Category Archives: faculty

CLS 46 is underway

The 46th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society begins TODAY and runs through Saturday evening (culminating in our world-renowed CLS banquet). A full program can be found here.

U. Chicago participants include two invited speakers, the illustrious John Goldsmith (Main Session) and Jason Riggle (Probabilistic Theories of Grammar), as well as the following presenters:

Eleni Staraki, “On the Temporal Interpretation of Modals – A crosslinguistic comparison”

Max Bane and Morgan Sonderegger with Peter Graff (MIT), “Longitudinal phonetic variation in a closed system”

Elena Castroviejo Miró (postdoc) with Laia Mayol (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), “Evaluative adverbs in questions: a comparison between French and Catalan”

Anastasia Giannakidou and Suwon Yoon, “No NPI licensing in clausal comparatives”

James Kirby, “A probabilistic model of category merger”

Also, a huge thank you to the officers of CLS 46 (Adam Baker, Rebekah Baglini, Tim Grinsell, Jonathan Keane, and Julia Thomas)—best of luck this weekend!

“Relatively” recent talk for CK

If you had the feeling that something was missing a few weeks ago, perhaps it’s because Chris Kennedy was gone off to Germany at the end of last month at the 2010 Conference of the German Society for Linguistics (DGfS).  Chris gave a talk during that conference’s workshop on Subjective Meaning: Alternatives to Relativism, entitled “Where does relativity come from?”

The program for DGfS can be found here, and slides from Chris’s presentation are here. And welcome back, Chris!

Chicagoans at Penn Linguistics Colloquium

Autumn quarter’s sociophonetics seminar has proven fruitful—the experiment designed by the class has been accepted to the Penn Linguistics Colloquium (PLC 34)!  The eight co-authors include Alan Yu, Carissa Abrego-Collier, Rebekah Baglini, Tommy Grano, Martina Martinovic, Charles Otte III (NELC/Ling), Julia Thomas, and Jasmin Urban.

The paper, entitled “Mediating factors in phonetic imitation: Perceived sexual orientation,” will be presented Saturday, March 20.

Continuing Chicago’s efforts to invade Penn, Chris Kennedy also happens to be the invited plenary speaker at PLC this year. The title of his talk is “The Composition of Incremental Change” (abstract here).

Some recent Canada conferences

Alan Yu gave two invited lectures in Canada this past couple weeks. The first lecture, “Washo Word Prosody”, was presented at the Workshop on Structure and Constituency in the Languages of the Americas (WSCLA 15) at the University of Ottawa in Ontario. He then presented “When does perceptual compensation fail? The implications of analyzing channel bias rationally” at the Workshop on Computational Modelling of Sound Pattern Acquisition at the University of Alberta – Edmonton.

Meanwhile, third-year grad Alice Lemieux also presented at University of Ottawa for WSCLA 15 a couple weeks ago. Her presentation was titled “Small but significant – body part incorporation in Washo,” and the abstract can be found here.