USC Ling June Digest (Special Summer Edition)

Triple congratulations to Peter Guekguezian are in order:

Last month Peter successfully defended his dissertation “Prosodic Recursion and Syntactic Cyclicity inside the Word” and accepted a post-doc at the University of Rochester beginning this fall!

Peter also competed and had an incredible run at Jeopardy!, which aired this week. Congratulations on your amazing 3-day winning streak, Peter! You can read more about Peter on Jeopardy! here.

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Andrew Simpson presented a paper on “Parallels in the structure of phases in clausal and nominal domains” as an invited speaker at the 6th Cambridge Comparative Syntax Conference, May 4-6, developing joint work with Saurov Syed.

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Khalil Iskarous gave a talk titled “Dynamical possibilities for a theory of sound change: The Fokker-Planck Equation” at the University of  Bolzano on June 17.

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If you have any news or updates for the blog, please send them to us!

We hope everyone is having a lovely summer.

USC Ling Weekly Digest May 22

Congratulations to Ulrike Steindl, who successfully defended her dissertation “The Grammar of Correction” on May 9 and accepted a position as Language Engineer with Nuance Communications in Aachen!

 

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Congratulations to Saurov Syed, who accepted a one-year lecturer position teaching syntax in Harvard University!

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The AMP 2016 Proceedings have now been published! The proceedings consists of 31 papers that can be viewed and accessed here: http://journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php/amphonology/issue/view/157

The editors for the proceedings were Charlie O’Hara, Caitlin Smith, Karen Jesney & Rachel Walker.

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*** Commencement pictures coming soon! ***

USC Ling Weekly Digest May 8

Congratulations to Chorong Kang and Syed Saurov,
who both successfully defended their dissertations last week! 

Over the weekend, Roumi Pancheva visited Salt Lake City, the site of the LSA Annual Meeting, January 4-7, 2018. If you go to the LSA, you too can see these mountains!

The Southern California Meeting in Phonology (SCaMP) was held at UCLA on Saturday, May 6. Charlie O’Hara gave a talk on “Interactions of learnability and phonological grammar drive the typology of coda stop inventories.” A bunch of the USC gang joined for merriment afterwards at Barneys in Westwood.

Betül Erbaşı and Songül Gündoğdu presented “Ezafe across language families: Iranian and Altaic” at the 1st North American Conference on Iranian Languages (NACIL1) in Stony Brook (april 28-30).

USC Ling Weekly Digest April 24

Khalil Iskarous gave a talk titled “The interaction between phonetics and phonology in the realization of listner-based sound change” with Darya Kavitskaya at the 4th Sound Change Workshop at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

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This week:

Monday 04/24 at 4pm in the Conference Room: Syntax+! Betül Erbaşı and Songül Gündoğdu will present “Ezafe across language families: Iranian and Altaic”.

Thursday 04/27 at 4:30pm in the TBD: PhonLunch! Hayeun Jang is presenting “Effects of intervening consonants in Korean umlaut”.

Also Thursday 04/27, at 5pm in the Conference Room: Psycholing lab meeting! Ana Besserman will talk about “Implicit Arguments and Discourse.”

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Here are some lovely pictures of the 36th Annual Academic Honors Convocation, where Saurov Syed officially received the Oustanding Teaching Award of 2017!

USC’s 19th Annual Undergraduate Symposium for Scholarly and Creative Work

Congratulations to all the undergraduate students who presented their research at the USC’s 19th Annual Undergraduate Symposium for Scholarly and Creative Work. This year featured lots of really interesting work! Here are some of the presenters:

. Patrice Zhao presented “Asking Questions: Effects of Word Order on Language Production”.

. Catherine Wang and Justin Nichols presented “When Pronouns Disagree: A Psycholinguistic Investigation”.

. Claire Witzke presented “Judgments in Nativeness for Constructed Languages: Dothraki”.

. Jesse Mena, Justin Nichols, and Joshua Segui presented “Automatic Detection of the Grammatical Vocabulary of Language: Lithuanian, Polish, and Irish”.

. Joshua Segui presented “The Morphosyntax of Double Object Clitics in Kambera”.

. Last but not least, congratulations to Nimisha Patil (double-majoring in Biomedical Engineering and Film Production) who won the prize for best interdisciplinary poster with her work titled “Comparison of Basic Beatboxing Articulations using Real-Time Magnetic Resonance Imaging”!

USC Ling Weekly Digest April 17

Congratulations to Khalil Iskarous for his promotion to Associate Professor!

And congratulations to all the students who were awarded fellowships: Jessica Harmon for the USC Graduate School Final Year Fellowship, Charlie O’Hara for the Morkovin Endowed Fellowship and Binh Ngo for the Research Enhancement Fellowship!

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Roumyana Pancheva gave a colloquium talk at UConn on “Logophoricity effects in double object structures with clitics” (joint work with Maria Luisa Zubizarreta) on 03/31.

Snowdrops!

Peter Guekguezian gave a colloquium at Fresno State called “Multiple Spellout Meets Parallel Phonology” on Thursday 4/6.

Peter Guekguezian also presented “Compatibility, Antagonism, and the Nature of Coarticulation: the SaySiyat Pharyngeal” (joint work with Khalil Iskarous) at the 24th Annual Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association in the University of Washington, Seattle on Saturday 4/8.

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This is the penult week of classes! 😳

Monday 04/17 at 3:30pm in the Conference Room: Lisa Davidson’s (NYU) colloquium talk on “Gradient phonation patterns in American English obstruents.”

Tuesday 04/18 at 9am in the Reading Room: Justin Nichols and Catherine Wang will give a practice talk on “When Pronouns Disagree: A Psycholinguistic Investigation of Imposters” for GLEEFUL 2017.

Thursday 04/20 at 12:30pm in the Conference Room: PhonLunch! Samantha Gordon will talk about “Coordination in multimodal spontaneous speech”.

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Stay tuned for an upcoming post about the Linguistics Undergraduate students and the research they presented at the 19th Annual Undergraduate Symposium for Scholarly and Creative Work!

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USC Ling Weekly Digest April 10

Congratulations to Saurov Syed, who has been offered a USC Dornsife Preceptor teaching position following his graduation!!

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Last week, Khalil Iskarous gave a talk at George Mason University Krasnow Institute on “Dynamical principles underlying octopus body patterning, a visible neural network”.

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“What’s happening this week?”, you ask?

Monday 04/10 at 3:30pm in the Conference Room: Syntax+! Thomas Borer will present his poster for GLAC “The Person Case Constraint in Swiss German – A Movement Analysis”.

Wednesday 04/12 from 11am to 2pm in the TCC ballroom: the Undergraduate Symposium for Scholarly and Creative Work! This event will feature research posters by USC undergraduates, including at least two linguistics posters:
. “Asking questions: Effects of word order on language production” by Pengchen (Patrice) Zhao
. “When Pronouns Disagree: A Psycholinguistic Investigation” by Justin Nichols and Catherine Wang

Thursday 04/13 at 5pm in the Conference Room: Psycholinguistics Lab Meeting! Monica Do will talk about “How are Questions Made? The Sequel: A Production Study of Wh-Questions”.