Author Archives: tracyd

New PhD Students for Autumn 2024

We welcome 7 new PhD students this Fall! They are Marcia Gonzales, Jessie He, Joohee Ko, Chunan Li, Jordyn Martin, Uduma Umeh, and Summer Xia.

Joohee Ko received her M.A. in Linguistics from Seoul National University and her B.A. from Ewha Womans University, where she majored in English Education and minored in Psychology. Her research interests are in phonetics, phonology, and psycholinguistics. She has been working on cue integration in Korean, and she is interested in further exploring cue weighting and individual differences in speech perception and production. In addition to linguistics, she enjoys rock climbing and drawing.

Chunan Li is a recent MSc graduate from the Language Evolution and Cognition program at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focused on the relative order of gender and number morphology, using experimental methods to explore how cognitive biases and linguistic input shape languages. She also investigated morphosyntactic theory through the lens of diachronic changes and dialectal variations in Chinese. Broadly curious about the mechanisms of language change, she draws insights from historical linguistics, cognitive science, and evolutionary theory. After all, change is inevitable, but it can be enjoyable.

Uduma Umeh is a first year PhD student in linguistics. He is interested in experimental syntax and its interfaces with morphology and semantics. He has already researched on the cross-linguistic variations of various kinds of ellipsis in English and Igbo (his native language) through the Minimalist lens of Jason Merchant’s E-Feature/E-Givenness theory of ellipsis licensing. His future inquiry, amongst others, will include an investigation into the availability of different ellipsis kinds across the Niger-Congo group of languages. he holds a B.A. (English/Literature) and an MA (English Language) from Abia State University, Uturu, Nigeria and the University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria respectively. He enjoys solitude and meditation and intellectually stimulating conversations. His goal is to be in the academia to teach and inspire.

Summer Xia earned her MSc degree in Language Sciences (Neuroscience, Language & Communication) from University College London. Her research focuses on psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, particularly how prediction mechanisms and memory retrieval interact to shape online sentence processing. Outside her studies, she enjoys playing the piano, sketching, creating watercolor art (especially children’s illustrations), and watching panda videos. If she were not a linguistics student, she’d love to be a panda caretaker.

New Postdocs for Autumn 2024

We are delighted to introduce the newest members of our academic family – the postdoctoral researchers who have recently joined our department! Their expertise and innovative approaches promise to bring fresh energy and new perspectives to our ongoing projects and research endeavors.

Austin German is an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow working under the guidance of Professor Diane Brentari. HIs research focuses on Zinacantec Family Homesign (“Z sign”), a signed language developed by three deaf siblings and their hearing extended family members in Zinacantán, a Tsotsil Maya community of highland Chiapas, Mexico. He is broadly interested in (i) the relationship between community structure and language structure, i.e. how the social dynamics of signing communities influence the grammatical structure of signed languages; and (ii) how variation in the learning environment (e.g., how many language models are available to a learner) influences an individual’s language development. HIs postdoctoral project focuses on the morphophonological and morphosyntactic structure of Z sign in comparison to other sign languages, homesign systems, and gestures of non-signing individuals. Austin received my PhD from the Department of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin in 2024. Before that, he received a BA in Linguistics and a BS in Cognitive Science from the University of California, San Diego.

LEE Si Kai (also goes by Sky/Skai) earned his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Connecticut in December 2023, and prior to coming to Chicago, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. His primary research interests are in syntax and his own native dialect of Singlish, but he maintains an active secondary interest in formal semantics, particularly where it interfaces with syntax, as well as in the architecture of contact languages more generally. Outside of linguistics, he enjoy bouldering (albeit at a very low level), making cocktails, kayaking (when the weather permits), and watching YouTube videos on a wide variety of different topics — he is also always open to new experiences so if you have a recommendation with respect to something you love to do in Chicago, he’d love to hear from you. He is excited to be a part of the Linguistics Department at UChicago, and look forward to having many a fruitful discussion about the weird and wonderful linguistic phenomena that exist with everybody in the near future. Through this, he hopes to be able to further both his personal as well as our collective understanding of the intrinsic, shared human capacity for language. Fun Fact: since leaving Singapore after completing his bachelor’s degree, He has spent his time in a succession of so-called “windy” cities/towns: He was first in Storrs, CT, then in Hsinchu, Taiwan, and he has now landed in Chicago, IL, which promises to be the windiest/coldest place so far.

Serpil Karabüklü is a postdoctoral researcher in the Sign Language Linguistics Lab, working on nonmanuals in terms of their semantic and pragmatic roles in sign languages. She collaborates with Prof. Diane Brentari on signers’ accommodation strategies in instrumental events. She presented findings from American and Turkish Sign Languages in a talk with Prof. Brentari, titled Accommodation in atypical situations: Crosslinguistic production and perception studies at the Formal and Experimental Advances in Sign Language Theory 2024 (FEAST 2024). Dr. Karabüklü also gave a poster presentation on the findings of her collaborative work on focus in Turkish Sign Language, Focus prominence in focal and non-focal domains in Turkish Sign Language (TİD). She also recently published her analysis of simultaneous modulations of manual and nonmanual domains for signer certainty, Simultaneity of certainty in Turkish Sign Language (TİD), at the Journal of Pragmatics.

Yevgeniy Melguy is excited to be joining the department this fall as a new post-doc! Yevgeniy completed his BA in linguistics at Reed College, followed by a PhD in linguistics at UC Berkeley. He recently returned to the US this summer after doing a postdoc at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language, following in Melissa Baese-Berk’s footsteps. Yevgeniy’s work focuses on speech perception and production, with a particular interest in multilingualism, second-language acquisition, and accented speech. At UChicago, he will be collaborating with Melissa on a project investigating the mechanisms that listeners use to adapt to an unfamiliar accent or dialect. The research aims to understand the perceptual strategies that enable listeners to achieve rapid adaptation to an accent, and how they generalize this knowledge to new speech contexts. Outside of his scientific pursuits, Yevgeniy enjoys staying active with hobbies such as hiking, biking, rock climbing, martial arts, cooking/baking, and pottery. He looks forward to meeting everyone in person soon and encourages colleagues to say hi if they see him around the department!

Starting this fall, Xuetong Yuan will be a postdoctoral fellow working with Ming Xiang. She primarily works on semantics and pragmatics, with a secondary interest in prosody. She received her PhD from the linguistics department at University of Connecticut, and she spent her undergraduate years at Nankai University. Her current research centers on understanding how linguistic expressions restrict and organize discourse. To this end, she has worked on discourse particles, questions, focus and prosody, speech acts/clause types, and conditionals. Her dissertation explores the notion of conditionality from a cross-linguistic perspective and examines the intricate interactions of discourse and conditional constructions in languages such as Mandarin and Japanese. The project Ming and she are working on aims to explore the discourse notion of the Question Under Discussion and its potential impact on language processing. She is very excited to have the chance to work on a topic which aligns so well with her interests, and she very much look forward to collaborating with Ming. Xuetong was born in Beijing, and she currently spend more time in Tokyo with her family during breaks. She enjoys both cities. When she is not working, she enjoys music (classical and pop), baseball games, and video games. She goes to baseball games and concerts regularly when she is in Tokyo, and she looks forward to continuing my hobbies in Chicago.

BLING Revived!

We are thrilled to announce the revival of our departmental newsblog, your go-to source for the latest updates, stories, and achievements within our community! The summer had been a season of vibrant activities and remarkable accomplishments for many of our members. Below is a sample of these activities and achievements. As we gear up for an exciting new academic year, we look forward to sharing more stories of innovation, adventure, and academic excellence. Stay tuned, and welcome back to a revitalized and more engaging departmental newsblog!

Karlos Arregi spent some time in Germany in June to give talks on his joint work with Asia Pietraszko (https://asiapietraszko.com) on head movement and verbal periphrasis. He gave a colloquium at the University of Potsdam, and was an invited speaker at the Myopia in Grammar Workshop at Leipzig University (https://home.uni-leipzig.de/tebay/myopia.htm).

Steven Castro just completed from two one month fieldwork trips from Fiji. I was there collecting data through interviews and ethnographic observations for my dissertation on language and mixed race identity. I also will be presenting at NWAV and LSA in the coming months.

Lucas Fagen attended Sinn und Bedeutung 29 in Noto, Sicily (September 17-19) to present joint work with Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) on minimal sufficiency readings of exclusives.

During this past summer, Gabriel Gilbert presented at the 16th International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics (16-ICAL) hosted by De La Salle University in Manila, Philippines. He presented a talk titled “Possibility > Apprehensive > Prohibitive: The Case of Hawaiian mai”. This talk used both historical and spoken data to illustrate a proposed grammaticalization path where a marker of epistemic possibility develops into a deontic modal item, adopting the methods of formal diachronic semantics.

Salikoko Mufwene held the “Chaire annuelle Mondes francophones 2023-24” at the Collège de France in Paris in spring. He gave several lectures on how his approach to the emergence of creoles and his scholarship on globalization and language help explain more adequately the history of French in Europe and in the rest of the world. He submitted the typescript of his “leçon inaugurale” for publication at the Editions du Collège de France this summer. According to Amazon.com, the small book retitled Migrations humaines et évolution linguistique will be published in February 2025. He was featured several times in the French media about his interpretation of the history of French and recorded a podcast on multilingualism in Africa with an Australian entrepreneur (released this summer and is posted at his Facebook page). He is part of a documentary titled Biographie de la langue française which was broadcast on October 3 by TV5 Monde. He was interviewed recently by Billets d’Afrique (Paris) and gave a webinar to their audience on October 1. He participated as an academic consultant in a UNESCO meeting in late June for advice on the preparation of a World Atlas of Languages. He also completed his typescript of a book titled Ecological perspectives on language endangerment and loss.

In late June, first-year Ph.D. student Joohee Ko attended the 19th Conference on Laboratory Phonology: LabPhon 19 in Seoul, South Korea. There, she presented a talk titled “The time course of phonetic cue integration in Seoul Korean sibilant fricatives”, with James Whang (Seoul National University).

Anna-Marie Sprenger finished up 9 months of ethnographic fieldwork, funded by a Fulbright-Hays DDRA Grant, in Iași, Romania for their dissertation. They conducted 43 sociolinguistic interviews, collected interactional and soundscape recordings, and collaborated with local queer / feminist organizations and a center for Ukrainian refugees. Part of this research, which focuses on English usage among queer activists in Iași, was accepted to NWAV 52, where Anna-Marie will present in November. Anna-Marie’s manuscript, “Parodying Incompetence in (I)europa: Hearing Glide Insertion and Communism in a Romanian Politician’s Speech” was accepted for publication to the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology for their upcoming January issue.

Saule Tugenbaeva co-taught at the NYI summer linguistic school this July. Below is a screenshot and the link to the event: https://nyispb.org/vnyi9/VNYILing/theoretical-linguistics-cognitive-science_339.html.

Yiin Wang conducted fieldwork this summer in several villages in Jiangxi Province to study sound changes occurring in Linchuan Gan Chinese. The project, which involved interviewing speakers of different generations using picture-based slides, was funded by the University of Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression. Data on tones, Voice Onset Time, and final consonants were gathered for further analysis and research.

Ming Xiang did a lot of traveling in the summer. In mid-June she chaired the dissertation defense for Sanghee Kim at the University of Chicago Paris center. Congratulations to Dr. Kim! After that, she visited Humboldt University in Berlin for some collaborative work with local researchers. She also gave a talk at Humboldt university on syntactic change driven by language contact, presenting a case study based on experimental data she collected on Cantonese and Mandarin. Berlin was one of her favorite cities. Watching EURO 2024 soccer games on big TV screens in Berlin restaurants alongside beer-drinking locals was a delightful experience (without being converted to a soccer fan). After spending some time in Europe, she went back to China, where she attended workshops on brain research methods in Beijing and Guangzhou. In those sizzling hot summer days in China, good Chinese food was her reward. In late August, she returned to Chicago, stopping in Hong Kong (good food again!) for a few days on her way. Over the summer, three papers of hers were accepted/published. One paper co-authored with Dr. Sanghee Kim was published in the journal Cognitive Science (title: Incremental discourse-update constrains number agreement attraction effect); another paper with Dr. Eszter Ronai will appear in the journal Language and Cognition (title: Scalar inference calculation through the lens of degree estimates); and the third paper with a previous UofC undergrad student Jiayuan Yue (now a master student at UCL linguistics) will appear in a Festschrift volume for Masha Polinsky (title: The argument-adjunct asymmetry revisited: the role of focus alternatives in island effect). An additional paper was revised and resubmitted in August, co-authored with Ming’s visiting student Yunsong Li and also her collaborator Dr. Suiping Wang in China (title: Working memory capacity limit is dependent on encoding granularity: evidence from Mandarin Chinese). Also in August Ming’s new NSF grant was finally official! This NSF project will take a quantitative and experimental approach to assess the uncertainty of question under discussion in naturalistic discourse and also examine the effect of such uncertainty on sentence processing.

Alan Yu attended the 19th Conference on Laboratory Phonology in Seoul in late June where he was a discussant at the “Phonetic Imitation: Representation, Sound Change, and Other Theoretical Implications” workshop. He also delivered a lightning talk at the CorpusPhon workshop and presented a poster in the main session of the conference. In July, he visited the Bilingual Cognition and Development Lab at the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, where he gave a talk on categorization consistency. In August, he taught a course on sound change actuation at the Fudan International Summer School of Linguistics. James Kirby (PhD, 2010) was also an instructor at that summer school. Alan also started a UChicago Global-funded project, titled “Crowdsourcing Language Change in Hong Kong with Smartphone Applications,” collaborating with Ming Xiang and alumni Yenan Sun (PhD, 2022) and Jackie Lai (PhD, 2021).

Erik Zyman traveled to Germany to give two invited colloquium talks—one at the University of Potsdam and one at Leipzig University—entitled “Nakajima-Clefts as a Window onto Verb Phrase Structure.” The linguists at both universities gave him a warm welcome and engaged him in exciting discussions of both his investigations and their own. Erik also pushed forward three of his other current research projects, entitled “On the Symmetry Between Merge and Adjoin,” “Radical Tmesis Is Internal Merge,” and “On the Syntactic Autonomy of Theme Vowels.” Among his non-linguistics-related activities were visiting Berlin and hiking in Acadia National Park in Maine.