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”.

 

Weekly Digest 03/05

Brooke Kidner presented a project on Ceceo Spanish sibilant variation this Friday (03/02/18) as part of a SACNAS (Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science) collaboration with the USC and LACC chapters!

 

We had a wonderful Open House event last week! Thank you so much to all involved! A special huge thanks to our amazing student hosts and incredible department staff in making this happen! Here are a few pics:

 

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This week at USC linguistics:

Monday 03/05 at 2pm in GFS218: Syntax+! Madhumanti Datta will give a talk titled Clausal Complementation in Bangla-Word Order and Complement Types.
at 2:30 pm in the Conference Room: PhonLunch! Khalil Iskarous will present “Phon: A single dynamical theory of representation and computation”.
and at 3:30pm in the Conference Room: Special Semantics Colloquium! Followed by dinner.

Wednesday 03/07 at 7:30pm: JUMP (Joint USC/UCLA Meeting in Phonology)! Rachel Walker on “Partial segment behavior”.

Thursday 03/08 at 1pm in the Conference Room: Psycholing lab meeting! Monica Do and Ana Besserman will do practice poster presentations for this year’s CUNY conference (http://cuny2018.ucdavis.edu/).

 

 

 

Weekly Digest 02/26

Charlie O’Hara presented “Soft typology of Coda place of articulation distributions requires synchronic constraints” at the Workshop on Emergence of Universals on 02/19/18 at OSU in Columbus, Ohio.

We had a Lunar New Year celebration with homemade cakes. Thanks all who participated in baking and eating!

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This week is our OPEN HOUSE! Here are some events to keep on your radar this week:

Monday (2/26) at 2pm in the Conference Room: PhonLunch! Reed Blaylock will present “Phrase-conditioned lengthening in singing” and Mairym Llorens will present “The timing of urge-driven coughing relative to the speech around it: A window into selection”.
also on Monday, at 3.30 pm in the Conference Room: Syntax+! Huilin Fang will give a talk titled “Mandarin Aspectual Particle dao and Its Evidential Restrictions”.

Tuesday (2/27) at 7pm: Open House Student dinner at the USC Village! 

Wednesday (2/28) at 3:30pm in the Conference Room: Psycholing lab meeting Open House edition!
also Wednesday at 7pm: Open House Department dinner in DTLA!

 

Thursday (3/1) at 11 am in Location TBA: Syntax+ Open House edition! Thomas Borer will give a talk titled Pronouns in (Swiss) German.

Also this Thursday, at 1pm in the Conference Room: Psycholing lab meeting! Jesse Storbeck will present “Acquisition of probabilistic non-adjacent dependencies in an artificial grammar”.

Weekly Digest 02/20

Tuesday (02/20) at 4pm in GFS207: Syntax+! Ethan Poole (UCLA) will give a talk titled (Im)possible Traces. 

Thursday (02/22) at 1pm in the Conference Room: Psycholing Lab Meeting!
and at 4:30pm in GFS108: ShLAC (Language & Computation) lab meeting!

Friday (02/23) at 10:30am: Semantics colloquium! Followed by lunch at 12pm and High Tea at 4:30pm.

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If you haven’t yet done the survey about the climate in linguistics and related areas, it’s not too late:

A group of scholars (Dr. Corrine Occhino, Research Asst. Professor in the Center on Cognition and Language at Rochester Institute of Technology, in Rochester, NY; Dr. Savithry Namboodiripad, Assistant Prof at the University of Michigan; and Dr. Lynn Hou, a University of California President’s Post-Doctoral Fellow at The University of California, San Diego)  is circulating a survey with the intent to get a better understanding of the climate for all who study language, linguistics and related areas.

You can share your experiences here:
https://umich.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9oaKQ2xrX9ngmOx

Weekly Digest 02/12

Here’s what’s going on this week:

Monday (02/12) at 2:30pm in the Conference Room: PhonLunch! Charlie O’Hara on “Soft typology of coda place of articulation distributions requires synchronic constraints.”
and at 3:30pm, also in the Conference Room: Syntax+! Daniel Plesniak on “Towards the Cross-Linguistic Unity of De’s: A Third Factor Approach to Intra-Nominal Marking.”

Thursday (02/15) at 1pm in the Conference Room: Psycholing Lab Meeting! Catherine Wang will give a practice talk called “Fact or opinion? Interpreting subjective adjectives in news discourse.”
and at 4:30pm in GFS108: ShLAC (Language & Computation) lab meeting!

Friday (02/16) at 10:30am: Semantics colloquium! Followed by lunch at 12pm and High Tea at 4:30pm.

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PS. This week is Valentine’s Day! If you have any ideas for valentine’s linguistic memes, please send them to Ana.

Weekly Digest 02/05

Many congratulations to Reed Blaylock, who has been selected to receive a USC University Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award! Excellent work, Reed!

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This week:

Monday (02/05) at 3:30pm in the Conference Room: Colloquium! John Goldsmith (University of Chicago) will give a talk titled “Learning morphology: an algorithm to learn something about language.”

Thursday (02/08) at 4:30pm in GFS108: ShLAC (Language & Computation) lab meeting!

 

 

Weekly Digest 01/29

Khalil Iskarous presented an invited talk titled “Dynamical Theories of Language Production: Langue and Parole in Optimality Theory and Articulatory Phonology” at the conference of the Associzione Italian Science della Voce annual meeting in Bolzano, Italy (01/25).

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Here’s whats going on this week:

Today, Monday (01/29) at 2:30pm in the Conference Room: PhonLunch! Hayeun Jang will present “Coronality of /i/: From tongue muscles to phonological representation.”

Thursday (02/01) at 1pm in the Conference Room: Psycholing Lab Meeting! Haley Farkas will present “Acquisition of verbal comparatives.”

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A group of scholars (Dr. Corrine Occhino, Research Asst. Professor in the Center on Cognition and Language at Rochester Institute of Technology, in Rochester, NY; Dr. Savithry Namboodiripad, Assistant Prof at the University of Michigan; and Dr. Lynn Hou, a University of California President’s Post-Doctoral Fellow at The University of California, San Diego)  is circulating a survey with the intent to get a better understanding of the climate for all who study language, linguistics and related areas.

You can share your experiences here:
https://umich.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9oaKQ2xrX9ngmOx

Weekly Digest 01/22

Good morning, linguists! Here are some events happening this week in our department:

Monday (01/22) at 2pm in GFS111: Syntax+! Haley Wei will present “Adverbial Clauses in Mandarin Chinese: Ordering and Syntax-Discourse-Prosody Interface.”

Also on Monday (01/22), at 2:30pm in the Conference Room: PhonLunch! Yoona Yee will present “Articulatory complexity as a factor for phonological similarity: implications for laryngeal co-occurrence restrictions.”

And Thursday (01/25) at 1pm in the Conference Room: Psycholing Lab Meeting! Monica Do and Binh Ngo will present “What influences classifier choice? Investigating the role of perceptual salience.”