”, and Stefan Keine and Rajesh Bhatt presented “A Secondary-crossover effect in Hindi”.

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This week, in the USC Linguistics department…

Monday (04/02) at 2:30pm in the Conference Room: PhonLunch! Arthur Santana presents “Is there reduction via laxing in northern dialects of Brazilian Portuguese?” and Yoona Yee presents “Implicational universals in the typology of consonant harmony”.

and Thursday (04/05), at 4:30pm in GFS108: ShLAC (Language & Computation) lab meeting!

 

Weekly Digest 03/26

Congratulations to Cynthia Yoonjeong Lee, who last week successfully defended her dissertation “The Prosodic Substrate of Consonant and Tone Dynamics”!!!

Stephanie Shih gave an invited talk titled “Lexically-conditioned phonology in probabilistic grammar” at the Colloquium at University of Arizona Linguistics Department. There were desserts and desert! The after-colloquium party included a dessert potluck; the second picture is of the saguaro cactus forest in the desert outside of Tucson:

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This week, in the USC Linguistics department…

Monday (03/26) at 2:30pm in the Conference Room: PhonLunch! Professional Development Discussion: Dani Byrd will talk about thinking about authorship and a look at USC Academic Senate’s “Guidelines for Assigning Authorship and for Attributing Contributions to Research Products and Creative Works”, and Yoonjeong (Cynthia) Lee will talk about data citation and attributions in linguistics.

also on Monday, at 3:30pm in the Conference Room: Syntax+! Bhamati Dash is presenting a talk titled “‘Verb Stacking’ in Fragment Answers: Evidence from Hindi.“

Thursday (03/29) at 1pm in the Conference Room: Psycholing lab meeting! Jesse Storbeck will present “Acquisition of probabilistic non-adjacent dependencies in an artificial grammar.”

also on Thursday, at 4:30pm in GFS108: ShLAC (Language & Computation) lab meeting!

Weekly Digest 03/19

On March 2nd, Andrew Simpson gave a talk as invited speaker at the Current Issues in Comparative Syntax conference held in the National University of Singapore: “Phases vs. Cyclic Linearization Spell-Out Domains: two perspectives on cyclicity.”

And this past weekend the USC Psycholinguistics Lab sent some of its members to the 2018 CUNY Sentence Processing conference in beautiful Davis, CA. Ana Besserman presented “How accessible in the discourse model are implicit arguments? An investigation using sluicing” (with Elsi Kaiser), Jesse Storbeck presented “Animacy and possession type guide interpretation of ambiguous VP ellipsis” (with Elsi Kaiser), Monica Do presented “Now You See it, Now You Don’t: Visual Cues Modulate Short vs Long Passive Production” (with Elsi Kaiser) and “Subjecthood is Privileged in Message Formulation: Real-time Production of wh-Questions in English and Mandarin” (with Elsi Kaiser and Pengchen Zhao), and Elsi Kaiser presented “Adjective interpretation across the senses: On the subjective nature of sight, smell and taste” (with Catherine Wang and Gwenyth Portillo-Wightman) and “If I were you: Inducing Non-default Interpretations of Perspective-sensitive Items in the Visual World” (Johanna Klages, Elsi Kaiser, Anke Holler and Thomas Weskott). 

CUNY2018: The bike raced past the campus won

Jesse Storbeck

Giant Cat

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This week, at USC linguistics…

Monday 03/19 at 2:30pm in the Conference Room: PhonLunch! Miran Oh presents “Timing of oral and larynx gestures in ejectives and imposives”.

Thursday 03/22 at 1pm in the Conference Room: Psycholing Lab Meeting! Sarah Lee presents “Pragmatic Enrichment during Event Comprehension: Investigating the role of context in processing inferred results”.