Weekly Digest – February 17, 2020

This week in the linguistics department:

Tuesday (2/18), 9:30am in the Conference Room, Psycholinguistics Lab Meeting! Ana Besserman will present “Implicit objects in comprehension: verb type effects”.

Tuesday (2/18), 2pm in the Reading Room, PhonLunch! Yijing Lu will be presenting “Supralaryngeal characteristics of persistent developmental stuttering”.

Tuesday (2/18), 3:30pm in WPH 2020, Meaning Lab! Deniz Rudin will be leading a discussion.

Friday (2/21), 10:30am in the Conference Room, Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (National University of Singapore) will present a colloquium: “Bikol clefts and topics and the Austronesian extraction restriction “.

Friday (2/21), 3:00pm in the Reading Room, Syntax+! Discussion of “Vietnamese focus particles and derivation by phase” with Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (National University of Singapore).

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Roumyana Pancheva gave an invited talk at the University of British Columbia on Friday, February 14, entitled “Temporal interpretation without tense” (joint work with Maria Luisa Zubizarreta).

 

Weekly Digest – February 10, 2020

This week in the linguistics department:

Tuesday (2/11), 9:30am in the Conference Room, Psycholinguistics Lab Meeting! Betul Erbasi will present “Familiarity as a guide to understanding contraction in German”.

Tuesday (2/11), 3:30pm in WPH 2020, Meaning Lab! Mahmoud Jalloh will be leading a discussion on causality.

Wednesday (2/12), 12:30pm in the Conference Room, PhonLunch! Jessica Johnson will be presenting.

Friday (2/14), 10:30am in the Conference Room, Faruk Akkus (UPenn) will present a colloquium: “Lessons from “make” causatives in Sason Arabic”.

Friday (2/14), 1pm, Charlie O’Hara will be giving a practice job talk. Room TBD.

Friday (2/14), 3:00pm in the Reading Room, Syntax+! Discussion of “On Iranian Case and Agreement” with Faruk Akkus (UPenn).

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USC linguists were well represented at the Berkeley Linguistics Society workshop on Phonological Representations this weekend at UC Berkeley. Stephanie Shih presented an invited talk entitled “Relating gradience in grammar and representation”. Rachel Walker presented “Gradient feature activity and place assimilation”. Hayeun Jang presented “The polarity of gradient featural representations: A case study of coronal palatalization”.

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The linguistics department held a Happy Hour on February 4th at Rock N Reilly’s in the USC Village. Thanks to the organizers for organizing another great event.

Weekly Digest – February 3, 2020

This week in the linguistics department:

Tuesday (2/4), 9:30am in the Conference Room, Psycholinguistics Lab Meeting! Chloe Gfeller will present “Metrical expectations in speech perception”.

Tuesday (2/4), 3:30pm in WPH 2020, Meaning Lab! Jeremy Goodman will be leading a discussion on Frege’s “On Sense and Reference”.

Wednesday (2/5), 12:30pm in the Conference Room, PhonLunch! Cynthia Lee (UCLA) will present “The prosodic substrate of consonant and tone dynamics”.

Friday (2/7), 10:30am in the Conference Room, Ksenia Ershova will be presenting a colloquium.

Friday (2/7), 3:00pm in the Reading Room, Syntax+! Discussion of “Two paths to polysynthesis: Evidence from West Circassian nominalizations” with Ksenia Ershova (Stanford).

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Weekly Digest – January 27, 2020

This week in the linguistics department:

Tuesday (1/28), 9:30am in the Conference Room, Psycholinguistics Lab Meeting! Jun Lyu will present “Online resolution of anaphoric and cataphoric dependencies in English weak crossover”.

Tuesday (1/28), 3:30pm in WPH 2020, Meaning Lab! Alexis Wellwood will be presenting.

Tuesday (1/28), 4:30pm in the Reading Room, Syntax+! Tommy Tsz-Ming Lee will present “Aspectual verbs in Cantonese: a split aspect analysis”.

Wednesday (1/29), 12:30pm in the Conference Room, PhonLunch! Hayeun Jang will present “The polarity of gradient featural representations: a case study of coronal palatalization”.

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Weekly Digest – January 20, 2020

This week in the linguistics department:

Tuesday (1/21), 9:30am in the Conference Room, Psycholinguistics Lab Meeting! This meeting will focus on academic professionalization (CVs and websites), and Cindy Chiang will present “Examining impacts of filled pauses on children’s parses of dative alternations”.

Tuesday (1/21), 4pm in the Reading Room, Syntax+! Elango Kumaran will present “Kanien’kéha agreement”.

Wednesday (1/15), 12:30-2pm in the Conference Room, PhonLunch! Charlie O’Hara will present “How statistical learning impacts the sound patterns of the world’s languages.”

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USC linguists were well represented at this year’s annual meeting of the 2020 Linguistics Society of America in New Orleans!

Jina Song and Elsi Kaiser gave a talk “Effects of discourse factors on the interpretation of Korean null pronouns in subject and object position”. Elsi Kaiser and Catherine Wang presented a poster “Distinguishing fact from opinion: Effects of linguistic packaging”. Yijing Lu presented a poster “Relating acoustic similarity and perceptual similarity: a case study using computational methods”. Betul Erbasi gave a talk with Songul Gundogdu Yucel entitled “Ezafe as a Linking Feature within DP”, and a talk “Assertion and Evidence in Embedded Contexts”. Mairym Llorens Monteserin gave a talk “Skilled orchestration of speech and tics in adults with Tourette syndrome”. Cynthia Lee (PhD 2018), Louis Goldstein, and Dani Byrd presented a talk “Laryngeal consonant and phrasal tone dynamics in Seoul Korean”. Charlie O’Hara presented the posters “The Effect of Learnability on Constraint Weighting: Case Study from Contour Tone Licensing” and “Frequency Matching Behavior in On-line MaxEnt Learners”. Elsi Kaiser and Deniz Rudin presented a talk “When faultless disagreement is not so faultless: What widely-held opinions can tell us about subjective adjectives”. Khalil Iskarous gave a minicourse “Mobile Apps for Endangered Language Revitalization and Documentation”.

Congratulations to Khalil Iskarous who was senior co-chair of the program committee for organizing a great annual meeting!

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Alexis Wellwood gave comments in an Author Meets Critics session at the Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association. The book Alexis commented on is called Physics Avoidance: Essays in Conceptual Strategy, by Mark Wilson (University of Pittsburgh). Alexis commented on the challenges scientific discourses pose for the philosophy of language.

Weekly Digest – January 13, 2020

Hello everyone! Welcome back and happy new year! Welcome to a new decade! Please send me any updates you have from over the break, particularly if you have any photos from the LSA!

Tuesday (1/14), 9:30am in the Conference Room will be an organizational meeting for Psycholinguistics Lab Meeting!

Wednesday (1/15), 12:30 in the Conference Room, the organizational meeting for PhonLunch!

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Before we left for the break, the department held the department Holiday party.

Thanks to Guillermo for excellent photos of the festivities!

Weekly Digest – December 9, 2019

Hello everyone! Classes are over, it’s raining every other day, and every seat at the coffee shops near campus is taken… we’ve made it through another semester! Good luck to everyone with finals and grading to do in these next few weeks! This will be the last regularly scheduled weekly digest of the semester, so send me updates if there is something you want to get out before 2020. In the meantime, I hope you all have a great winter break, and a happy new year; and I hope to see you all at the…

Linguistics Holiday Party! On Tuesday 12/10, at 5pm in GFS 330.

Next Monday (12/16), at 11 in the Conference Room, PhonLunch! Mairym Llorens will present a talk entitled “Skilled orchestration of speech and tics in adults with Tourette syndrome.” Charlie O’Hara will present a poster entitled “Frequency Matching behavior in on-line MaxEnt learners.”

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On 12/2, Rachel Walker presented a paper titled “Locality and iterativity in Jingulu vowel harmony” at the Iterativity in Grammar Workshop at Leipzig University. From 12/4-12/7, Rachel taught a mini-course at Leipzig University on “Surface Correspondence Theory”.

Leipzig

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USC linguists were well represented at the Acoustical Society of America in San Diego last week. Mairym Llorens presented “Distribution of Tourette’s verbal tics produced during active speech.” Miran Oh and Dani Byrd presented “Oral-velum actions in the articulation of nasal juncture geminates and singletons”. Reed Blaylock and Ramida Phoolsombat presented “Beatrhyming probes the nature of the interface between phonology and beatboxing.” Samantha G. Danner, Jelena Krivokapic (Michigan), and Dani Byrd presented “Co-speech movement behavior in conversational turn-taking.” Nynaeve Perkins Booker, Cheyenne M. LaRoque, Samantha G. Danner, Jelena Krivokapic (Michigan), and Dani Byrd presented “Co-speech laughter in a conversational speech task.” Sarah Harper and Louis Goldstein presented “Variability is variable: Individual differences in articulatory variation.” Asterios Toutios, Reed Blaylock, Louis Goldstein, and Shrikanth S. Narayanan presented “Toward cross-speaker articulatory modeling.”

See you all next year!!!