Weekly Digest – May 5, 2020

Luis Miguel Toquero Pérez’s paper “The semantics of Spanish compounding: An analysis of NN compounds in the Parallel Architecture” has been just published in Glossa. Check it out at the link below:

Toquero-Pérez, Luis Miguel. 2020. The semantics of Spanish compounding: An analysis of NN compounds in the Parallel Architecture. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 5(1): 41. 1–31. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.901

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As we spend time isolated, it can be nice to share some of the small moments that bring us joy. In this week’s Joy Journal:

Rachel saw a cool plant on a walk this week:

Charlie saw some ducks among other nice birds as the cherry blossoms bloomed in Chicago:

Andrew wanted to share an uplifting story from the BBC:

99-year-old Capt Tom Moore aimed to raise $1,500 for the UK National Health Service and its fight against Covid19, by completing 100 laps of his garden.  His challenge went viral and more than 800,000 people have made donations, so he has now raised over $50 million.  He was also invited to record a duet of the classic song ‘You’ll never walk alone’, and amazingly this has now become No.1 in the UK charts, in the week of Captain Tom’s 100 birthday.

Full story at:  https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-52415966

If anyone has other moments of joy they would like to share (or a linguistics pun to replace “Joy Journal” for this section), please contribute them via the submit link, or by e-mailing Charlie.

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And finally, excellent news! Mary Byram Washburn welcomed Samuel Joseph Washburn into her family on April 29th. Mary says everyone is healthy and adjusting. Congratulations to Mary and her family!

Weekly Digest – April 27, 2020

It’s the last week of classes! This has been a uniquely challenging semester, and I want to extend gratitude to everyone who has been organizing and attending department events via Zoom, and for everyone’s hard work teaching and doing research during these times. Hopefully, the end of the school year brings a relief for most of us, and we can begin to meet in person again next school year. My thoughts go out to those directly affected by the pandemic, those separated from loved ones by travel restrictions, and those unsure of what the future holds for them in these uncertain times.

Finding joy in these times has been a challenge, but I know many of us have found small ways to lighten up our days through baking, more time with pets, socially-distanced time outside, and other ways. In the interest of sharing joy, I wanted to put out a call for next week’s Weekly Digest. If anyone has pictures they would like to share of something that has brought them joy, we can end the semester on a brighter note next week!

This week in the linguistics department (All times are in Pacific Time):

Monday (4/27), 4pm on Zoom, Syntax+!  Elango Kumaran will present “Ergative and unergative subjects in Karuk”. Contact Luismi for the Zoom link.

Tuesday (4/28), 9:30am on Zoom, Psycholinguistics Lab Meeting! Sarah Lee will be presenting “The successful transfer inference in transfer-of-possession events: aspectual, lexical semantic, and syntactic cues”. Contact Elsi to get access to the Zoom link.

Thursday (4/29), 3:30pm on Zoom, Virtual Tea Time! Please come and socialize! Bring your own tea! Contact Stephanie for the Zoom link.

Weekly Digest – April 13, 2020

This week in the linguistics department (All times are in Pacific Time):

Monday (4/13), 3:30pm on Zoom, Syntax+! Tommy Tsz Ming Lee will present at a students-only meeting. Contact Luismi for the Zoom link.

Tuesday (4/14), 9:30am on Zoom, Psycholinguistics Lab Meeting! Daniel Plesniak will be presenting “Correlations of judgements in binding constructions”. Contact Elsi to get access to the Zoom link.

Wednesday (4/15), 12:30pm on Zoom, PhonLunch! Yubin Zhang will be presenting “Consonant F0 is not intrinsic perturbations: A preliminary case study of Nuosu Yi”. Contact Yubin for the Zoom link.

Thursday (4/16), 3:30pm on Zoom, Virtual Tea Time! Please come and socialize! Bring your own tea! Contact Stephanie for the Zoom link.

Weekly Digest – April 6, 2020

In lieu of current events, all department events will be meeting remotely for the rest of the semester. I hope everyone is safe and doing well during these challenging times.

This week in the linguistics department (All times are in Pacific Time):

Monday (4/6), 4:30pm on Zoom, Syntax+! Betül Erbaşı will present. Contact Luismi for the Zoom link.

Tuesday (4/7), 9:30am on Zoom, Psycholinguistics Lab Meeting! Jina Song will be presenting “L2 Acquisition of scrambling in Korean”. Contact Elsi to get access to the Zoom link.

Wednesday (4/8), 12:30pm on Zoom, PhonLunch! Brian Smith will be presenting “Accounting for exceptionality in probabilistic OT grammars: a case study of exception-ridden vowel alternations in French”. Contact Brian for the Zoom link.

Thursday (4/9), 3:30pm on Zoom, Virtual Tea Time! Please come and socialize! Bring your own tea! Contact Stephanie for the Zoom link.

Weekly Digest – March 9, 2020

This week in the linguistics department:

Monday (3/9), 3:30pm in the Conference Room, Syntax+! Daniel Plesniak will present “The relationship between quantificational binding and syntactic structure”.

Wednesday (3/11), 12:30pm in the Conference Room, PhonLunch! Ian Rigby will be presenting.

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Roumyana Pancheva presented an invited talk “Historical change in scalar meanings” at the workshop on Variation in the lexical semantics of adjectives and their cross-linguistic kin, in Hamburg, March 5-6.

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Sunday, March 1, USC linguists took visiting speaker Gaja Jarosz on a hike in LA’s famous Griffith Park.

Tuesday, March 3rd, there was a department happy hour!

Weekly Digest – March 2, 2020

This week in the linguistics department:

Monday (3/2), 3:30pm in the Conference Room, Gaja Jarosz (UMass Amherst) will present a colloquium: “Generalizing Phonological (Hidden) Structure”.

Tuesday (3/3), 9:30am in the Conference Room, Psycholinguistics Lab Meeting! Sung Hah Hwang will present “Prosody in Siri-directed Speech”.

Tuesday (3/3), 4-5pm in the Reading Room, Syntax+! Tommy Tsz-Ming Lee will present “Verb doubling and Cyclic Linearization”.

Tuesday (3/3), 4-6pm and Wednesday (3/4), 3:30-5:30pm in the Conference Room, Gaja Jarosz will be giving a mini-course “Using Statistical Learning Models to Connect Phonological Theory and Quantitative Behavioral Data”.