Chicagoans at NWAV 40

Several Chicagoans presented at NWAV 40 at Georgetown University, Oct 27-31.

  • Kathryn Campbell-Kibler (BA/MA ’98) and Abby Walker: Vocalic accommodation in a cross dialectal shadowing task
  • Kathryn Campbell-Kibler (BA/MA ’98): Measuring implicit dialect awareness using the IAT
  • Salikoko Mufwene: The Emergence of Complexity in Language: An Evolutionary Perspective
  • Morgan Sonderegger, Andrea Beltrama, Tasos Chatzikonstantinou, Erin Franklin, Brett Kirken, Jackson Lee, Maria Nelson, Krista Nicoletto, Talia Penslar, Hannah Provenza, Natalie Rothfels, Maximilian Bane, Peter Graff and Jason Riggle: Coronal stop deletion on reality TV
  • Alan Yu, Carissa Abrego-Collier and Morgan Sonderegger: Attitudinal effects in phonetic convergence

 

Update from Victor Friedman

“I just got back from giving a keynote address on Southeast Europe and Southeast Asia as linguistic areas at the meeting of the International Congress of Slavists’ Balkan Commission in Iasi.  While I was in the Balkans, I also stopped in Lerin (Greek Florina) to participate in the book launch of the first Modern Macedonian-Modern Greek dictionary to be published in Greece.  The neo-nazis from Hrisi Avgi (the ones that assaulted me in 2009) were there, along with riot police and plainclothesmen.  Greece is still a dangerous place for linguists who work on Macedonian, alas, but there were lots of local Macedonians from Lerin and the nearby villages at the launch anyway.  A collection of my articles on Lak was published in Russian under the title Ocherki lakskogo jazyka (Maxachkala, 2011) by the Daghestanian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences.”  –Victor

Giannakidou in Korea

Anastasia Giannakidou gave two talks at Seoul National University titled “Referential vagueness and negative polarity: evidence from Greek and Korean” and “Wh-interminates and free choice: the view from Korean.” She also jointly presented a talk with Suwon Yoon (PhD 2011) and Marcel den Dikken (CUNY) on “On the distribution of NPIs in clausal comparatives” at the 21st Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference (Oct 20-22, 2011).  Also at the conference was Osamu Sawada (PhD 2010, now at Mie Univ.), who presented “The meaning of modal affective demonstratives in Japanese” with Jun Sawada (Kansai Gaidai Univ.).

Portland here we come!

An unprecedentedly large contingent of Chicagoans will be heading to the annual meeting of the LSA and SSILA (*) in Portland next January:

  • Peter Alrenga, Chris Kennedy, and Jason Merchant: Standard of Comparison/Scope of Comparison
  • Andrea Beltrama and Ming Xiang: How beautiful is a pretty girl? Scalar implicatures and context effects with gradable adjectives
  • Ryan Bochnak: Cross-linguistic variation in degree semantics: the case of Washo
  • *Amy Dahlstrom: The place of Meskwaki in a typology of comparatives
  • Tommy Grano: Wanting (to have) null verbs: A view from Mandarin and beyond
  • Jonathan Keane, Diane Brentari, & Jason Riggle: Handshape and coarticulation in ASL fingerspelling
  • Peter Klecha: Modal Domain Shifting: An Imprecision-Based Account
  • Martina Martinovic: Pseudoclefts as a source of fragment answers in Wolof
  • Yaron McNabb: Hebrew mamaš ‘Really’ vs. Real Cases of Degree Modification
  • Chieu Nguyen: The independence of specificity types in Vietnamese
  • *Jerry Sadock: A report on NSF H10195: The lexicon of a polysynthetic language
  • Morgan Sonderegger, Andrea Beltrama, Tasos Chatzikonstantinou, Erin Franklin, Brett Kirken, Jackson Lee, Maria Nelson, Krista Nicoletto, Talia Penslar, Hannah Provenza, Natalie Rothfels, Max Bane, Peter Graff, & Jason Riggle: Coronal stop deletion on reality TV
  • Julia Thomas, Holly Craig and S. Hensel: The Need for Bi-dialectal Education with Child Speakers of AAE: A Look at Copula Acquisition
  • Ming Xiang, Jason Merchant and Julian Grove: Silent Structures in Ellipsis: Priming and Anti-priming Effects
  • Suwon Yoon: Embedded Root Phenomena in Korean versus V2 in German
  • Alan Yu, Carissa Abrego-Collier, Morgan Sonderegger: Individual differences in phonetic convergence
  • Alan Yu and Morgan Sonderegger: Frequency effects on perceptual compensation for coarticulation

Two students are also organizing their own special sessions.

  • Ryan Bochnak is co-organizing a special session with Lisa Matthewson (UBC) on “Methodologies in semantic fieldwork”
  • Rebekah Baglini (the current LSA Bloch fellow) is c0-organizing with Scott Grimm a special session titled “Funding Your Research: Grants for Graduate Students.”  Panelists include Lenore Grenoble and Gregory Anderson (PhD 2000), who will talk about “Funding for linguistic fieldwork and language documentation.”

Last but not least, Ryan Bochnak won the first runner-up in the Best Student Abstract competition. Being runner-up is not just a consolation prize: Ryan will receive a $300 prize, and his achievement will be announced in the  meeting handbook and at the Awards Ceremony prior to the Presidential Address. Well done, Ryan!