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!!!

Weekly Digest – December 2, 2019

Hello everyone! Hope you all had a great Thanksgiving Break! This week, in the Linguistics department…

Today, at 11-11:50 in the Conference Room, PhonLunch! Yijing Lu will present “Relating acoustic similarity and perceptual similarity: A case study using computational methods” and additional work regarding her screening project.

Friday (12/5), 11am in the Conference Room: Syntax+! Mamoru Saito (Nanzan University) will present “Weak Heads in Labeling: Case Studies with Complex Predicates and Modification Structures.”

Also on Friday at 3pm in MHP 102: the second talk in the Mind and Language series! Paul Pietroski (Rutgers) will present a talk entitled “Meanings, Homophony, and Polysemy.”

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Reed Blaylock presented an invited talk entitled “Breaking Down the Beat: Beatboxing for Speech Scientists” at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association on November 22 in Orlando, Florida.

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Have a great last week of classes!

Weekly Digest – November 18, 2019

Hello everyone! This week, in the Linguistics department…

Today, at 11-11:50 in the Conference Room, PhonLunch will be doing the second set of practice posters for the ASA. Samantha Gordon Danner will present “Co-speech movement in conversational turn-taking.” Eve Perkins Booker and Cheyenne Laroque will present “Co-speech laughter in a conversational speech task”. Miran Oh will present “Oral-velum actions in the articulation of nasal juncture geminates and singletons.”

At 3:30 today, there is a department colloquium! Emily Clem (University of California, San Diego) will present “Cyclicity in Agree: Maximal projections as probes.”

Tuesday (11/19), 9:30am in the Conference Room: Psycholinguistics Lab Meeting! Sarah Lee will present “Tracking object state change in activity events: Topicality, tense/aspect, and other factors.”

On Wednesday (11/20), at 7pm, the Joint UCLA/USC meeting on Phonology will be held. Claire Moore-Cantwell (UCLA) will present “Cognitive load impairs access to the phonological grammar.”

On Friday (11/22), from 11am to 2pm in the Conference Room: Syntax Fest round 2! Luis Miguel Toquero Perez will present “Revisiting subextraction patterns (from arguments).” Jun Lyu will present  “Selective opacity of RC islands in Mandarin Chinese”. Sarah Lee will present “Who knows? Perspectives in Korean direct and indirect evidentials.”

Weekly Digest – November 11, 2019

Hello everyone! This week, in the Linguistics department…

Today, at 11-11:50 in the Conference Room, PhonLunch will be doing the first set of practice posters for the ASA. Mairym Llorens Montesérin  will present “Distribution of Tourette’s verbal tics produced during active speech.” Reed Blaylock will present “Beatrhyming probes the nature of the interface between phonology and beatboxing.” And Sarah Harper will present “Variability is variable: Individual differences in articulatory variation.”

Tuesday (11/12), 9:30am in the Conference Room: Psycholinguistics Lab Meeting! Ana Besserman will present “Processing existential and anaphoric implicit objects in Brazilian Portuguese.”

On Friday (11/15), from 11am to 2pm in the Conference Room: Syntax Fest! Tommy Tze Ming Lee will present “Hyperraising and evidence-based attitude reports.” Daniel Plesniak will present “Exempt anaphors across syntactic configurations.” And Betül Erbaşı will present “The structure of (Non-)factivity.”

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As part of a collaboration with the non-profit research and advocacy group Tourette’s Hero, Mairym Llorens will be hosted by the Wellcome Institute for a two-week residency at their facilities in London, UK. While at the Institute, she will collect data for her dissertation study on co-produced speech and tics and present some of her findings. She contributed a guest post on the Tourette’s Hero blog which you can view here:
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On 11/4, Deniz Rudin gave a talk at UC San Diego’s SemBabble group called “Intonational Commitments and the Pragmatics of the Table.”

This weekend, the 12th annual California Universities Semantics and Pragmatics (CUSP) took place at USC on November 9th and 10th. Semantics-oriented (and sem-curious) graduate students and faculty from across CA gathered in HAR 101 to hear 14 graduate students deliver 13 talks, including “M-zi ‘not know’ in Cantonese as an epistemic marker” by our department’s own Tommy Tsz-Ming Lee. Discussion was cordial and productive; socialization needed no further justification than its cordiality. All this cordiality was facilitated in large part by the logistical efforts of five volunteers: Tommy, Luismi Toquero Perez, Madhu Datta, Haley Wei Wei, and Sarah Lee.

A full program can be accessed here: https://denizrudin.github.io/cusp12.html

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On Thursday 11/7, the department held a Bowling Night at Shatto 39 lanes in Koreatown. Linguists bowled strikes, spares, splits and more, as laughter and a friendly spirit of competition filled the lanes. Congrats to Andrés Benítez for being the best bowler of the night. Thanks to Chloé and Ian for organizing another great event.

Weekly Digest – November 4, 2019

Hello everyone! This week, in the Linguistics department…

Today, at 2:30 in the Conference Room: Syntax+, Tommy Tsz-Ming Lee will present “Verb doubling and Cyclic Linearization.”

On Wednesday, (10/9) in WPH 202, from 12-12:50, Meaning Lab! Eleonore Neufeld will present her research on pornography’s dehumanization of women through essentialization.

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On 10/30, Bhamati Dash gave a talk at the 35th South Asian Languages Analysis Roundtable (SALA) in Paris. The talk was entitled “Contrastive Polarity says yes to IP Ellipsis”bhamati paris

On November 2nd, Maria Luisa Zubizarreta and 7 USC graduate students (Tommy Tze Ming Lee, Danel Plesniak, Betul Erbasi, Luismi Toquero Perez, Jun Lyu, Haley Wei Wei, and Madhu Datta) attended the 1st Southern California Annual Meeting on Syntax (SCAMS) at Pomona College. Luismi gave a presentation entitled “The Syntax and Semantics of Spanish Comparatives: a Uniform Account.”USC at SCAMS

 

Weekly Digest – October 28, 2019

This week, in the Linguistics department…

Tuesday (10/29), 9:30am in the Conference Room: Psycholinguistics Lab Meeting! Ian Rigby will talk about “Linguistic and Psychological Constraints in the Formation of Name Blends”.

Wednesday (10/30), 12-1 in WPH 202, Meaning Lab! Junhyo Lee and Anthony Nguyen will present “Generics in Proportion”.

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On October 23rd, Ana Besserman gave a workshop titled “Introduction to Linear Mixed Models on R” at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (PUC-Rio).

Alexis Wellwood received the Raubenheimer Faculty Award, one of USC Dornsife’s highest faculty honors, recognizing excellence in research, teaching, and service. Congrats Alexis!

USC linguists were well-represented at the 50th North East Linguistics Society (NELS) at MIT from Oct 25-27. Rachel Walker gave a talk entitled “Gradient Feature Activity in Korean Place Assimilation”. Stefan Keine gave an invited talk entitled “Feature gluttony in the syntax of hierarchy effects”. Stephanie Shih gave an invited talk entitled “The contribution of sound symbolic evidence to lexically-conditioned phonology”. Charlie O’Hara presented a poster entitled “Language-Specific Factors Influence Learnability: Case Study from Contour Tone Licensing”. Roumyana Pancheva presented a talk entitled “Temporal reference in the absence of tense in Paraguayan Guaraní ” (joint work with Maria Luisa Zubizarreta). Caitlin Smith (PhD 2018) also presented a talk.

 

USC made a great showing at the California Meeting on Psycholinguistics (CAMP3) at UC Santa Cruz this weekend. Silvia Kim presented “English-Korean Code-switching: Bound Morpheme Switches by Heritage Speakers” (joint work with Elsi Kaiser). Jesse Storbeck gave a poster “Discourse-level processing of English possessed nouns” (joint work with Elsi Kaiser). Jina Song gave a poster “Effects of post-pronominal factors on pronoun resolution: Looking beyond the pronoun” (joint work with Elsi Kaiser). Cindy Chiang gave a talk “Object-extracted relative clause processing: examining interactions between discourse status, representational complexity, and locality” (joint work with Yijing Lu & Elsi Kaiser). Sarah Lee presented “Topicality and tense effects in processing object state change in activity events” (joint work with Elsi Kaiser).

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This weekend, the Linguistics Department held its Halloween Party! A spooky, punful, and festive time was no doubt had by all attendees! Thanks to Chloé and Ian for organizing another successful event.