BLING

Congrats to Julia Thomas for successfully defending her qualifying paper, “Styeshifting in African American English: Theoretical Implications from a phonetic analysis of /ai/ monophthongization”!

In addition to several BLS talks mentioned below, Chicago researchers will be presenting at a number of other upcoming conferences.

At the upcoming (Feb 11) 16th Workshop on the Structure and Constituency of Languages of the Americas, Ryan Bochnak, Tim Grinsell, and Alan Yu will be presenting “Copula agreement and the stage-level/individual-level distinction in Washo”.

At the 24th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing (March 24-26), hosted at Stanford, Chicagoans will be presenting one talk:

• A Corpus Study of Socially Mediated Language Change in Voice Onset Time, by Max Bane, Peter Graff and Morgan Sonderegger

and a number of posters:

• Interacting with non-native speakers induces “good-enough” representation, by Shiri Lev-Ari, Boaz Keysar and Emily Ho
• Interference “licensing” of NPIs: Pragmatic reasoning and individual differences, by Ming Xiang, Julian Grove and Anastasia Giannakidou
• Cross-linguistic variations and similarities: an ERP study of Mandarin wh-constructions, by Ming Xiang, Fengqin Liu, Peiyao Chen and Taomei Guo
• Implications of individual variation in socio-cognitive processing on sound change, by Alan Yu

Finally, this spring (April 22), the 3rd annual meeting of the Illinois Language and Linguistics Society will be held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Chicagoans Karlos Arregi and Sue Gal are both invited speakers.

Professor Chris Kennedy will be giving a colloquium at the University of Southern California on Feb 22, on “The number of meanings of English number words”.

He will be shortly followed by Chicago PhD student Max Bane, who will be giving his own colloquium at USC on Feb 25.

Professor Alan Yu gave a research seminar recently (Feb 1) at the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The talk was titled “Individual variation in socio-cognitive processing and the actuation of sound change”.

He will also be giving a colloquium at Carleton University, Ottawa on March 11 on a similar topic.

Professor Jason Merchant will be giving an invited colloquium at MIT on March 11, and is also an invited speaker at a workshop on ellipsis at Stanford, this April 29-30. He doesn’t know yet what he’ll talking on at either place, but says it will probably be about gender features under ellipsis.