Dean's Undergraduate Research Fund news
Cheers to Colin Coltrera and Donna Kiessling, who are recipients of DURF grants for Spring 2012. Their respective faculty sponsors are John Costello and Renee Blake.
Official news and events of the NYU Linguistics Department
Announcements Archives
Posted February 6, 2012
Posted February 3, 2012
Tim Leffel's and Lucas Champollion's GLOW posters
Tim Leffel is going to present a poster on "Non-restrictive adjectives and the theory of scalar implicature" and Lucas Champollion on "Temporal dependencies: anaphora vs. movement" at GLOW 35, Potsdam, March 28-30.
Posted February 1, 2012
Papers by Pylkkänen and colleagues
The following articles by Liina Pylkkänen, Jon Brennan (NYU PhD 2010), and Hugh Rabagliati (NYU PhD 2010) are now published online, ahead of print:
Brennan J, Pylkkänen L. (2012). The time-course and spatial distribution of brain activity associated with sentence processing. Neuroimage. Jan 9. epub
Rabagliati H, Pylkkänen L, Marcus GF. (2012). Top-down influence in young children's linguistic ambiguity resolution. Developmental Psychology. Jan 9. epub
Posted January 28, 2012
Maria Gouskova's article in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory
Maria Gouskova's article on “Unexceptional segments” has just appeared in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 30:1, pp. 79--133. See the pre-publication version here.
Posted January 24, 2012
Six PhD dissertations from 2011
We celebrate our PhD alumni who defended and filed their dissertations during the calendar year 2011 or in January 2012. The dissertations can be accessed at their homepages and at the (pdf) links below.
Sonya Fix
"Dark-Skinned White Girls": Linguistic and Ideological Variation Among White Women with African American Ties in the Urban Midwest pdf
Daniel Lassiter
Measurement and Modality: The Scalar Basis of Modal Semantics pdf
Txuss Martín
Deconstructing Catalan Object Clitics pdf
Abdoulaye Laziz Nchare
The Grammar of Shupamem pdf
Laura Rimell
Nominal Roots as Event Predicates in English Denominal Conversion Verbs pdf
Marcos Rohena-Madrazo
Sociophonetic Variation in the Production and Perception of Obstruent Voicing in Buenos Aires Spanish pdf
Cara Shousterman accepts Dissertation Fellowship
Cheers to Cara Shousterman, who has just accepted the GSAS Dean's Dissertation Fellowship for 2012/13.
Posted January 23, 2012
Chris Barker talk at Vagueness workshop
Chris Barker is giving an invited talk on "Negotiating Temperature Standards" at the workshop on Vagueness in Language, Reasoning, and Cognition, Amsterdam, January 27-28.
Posted January 13, 2012
Harves & Kayne paper in Linguistic Inquiry
Having ‘Need’ and Needing ‘Have’, co-authored by Stephanie Harves and Richard Kayne has appeared in the Winter 2012 issue of Linguistic Inquiry.
Posted January 2, 2012
Papers by Champollion, Schlenker, and Szabolcsi
You may enjoy the comparative reading of three NYU semanticists' views on what it takes to do justice to quantification, in "Formal Semantics And Pragmatics: Discourse, Context And Models," the online proceedings of the eponymous 2010 Riga conference,
Quantification and negation in event semantics, by Lucas Champollion
Quantifiers and variables: insights from sign language (ASL and LSF), by Philippe Schlenker
Certain verbs are syntactically explicit quantifiers, by Anna Szabolcsi
and in "Linguistics and Philosophy" online first,
Donkey anaphora: the view from sign language (ASL and LSF), by Philippe Schlenker .
Posted December 19, 2011
Txuss Martin dissertation defense
Cheers to Txuss Martin, who successfully defended his dissertation on "Deconstructing Catalan Object Clitics." His committee consisted of Richard S. Kayne (chair), Mark Baltin, Cedric Boeckx (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), Stephanie Harves, and Alec Marantz.
Posted December 13, 2011
New articles by Philippe Schlenker
Philippe Schlenker has new articles on presuppositions: "DRT with local contexts" and "The Proviso Problem: a note", both in Natural Language Semantics 19/4, and "Presupposition Projection: Two Theories of Local Contexts, Parts I and II" in Language and Linguistics Compass 5/12.
Posted December 6, 2011
Richard Kayne, Liina Pylkkanen & Philippe Schlenker speak at "50 years of Linguistics at MIT"
Richard Kayne, Liina Pylkkanen & Philippe Schlenker will all be speaking at 50 years of Linguistics at MIT: a scientific reunion. Their sessions are "Principles and parameters," "Laboratory linguistics," and "Semantics and grammar," respectively. Gillian Gallagher will be presenting a poster.
Posted December 4, 2011
Maria Gouskova's paper in Lingua
Maria Gouskova's article on "Grounded constraints and the consonants of Setswana," with co-authors Elizabeth Zsiga (Georgetown) and One Tlale Boyer (Georgetown), is published in Lingua 121 (2011). See a pre-publication version here.
NYU Linguistics Number One in Brainz.org "Top Linguistics Departments & Schools Ranked"
We're not sure about the methodology used to create the ranking nor about the reliability of the site, but we're reluctant to argue with the "brainz." See here .
Posted November 20, 2011
NYU to host 2011 SYNC mini-conference, Dec. 3
This year's installment of the annual SUNY/Yale/NYU/CUNY mini-conference (SYNC) will be held on Saturday, December 3 in our department. The program and other conference information can now be found here.
We are delighted to announce that NYU alum Tom Leu (UQAM) will be the keynote speaker.
The conference is free of charge, but please do register if you plan on coming so that we can estimate how many people to plan for. Hope to see you there!
Neil Myler and Tim Leffel,
the SYNC organizing committee
Greg Guy talk at FRIAS Workshop
Greg Guy was one of the two featured speakers at the Workshop on System, Usage, and Society last week at the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Study (FRIAS), Freiburg, Germany. His paper was entitled 'The grammar of use and the use of grammar.'
Posted November 12, 2011
Tricia Irwin to speak at WECOL
Tricia Irwin is giving a talk on "Unaccusativity, Direct Objecthood, and Information Structure" at WECOL on Nov. 18-20 at Simon Fraser University.
Posted November 9, 2011
Suzanne Dikker talk and eight NYU posters at Neurobiology of Language
Suzanne Dikker (NYU PhD alumna) is giving a talk on "Predicting language: MEG evidence for lexical preactivation" at the upcoming Neurobiology of Language Conference in Annapolis, MD, and members of our department present eight posters:
Doug Bemis (NYU, Psychology) and Liina Pylkkänen: Simple composition in reading, listening, and production: an MEG investigation
Jon Brennan and Liina Pylkkänen: The Neural correlates of incremental structure-building and interpretation
Joe Fruchter (NYU, Psychology), Linneae Stockall, Queen Mary, University of London) and Alec Marantz: Early decomposition effects during visual processing of past tense verbs: an MEG study using masked priming and single-word lexical decision tasks
Kim Leiken and Liina Pylkkänen: Increasing combinatoric complexity in MEG
Gwyneth Lewis (NYU, Psychology) and Alec Marantz: The latency of lexical access in visual and spoken word recognition
Tal Linzen, Einat Shetreet (Children's Hospital, Boston) and Naama Friedmann (Tel Aviv University): Exploring the neural bases of dependency resolution using coordination sentences
Einat Shetreet (Children's Hospital, Boston), Tal Linzen and Naama Friedmann (Tel Aviv University): The effects of complement predictability on the processing of verbs' complementation options
Masha Westerlund (NYU, Psychology) and Liina Pylkkanen: Characterizing the role of the left anterior temporal lobe in combinatory processes
Posted November 8, 2011
Laura Rimell's dissertation defense
Cheers to Laura Rimell, who successfully defended her dissertation on "Nominal Roots as Event Predicates in English Denominal Conversion Verbs". Her committee consisted of Chris Barker, Richard Kayne, Alec Marantz (co-chair), Anna Szabolcsi (co-chair), and Bert Vaux of Cambridge.
Talks by Vincent Chanethom and Lucas Champollion
Vincent Chanethom will be presenting a poster entitled "Dynamic approach to the production of diphthongs by bilingual children" at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) annual convention in San Diego, CA, November 17-19, 2011.
Vincent will also be giving a talk entitled "Teaching phonetics and pronunciation in second language classrooms" at the Phonetics and Pedagogy Workshop of Princeton University's Department of French and Italian, December 1, 2011.
Lucas Champollion has been invited to speak at the "Workshop in Honor of Arnim von Stechow" (Nov 10-11, 2011 at University of Konstanz. His talk will be about temporal prepositional phrases and implicit variables.
Posted November 2, 2011
Simon Charlow and Lucas Champollion to speak at the 18th Amsterdam Colloquium
Simon Charlow will speak about "Cross-categorial donkeys" and Lucas Champollion, who is joining our faculty next Fall, about "Each vs. jeweils: A cover-based view on distance-distributivity" at the 18th Amsterdam Colloquium, December 19-21, 2011. The full program is posted now; ten-page paper versions of the talks will be available at the same web site during the colloquium.
Posted October 25, 2011
Paul Portner talk (Oct 28)
Paul Portner is speaking about "Clause types in context" in the Semantics Group at 1:30pm on Friday, Oct 28.
Posted October 14, 2011
NYU linguists at NWAV 40
Current NYU graduate students, faculty, and PhD, MA, and BA alumni are presenting the following papers and posters at the 40th annual meeting of New Ways of Analyzing Variation. Some of the presentations are co-authored with non-NYU colleagues, indicated below as "et al". The full program is posted here.
(Thanks to Greg Guy for the full list.)
Current
Amy Wong: ‘BOUGHT-lowering and its impact on the low back distinction: Evidence from Chinese Americans in NYC’
Renee Blake, Cara Shousterman, Luiza Newlin-Lukowicz, Lindsay Kelley: ‘A study on ethnicity: Examining feature co-occurrence to understand the linguistic behavior of black New Yorkers’
Emily Nguyen: ‘The urban/rural distinction and so much more: Monophthongal /ow/ in Minnesota’
Nathan LaFave and Gregory Guy: ‘Channel of communication and lexical frequency in English adjective gradation’
Daniel Erker: ‘Of categories and continua: discrete and gradient properties of sociophonetic variation’
POSTERS:
Allison Shapp and Renee Blake: Sociolinguistic variation in American English adverbial -ly
Nathan LaFave, Daniel Szeredi, Allison Shapp, Timothy Mathes, Morakinyo Ogunmodimu and Gregory Guy: Variable auxiliary contraction in spoken American English
Tal Linzen: ‘The weakening role of inalienability in the Hebrew possesive dative: a corpus blog study’
Daniel Szeredi: Loss of agreement between Hungarian relative pronouns and their antecedents
Alums
Marcos Rohena-Madrazo: ‘Effects of production on the variable rating of sh and zh in Buenos Aires Spanish listeners’
Sonya Fix: ‘A quantitative and qualitative consideration of language and material style in a study of white women in contact with African American English’
Jennifer Nycz: ‘Frequency effects on second dialect acquisition’
Simanique Moody: ‘The ties that bind: African American English in contact with Gullah-Geechee in southeast Georgia’
Kara Becker: ‘The social meaning(s) of raised BOUGHT in NYC: A perceptual approach’
Erez Levon, Ronald Mendes (et al.): Panel on ‘Sexuality in language: Analyzing complex social practice’
Rafael Orozco, ‘What happens when dialectal parallelism meets language contact?
Cecelia Cutler (et al.): Panel on ‘Emergent methodologies for analyzing youth language practices in new media’
Bill Haddican et al.: ‘Social correlates of change in mid-vowels in Northern England’
Bill Haddican et al.: ‘Effects on the particle verb alternation across English dialects’
Anna Marie Trester et al.: ‘Second dialects and shifting linguistic identities: British women in the United States’
Anna Marie Trester et al.: ‘Talking business, taking charge: communicative and interactional norms in the MBA classroom’
Posted October 3, 2011
Gillian Gallagher and Maria Gouskova to present at NELS 42
There will be two talks at NELS 42 in Toronto by NYU people. Gillian Gallagher will present her work on Quechua, "Speaker knowledge of laryngeal phonotactics in Cochabamba." Maria Gouskova will report on joint work with Michael Becker, "Russian yer alternations are governed by the grammar". The full program can be seen here.
Posted October 2, 2011
NYU WPL Syntax, Vol. 3 is online
We are pleased to announce the publication of NYU Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 3. The volume can be accessed for free online at: http://linguistics.as.nyu.edu/object/linguistics.grad.nyuwpl .
Jim Wood and Neil Myler
Editors, NYUWPL 3
Contents
Mark Baltin - The copy theory of movement and the binding-theoretic status of A-traces: You can’t get there from here
Satarupa Das - Bengali imposters
Stephanie Harves and Richard S. Kayne - Having Need and Needing Have in Contemporary Indo-European
Daniel Lassiter - Anaphoric Properties of which and the Syntax of Appositive Relatives
Inna Livitz - Incorporating PRO: a Defective-Goal Analysis
Neil Myler - Come the pub with me: Silent TO in a Dialect of British English
Laziz Nchare - The Syntax of Agreement in the Shupamem DP and Greenberg’s Universal 20
Teresa O'Neill - The Syntax of ne...que Exceptives in French
Violeta Vazquez-Rojas - Definite and indefinite numeral phrases in Shupamem
Posted September 25, 2011
Philippe Schlenker's article honored among ten best in philosophy in 2010
The editors of the Philosopher's Annual select the ten best articles published in philosophy each year. We are delighted to announce that the 2010 selection contains three NYU philosophers, our very own Global Distinguished Professor Philippe Schlenker among them. See the full selection and their articles here.
“Attention and Mental Paint”
Ned Block
from Philosophical Issues 20 (2010), 23-63
“Towards a Theory of Part”
Kit Fine
from Journal of Philosophy 107 (2010), 559-589
“Presuppositions and Local Contexts”
Philippe Schlenker
from Mind 119 (2010), 377-391
Visitors in NYU Linguistics, Fall 2011
We welcome the following scholars and students.
Adriana Belletti and Luigi Rizzi will be visiting, roughly, from mid-November till mid-December.
Daniela Cid is a Fullbright visitor from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She is working on a dissertation on polysemy and will spend a year in the Neurolinguistics lab learning MEG with Liina Pylkkanen & co.
Ane Berro Urrizelki is a visiting PhD student from the University of the Basque Country, here until the end of November, working with Richie Kayne. She is writing her dissertation on ergativity, case variation and argument structure, focusing on Basque dialects.
Friederike Moltmann will be visiting in Philosophy for a longer while, starting in mid-October. We hope to see her at some of our semantics events.
Posted September 21, 2011
Syntax/Semantics Brown Bag, Fall 2011
We're pleased to announce that the Syntax/Semantics Brown Bag, our main forum for new research in these areas from within the department and from other departments nearby, will be convening once again this semester. Talks take place on Fridays from 1.30-3pm, in room 103 of 10 Washington Place.
The following page will always be kept up-to-date directly by the BB organizers:
https://sites.google.com/a/nyu.edu/nyusyntaxbrownbag/ . Keep an eye on it.
The schedule so far is as follows.
September 23rd- Mark Baltin
October 7th- TBA
October 14th-TBA
October 21st- Jorge Lopez Cortina
November 4th- TBA
December 2nd-David Basilico
December 9th- Txuss Martin
Colloquium Schedule, Fall 2011--Spring 2012
It is with great pleasure that we announce the full schedule for the NYU Department of Linguistics Colloquium Series for the academic year 2011-2012.
Fall 2011:
Sept. 30 Jaye Padgett
Oct. 21 Roger Levy
Oct. 28 Anders Holmberg
Nov. 18 Norvin Richards
Dec. 9 Bryan Gick
Spring 2012:
Feb. 10 Juliette Blevins
Mar. 2 Sarah Thomason
Mar. 23 Chris Potts
Apr. 6 Valentine Hacquard
Apr. 20 Phillip Carter
All talks take place at 4pm on a Friday, in Room 104 of the Linguistics Department (10 Washington Place). As usual, each talk will be followed by a reception in the department and dinner at a nearby restaurant.
Posted September 17, 2011
Semantics Group meetings, Fall 2011
Two of the upcoming talks in the Semantics Group are,
Sept. 30, 1:30pm, Chris Barker on actions
Oct. 28, 1:30pm, Paul Portner (Georgetown), TBA
The preliminary schedule of the rest of the semester is posted here. We typically do not announce the individual talks on the blog. Please keep an eye on the schedule if you are interested in participating. Talks usually start at 10:30am (unlike the above two). Presentations are interleaved with discussion; meetings tend to last 2hrs or sometimes longer.
Posted September 12, 2011
Five NYU presentations at "Structuring the Argument"
Four papers and one poster were presented by current graduate students, recent alumni, and faculty of our department at Structuring the Argument at CNRS, Paris, Sept. 5-7 (some in collaboration with non-NYU-ers):
Einat Shetreet, Tal Linzen and Naama Friedmann, Are all complementation options activated when accessing the verb?
Lisa Levinson, Diagnosing the Causative-Inchoative Alternation
Lisa Levinson and Jonathan Brennan, The Costs of Zero-Derived Causativity in English: Evidence from Reading Times and MEG
Francesca Delogu and Liina Pylkkänen, MEG Evidence for Covert Syntax in Intensional Transitives
Alec Marantz [with comments by Victor Acedo], Syntactic Approaches to Argument Structure Without Incorporation: Doing the (anti-lexicalist) Dance without Doing the Dance
Posted August 16, 2011
Lisa Davidson receives NSF collaborative research grant
Cheers to Lisa Davidson, who has just been awarded a new 3-year grant from the National Science Foundation called Collaborative Research: A Bayesian model of phonetic and phonotactic effects in cross-language speech production. This grant is a joint collaborative award with Colin Wilson from Johns Hopkins University.
Posted August 12, 2011
Sang-Im Lee to speak at ICPhS XVII
Sang-Im Lee is presenting a paper on 'Spectral analysis of Mandarin Chinese sibilant fricatives' at ICPhS XVII (International Congress of Phonetic Sciences) in Hong Kong next week. Her trip to the conference is supported by the Gösta Bruce scholarship from IPA (International Phonetic Association).
Posted August 11, 2011
Vincent Chanethom receives NSF Dissertation Grant and Dean's Travel Grant
Cheers to Vincent Chanethom, who is the recipient of a NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement grant for the proposal entitled "Language Interaction in Child Bilingual Speech: An Acoustic Study of Diphthongs." His advisor is Lisa Davidson. Vincent has also received a GSAS Dean's Student Travel Grant for the proposal entitled "Dynamic differences in the production of diphthongs by French-English bilingual children."
Cara Shousterman receives NSF Dissertation Grant
Cara Shousterman is the recipient of a NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (advisor: Renee Blake) for the proposal entitled "Revisiting the Inner City: Language and Community Change in Harlem." Cheers, Cara!
Posted August 6, 2011
Lisa Levinson in "Syntax" and "Language"
Lisa Levinson (NYU PhD 2007) has just published "Possessive WITH in Germanic: HAVE and the Role of P" in the journal Syntax (for an early view, see DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9612.2011.00159.x) and a review of "Lexical semantics, syntax, and event structure" in Language 87/2, DOI: 10.1353/lan.2011.0029.
Posted August 1, 2011
Dylan Bumford wins Grand Prize for Academic Excellence
Cheers to Dylan Bumford, who was the Grand Prize winner in this year’s competition for the George H. Mitchell Student Awards for Academic Excellence of the University Co-op Society at UT, Austin. He was honored for his undergraduate thesis, “Making Sense of Sense: Lessons from Synaesthetic Metaphor.” His thesis was nominated by Hans Kamp of the Departments of Linguistics and Philosophy. Dylan is entering our PhD program in Fall 2011.
Posted July 21, 2011
Salvador Mascarenhas and Chris Barker to speak at SuB16
Salvador Mascarenhas will speak about "Licensing by modification: the case of positive polarity pronouns," and Chris Barker will be one of the invited speakers, at Sinn und Bedeutung 16, Utrecht, September 6-8.
Posted July 8, 2011
Marcos Rohena-Madrazo defends dissertation
Congratulations to Marcos Rohena-Madrazo, who just defended his dissertation, "Sociophonetic Variation in Production and Perception of Obstruent Voicing in Buenos Aires Spanish". The dissertation was chaired by Lisa Davidson, and the committee included Greg Guy, John SIngler, Susannah Levi, and Laura Colantoni (U. Toronto).
Posted June 26, 2011
Chris Barker talk on reconstruction effects
Chris Barker is giving a talk on "Delayed evaluation as an explanation for various reconstruction effects" at the Workshop on Reconstruction Effects in Relative Clauses at ZAS, Berlin, July 8-9.
Collins and Singler organize African Linguistics School II
Chris Collins and John Singler are two of the four organizers of African Linguistics School II, to be held in Porto-Novo, Benin, from July 17 to July 30. It is a two-week institute held biennially for graduate students in linguistics at African universities. (The other two ALS organizers are Profs. Enoch Aboh of the University of Amsterdam and Akinniyi Akinlabi of Rutgers). The faculty comes from Africa, Europe, and North America. Joining Chris and John on the faculty from NYU will be Violeta Vazquez-Rojas, a 5th-year graduate student in this department, who will be teaching "An Introduction to Semantics," and 3rd-year student Tim Mathes will be attending ALS II.
Funding for ALS II comes from the NSF, the University of Amsterdam, GLOW, and other sources. The initial ALS was held in 2009 at NYU Accra.
John Singler talk and Pidgin/Creole conference
John Singler gave a paper at a one-day conference at the University of Essex on June 17. It was entitled "Data elicitation for a linguistic analysis for the determination of origin (LADO), as seen through the lens of sociolinguistics." The conference was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK and was devoted to the topic of "Data Elicitation for LADO."
John is one of the organizers of the Society for Pidgin an Creole Linguistics meeting to be held at the University of Ghana in Legon (just outside of Accra) from August 2 to August 6. Major support for the meeting is coming from the NYU Office of Global Programs, the NYU FAS Dean for Social Science's Office, and NYU's Africa House. During the conference, John will be presenting a paper entitled "Stereotypes, stigma, and agency in Vernacular Liberian English."
Posted June 23, 2011
Laziz Nchare's dissertation defense
Cheers to Abdoulaye Laziz Nchare, who successfully defended his dissertation entitled "The Grammar of Shupamem" today. His committee chair was Chris Collins; committee members Ray Dougherty, Jeff Good (SUNY Buffalo), Greg Guy, Richard Kayne, and Anna Szabolcsi.
Shupamem is a Grassfields Bantu language; Laziz's mother tongue. After a general introduction, the dissertation focuses on the syntax of the DP, the Tense-Aspect-Mood system, negation, questions and focus, and body part expressions and the binding theory.
Posted June 3, 2011
Tom Leu to teach at the EGG school
Tom Leu is going to teach two research courses at the EGG school this summer, one on "Dissecting determiners: A course in Germanic Morphosyntax" and another "On x-to-C: A Germanic slide ride into Morphosyntax".
Tom Leu assistant professorship at UQAM
Tom Leu has accepted an Assistant Professor position in the Dept. of Linguistics at the Universite de Quebec a Montreal (UQAM). Congratulations, Tom!
Posted May 23, 2011
Dan Lassiter dissertation defense
Cheers to Dan Lassiter, who successfully defended his dissertation on "Measurement and Modality: The Scalar Basis of Modal Semantics". His committee chair was Chris Barker; committee members Seth Yalcin, Chris Kennedy, Philippe Schlenker, and Anna Szabolcsi.
Posted May 19, 2011
Liina Pylkkanen to teach at the Utrecht Summer School
Liina Pylkkanen will be lecturing in the Neuroscience of Communicative Meaning course at the Utrecht Summer School 2011.
Greg Guy to speak at Symposium on Bilingualism
Greg Guy is presenting at the International Symposium on Bilingualism (ISB-8), in Oslo in June. He will be the discussant at a panel on ethnolects.
Posted May 16, 2011
Neil Myler to speak at Workshop on Nominalization
Neil Myler is giving a talk on "Light verbs, hidden relatives, and control: the case of derived nominals" at JeNom4, a workshop on nominalizations, in Stuttgart.
Jon Brennan postdoc in MEG research
Jon Brennan (PhD 2010) accepted a post-doctoral position at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, where he will be working with Tim Roberts in collaboration with Dave Embick to use MEG to investigate abnormal language processing in diseases such as autism.
Vincent Chanethom to speak at Research Workshop on Experimental Linguistics
Vincent Chanethom will be giving a talk entitled "Dynamic differences in child bilinguals' production of diphthongs" at the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) Tutorial and Research Workshop on Experimental Linguistics in Paris, May 25-27.
Posted May 14, 2011
Jen Nycz to teach at Reed College
Jennifer Nycz (PhD 2011) will be joining the faculty of Reed College in August 2011 as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Linguistics.
Posted May 8, 2011
Tim Leffel, John Singler, and Franca Ferrari-Bridgers to speak at ACAL 42
Three NYU linguists are speaking at ACAL, the 42nd Annual Conference in African Linguistics, Maryland, June 10-12.
Tim Leffel, Epistemic modality in Masalit
John Singler, “Say 8 so I can know wat 2 do”: Text-messaging conventions in Vernacular Liberian English
Franca Ferrari-Bridgers (PhD 2005), Luganda verb morphology: A new analysis of the suffixes [YE] and [-A] and their distribution across the indicative, subjunctive and imperative mood
Posted May 6, 2011
Greg Guy course at the 2011 LSA Institute
Greg Guy is going to teach a course on Language in Latin America at the 2011 Linguistic Institute (Colorado).
Posted April 29, 2011
New papers by Liina Pylkkanen and NYU alumni
Liina Pylkkanen has two new papers out with recent PhD alumni Suzanne Dikker and Hugh Rabagliati:
Dikker, S. & Pylkkänen, L. (2011). Before the N400: effects of lexical-semantic violations in visual cortex. Brain and Language. doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2011.02.006 here
Rabagliati, H., Marcus, G. F. & Pylkkänen, L. (2011). Rules, Radical Pragmatics and Restrictions on Regular Polysemy. Journal of Semantics, 1–27. doi:10.1093/jos/ffr005 here
Posted April 27, 2011
Cara Shousterman teaching award
Three cheers to Cara Shousterman, who has won an Outstanding Teaching Award in recognition of her excellence in undergraduate education.
Maria Gouskova teaching award
Three cheers to Maria Gouskova, who has won a Golden Dozen Teaching Award in recognition of her excellence in undergraduate education. -- A less formal but no less important recognition of Maria's teaching is the fact that several of her phonology students have been accepted to first-rate PhD programs.
Posted April 16, 2011
Welcome the class of Fall 2011
NYU Linguistics is proud to present its incoming class of PhD students:
Dylan Bumford
Nicole Holliday
Itamar Kastner
Kuo-Chiao (Jason) Lin
Katie Wallace
James Whang
Linmin Zhang
Xin (Vera) Zu
Posted April 14, 2011
Lucas Champollion to join NYU Linguistics in 2012
The Department of Linguistics is very pleased to announce that Lucas Champollion (PhD 2010, Penn) has accepted our offer of an Asssistant Professorship in Semantics. Lucas is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Tuebingen and will join NYU starting in Fall 2012.
Posted April 13, 2011
Will Starr talk on imperatives (Apr 15)
Will Starr (NYU Philosophy) is talking about "A preference semantics of imperatives" in the Semantics Group at 11:00am on April 15 (Rm 104). -- See the meeting schedule here.
Posted April 5, 2011
Jeremy Kuhn NSF Graduate Fellowship
Cheers to Jeremy Kuhn, who has been awarded an NSF Graduate Fellowship. The title of his project is "Anaphora in American Sign Language".
Posted April 3, 2011
Simon Charlow at Michigan Philosophy and Linguistics Workshop
Simon Charlow is giving one of the invited talks at the Michigan Philosophy and Linguistics Workshop, April 8-10, 2011, on "More on the LFs of Attitude Reports" (joint work with Yael Sharvit).
Posted March 31, 2011
Maria Gouskova talks at Santa Cruz
During the week of April 4, Maria Gouskova is visiting UC Santa Cruz, where she will give two talks: "Vug, vga: An experimental investigation of Russian yer deletion" and "Cyclicity, locality and selectional restrictions."
Violeta Vazquez-Rojas talks on Purépecha
Violeta Vazquez-Rojas is giving three conference presentations on her dissertation research on Purépecha. At WCCFL 29 she is talking about "Purépecha classifiers and distributive predicates". One of her SULA VI talks in Manchester is on"Purépecha numeral classifiers: distributive predicates and individuation", the other (with Lluvia Camacho) is on "Numeral inflection in Purépecha".
Liina Pylkkanen on neuromagnetism of combinatory semantics
Liina Pylkkanen gave the Language and Cognition colloquium at Columbia last week, on “The Neuromagnetism of Natural Language Combinatory Semantics”. She is giving the IRCS colloquium at Penn on April 15th, probably with the same title.
Chris Barker talks on free choice permission
Chris Barker is giving departmental colloquia at MSU and Wayne State this week. The title is "Truth is free, permission is scarce". He is also an invited speaker at MOSS 2, the Moscow Syntax and Semantics conference on April 22-24.
Posted March 15, 2011
Cog Sci Colloquium: Jon Sprouse (Mar 21)
Cognitive Science Colloquium: Monday, March 21, 5-6:30pm,
10 Washington Place (Linguistics Bldg) -- reception to follow
Jon Sprouse, UC Irvine
The role of experimental syntax in an integrated cognitive science of language
Acceptability judgments form the primary empirical foundation for generative syntactic theories (Chomsky 1965, Schütze 1996). While the vast majority of the judgments that have been collected over the past 50 years were done so informally, over the past fifteen years many language researchers have advocated the adoption of more formal approaches to judgment collection: a set of techniques commonly referred to as experimental syntax (e.g., Bard et al. 1996, Cowart 1997, Featherston 2007, Gibson and Fedorenko 2010). My goal in this talk is to first present a framework for understanding exactly what the potential empirical contribution of formal experiments could be, and then investigate that framework using a series of large-scale acceptability judgment experiments that include over 750 naïve participants and over 450 constructions. Starting from the assumption that the shared goal of language researchers is to construct a theory that integrates all three of Marr’s (1982) levels, I will suggest that there are two basic empirical questions that formal experiments could potentially address: (1) To what extent is the data underlying syntactic theory sound?, and (2) What types of inferences are licensed by the linking hypothesis between acceptability judgments and syntactic theory? Although historical and sociological differences between language researchers working on different levels of the problem have meant that the majority of studies have focused on question (1), the results of these experiments suggest that the real power of formal experiments lies not in the question of the veracity of the data, as the empirical evidence suggests that informal judgments are remarkably reliable and appropriate for the phenomena of syntactic theory, but rather in the question of which inferences are licensed by the data (question 2), as formal experiments allow us to explore complex theoretical questions about the relationship between syntactic theories and parsing theories.
Posted February 8, 2011
Inna Livitz and NYU alumni at GLOW
Inna Livitz is presenting a paper on Reducing PRO: a Defective Goal Analysis at the 34th Annual GLOW conference in Vienna.
Our PhD alumni Bill Haddican and Eytan Zweig have a co-authored poster on The syntax and semantics of "be like" quotatives.
Posted January 31, 2011
Maria Gouskova in The Linguistic Review
Maria Gouskova's article on "The Phonology of Boundaries and Secondary Stress in Russian Compounds" has just appeared in The Linguistic Review 27:4 (2010), pp. 387-448.
Posted January 25, 2011
Dan Lassiter accepts Stanford postdoc
Starting in the summer Dan Lassiter will be a postdoc in Noah Goodman's lab at the Stanford Psychology Department, working on building probabilistic computational models of semantic and pragmatic phenomena and testing them experimentally. The overall project of which this is part seeks to integrate symbolic and statistical methods to develop explicit models of learning, inference, categorization, reasoning, and decision-making in a variety of domains. -- Dan is expecting to defend his dissertation in May.
Posted January 23, 2011
Simon Charlow and Jim Wood to speak at DGfS
Jim Wood and Simon Charlow are giving talks at the 33rd Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society in Goettingen:
Jim Wood, The unintentional causer in Icelandic (in AG 10)
Yael Sharvit (UConn) & Simon Charlow, Bound de re pronouns and concept generators (in AG 12)
Posted January 18, 2011
James Higginbotham lecture (Jan. 21)
James Higginbotham (USC) is giving a talk on "Indexicality and Embedding" at 11:00am on Friday, Jan. 21. Location: Rm. 103 or 104.
Abstract: In this talk I will survey a number of phenomena that show a sensitivity of indexical expressions to embedding. These have sometimes been diagnosed as "monsters" in the technical sense of David Kaplan; but I shall, as in published and forthcoming work, interpret them as anaphoric phenomena of a special kind, of which the canonical example is Sequence of Tense. Of particular interest is the "de se" so-called, where I will take issue with the point of view derived from the important work of David Lewis. I will also consider some distinctions within that category itself, and, contrary to Lewis, argue for a robust sense of de re belief and desire. On the side of comparative semantics, examples from Korean, Scots English, and elsewhere in the literature will underscore the variety of parametric differences available cross-linguistically.
Posted January 5, 2011
NYU Linguistics at the LSA
The following members of the department are presenting or organizing workshops at the LSA (in order of appearance):
Mark Baltin, organizer: Workshop on Structural Approaches to Ellipsis
Mark Baltin: How semantics (and overt syntax) is affected by deletion: Syntactic deletion
Oana Savescu Ciucivara (NYU/Bucharest) and Jim Wood: RE-prefixation and Talmy’s parameter
Jonathan Brennan and Liina Pylkkänen: Teasing apart the relationship between syntactic structure-building and semantic composition using MEG
Kevin Roon and Adamantios I. Gafos (NYU/Haskins): Dynamical modeling of phoneme classifications and response times
Lauren Hall-Lew (Edinburgh) and Sonya Fix: Perceptual coding reliability of /l/ vocalization in casual speech data
Gregory R. Guy: Shared constraints on phonological variation in New Zealand English
Tuuli Morrill Adams: The interaction of native and non-native prosodic structure in acquisition
Danielle Alfandre (Louisiana), Maryam Bakht, Scott Grimm (Stanford) and Olivia Sammons (Alberta), organizers: Workshop: Navigating Grad School and Beyond: Skills for Academic Success
Marcos Rohena-Madrazo: Sociophonetic variation and paradigm leveling in Buenos Aires Spanish sibilants
Jim Wood: Affirmative semantics with negative morphosyntax
Gillian Gallagher: Auditory features: the case from laryngeal co-occurrence restrictions
Elizabeth L. Coggshall: Glottalization in New York City English
Posted January 3, 2011
Collins--Postal book to be published by The MIT Press
Cheers to Chris Collins and Paul Postal, whose book ms. entitled "Imposters" has been accepted for publication by The MIT Press.
Posted December 7, 2010
Colloquium: David Beaver (Dec. 10)
David Beaver is giving a colloquium, "Only in New York" at 4:00pm on 12-10-2010.
Abstract: The meaning of exclusives, like only, just, merely, mere, and sole, and their counterparts across languages, is a longstanding puzzle that’s been bothering scholars since the thirteenth century. Yet another puzzle, with its own ever-growing literature, concerns focus sensitivity, whereby intonation affects meaning. The odd thing is that although exclusives provide the paradigmatic examples of focus sensitivity, there has been no previous theory which explains both their meanings and the fact that they are focus sensitive. Until now. I’ll introduce the phenomena and the puzzles from scratch, and offer a solution extending that developed in my 2008 book with Brady Clark "Sense and Sensitivity: How focus determines meaning."
Posted November 16, 2010
Amy Wong and Libby Coggshall to present at AAA
Amy and Libby are presenting this weekend at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting in New Orleans:
Amy Wong: "I'm a bad Asian": Stance acts and stylistic moves among American-born-Chinese preadolescents in New York City's Chinatown.
Libby Coggshall: The phonological effects of the Red Power Movement: Prosodic rhythm and change in Lumbee English.
Posted October 30, 2010
Jennifer Nycz dissertation
Cheers to Jen Nycz, who has defended her dissertation on "Second Dialect Acquisition: Implications for Theories of Phonological Representation". Committee: Gregory R. Guy (chair), Lisa Davidson, Adamantios Gafos, John Singler, and Gerry Docherty (Newcastle University).
Posted October 26, 2010
Szabo on Epistemic Comparativism (October 29)
Zoltan Gendler Szabo (Yale) is going to talk about "Epistemic Comparativism" (joint work with Jonathan Schaffer, ANU) in the semantics group on Oct. 29, Friday, at 11:00am in Rm. 103.
Posted October 25, 2010
Informational on Senior Honors Theses and DURF
For all Linguistics and Joint Majors, Thursday, October 28 from 2-3 pm in the Linguistics Department, rm 104.
Renée Blake, the Director for Undergraduate Studies (DUGS), will hold an informational for students writing or considering writing a Seniors Honors Thesis. Students should also attend if planning to submit a Dean's Undergraduate Research Fund application (http://nyu.edu/cas/DURF) by Nov. 1. Refreshments will be served and a representative from CAS will be there as well.
FOR UNDERGRADUATE CORRESPONDENCE: linguistics.dugs@nyu.edu
Posted October 2, 2010
NYU linguists at NWAV 39
NYU Linguistics is the most prominent program at NWAV 39, to be held November 2-6 at UT San Antonio. Over a dozen NYU linguists are presenting over fifteen papers and one poster!
Jennifer Nycz, The Phonetics/Phonology Distinction in Second Dialect Acquisition by Adults.
Jennifer Nycz, (with Watt, Llamas, Docherty and Hall), The Effects of a Border: A Detailed Examination of Production, Attitude and Perception.
Marcos Rohena-Madrazo, Effects of native voicing variation on the perception of non-native voicing contrasts.
John Singler, Stigma, Covert Prestige, and the Continuum: The Special Case of Vernacular Liberian English.
Libby Coggshall and Paul Ellis, The Sixth Borough?: Jersey City's Place in New York City English.
Gregory Guy, Goldvarb: Still the Gold Standard. (Statistical Tools Workshop presentation).
Maryam Bakht, presentation in Workshop on Issues in Field Methodologies in Younger Populations.
Sonya Fix (with Lew-Hall), Multiple Measures of L-Vocalization.
Amy Wong, presentation in Workshop on Issues in Field Methodologies in Younger Populations.
Amy Wong, Diverse Linguistic Resources and Multidimensional Identities of American-Born Chinese Youths.
Danny Erker and Gregory Guy, Exemplar Theory & Variable Syntax: How Lexical Frequency Conditions Subject Pronoun Use in Spanish.
Maryam Bakht, Libby Coggshall, and Marcos Rohena-Madrazo organized panel session on A sociolinguistic investigation of the “Jersey Shore”. In it:
Maryam Bakht, Here’s “The Situation”: Style and Identity on the “Jersey Shore”.
Elizabeth L. Coggshall, Luiza Newlin-Lukowicz, Emily Nguyen (with Acosta), Jersey Shore” Down the Jersey Shore: Transient Communities and Perceptual Folk Linguistic Ideologies.
Maryam Bakht, Marcos Rohena-Madrazo (with Valentinsson), “Anyone know what that means?”: Meta-Pragmatic Discourse and the Use of Stereotyped and Stigmatized Language in “Jersey Shore”.
Rafael Orozco (NYU alum), Veracruz Speech Perceptions: A Preliminary Study.
Erez Levon (NYU alum), Gender, Prescriptivism, and Language Change: A New Way of Analyzing Morphological Variation in Hebrew.
Paul DeDecker (NYU alum) and Jennifer Nycz, For the Record: Which Digital Media Are Good Enough for Sociophonetic Analysis? (poster)
Renee Blake and Cara Shousterman, Equalizing Partnerships: Blogging on African American English (at African American Language 2 (AAL2), the NWAV pre-conference)
Posted September 29, 2010
2010-11 Colloquium Schedule [UPDATED]
In light of the disjunctive phonology / semantics search that our department will be conducting, we have made some changes to the 2010-2011 Colloquium Series schedule announced earlier. The full (and final) schedule is the following:
FALL:
Nov. 12 Tucker Childs
Nov. 19 Juliette Blevins
Dec. 3 Arsalan Kahnemuyipour
Dec. 10 David Beaver
SPRING:
Mar. 25 Tyler Kendall
Apr. 1 Louis Goldstein
Apr. 8 Florian Jaeger
Apr. 15 Edward Flemming
Apr. 29 Scott Kiesling
The purpose of these revisions was primarily to make sure that there would be no conflicts between colloquia and the search. We hope that these changes won't be too inconvenient for any of you, and apologize in advance if some are.
All talks will be held at 4pm in Room 104, 10 Washington Place.
Posted September 28, 2010
Semantics Group meeting schedule
Oct. 1 11am Jim Wood, The unintentional causer in Icelandic
Oct. 8 2:00pm Inna Livitz & Salvador Mascarenhas, Semantic aspects of having-for in Russian modal possessives and English "get"
Oct. 15 12:30 pm Dan Lassiter TBA
On Oct. 8, Inna & Salvador will discuss the syntactic aspects of the same topics in the Brown Bag series at 11am. (Note the morning/afternoon switch for the two meetings.)
The schedule of the Semantics Group meetings is posted here. Please check for changes and for further meetings.
Posted September 22, 2010
Syntax Brown Bag: Eric Besson (Sept. 24)
Title: Subject-Agreeing Adverbial Adjectives in Ancient Greek
Abstract:
Continue reading "Syntax Brown Bag: Eric Besson (Sept. 24)" »
Four papers and a poster by NYU linguists at NELS 41
What a delight, the NELS 41 program! I apologize for not putting all the names in the title of this post, but eight...? Cheers to all the authors and also to the collaborative spirit!
Papers:
The Unintentional Causer in Icelandic
Jim Wood (NYU)
Investigating the Relationship Between Syntactic Structure-Building and Semantic Composition Using MEG
Jonathan Brennan, Liina Pylkkanen (both NYU)
Bound De Re Pronouns and Concept Generators
Simon Charlow (NYU), Yael Sharvit (UConn)
Morphological Effects on the Articulation of English Intervocalic /l/
Sangjin Hwang, Sang-Im Lee, Lisa Davidson (all NYU)
Poster:
Re- Prefixation and Talmy's Parameter
Oana Ciucivara, Jim Wood (both NYU)
Posted September 19, 2010
Talk & Workshop: Isabelle Buchstaller (Sept. 24)
THE WORKING GROUP IN URBAN SOCIOLINGUISTICS AT NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
is pleased to announce a talk and a workshop by
ISABELLE BUCHSTALLER
Newcastle University
THE TALK:
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, at 4 p.m.
DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS, 10 WASHINGTON PLACE, RM. 104
QUOTATIONS ACROSS THE GENERATIONS: Investigating strategies for speech and thought representation across four generations of Tyneside speakers
Continue reading "Talk & Workshop: Isabelle Buchstaller (Sept. 24)" »
Posted September 14, 2010
Renee Blake and Cara Shousterman in Journal of English Linguistics
Renee Blake and Cara Shousterman's article on Diachrony and AAE: St. Louis, Hip-Hop, and Sound Change outside of the Mainstream is published in the September 2010 issue of the Journal of English Linguistics.
Five NYU sociolinguists in English Today
A number of NYU folks were published in the September 2010 issue of English Today (guest-edited by Renee Blake):
Amy Wing-mei Wong -- New York City English and second generation Chinese Americans
Vincent Chanethom -- Influence of American English on second generation Lao immigrant speakers
Renee Blake and Cara Shousterman -- Second generation West Indian Americans and English in New York City
Lisa Del Torto (NYU BA alumna) -- ‘It's so cute how they talk’: Stylized Italian English as sociolinguistic maintenance
Posted September 3, 2010
Simanique Moody dissertation defense
Congratulations to Simanique Moody on the successful defense of her PhD dissertation on "Language Contact and Regional Variation in African American English: A Study of Southeast Georgia". The committee was Renee Blake (chair), Chris Collins, Lisa Green, Gregory Guy, and John Singler.
Chris Barker in Semantics and Pragmatics
Chris Barker's article on Free choice permission as resource-sensitive reasoning has just appeared in the online journal Semantics and Pragmatics, Vol. 3.
Posted August 25, 2010
Mark Baltin paper in Linguistic Inquiry
Mark Baltin's paper on "The Nonreality of Doubly Filled Comps" (Linguistic Inquiry - Volume 41, Number 2, Spring 2010, pp. 331-335) is one of the top 20 most downloaded full-text pdfs in the journal. The list spans some ten years of publication.
Tom Leu paper in Linguistic Variation Yearbook
"The internal syntax of jeder ‘every’ " by Tom Leu has appeared in Linguistic Variation Yearbook 9. This is an extension of Tom's 2008 NYU dissertation on the internal syntax of determiners.
Posted August 18, 2010
Violeta Vazquez-Rojas receives NSF dissertation award
Three cheers to Violeta Vazquez-Rojas, recipient of a NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research award (advisor: Chris Collins). The title of the proposal is "The Syntax and Semantics of Noun Phrases in Tarascan". Tarascan is an indigenous language of Mexico that sheds interesting light on the count/non-count distinction, which is what Violeta is investigating.
Erez Levon's book published by Palgrave
Cheers to Erez Levon (NYU PhD 2007), whose book entitled Language and the Politics of Sexuality: Lesbians and Gays in Israel has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan.
Posted August 16, 2010
Kayne's Comparisons and Contrasts published by OUP
A selection of recent articles by Richie Kayne, entitled Comparisons and Contrasts is published by Oxford University Press. Congratulations!
Posted August 2, 2010
Defenses by Becker and Bakht
We have two successful doctoral defenses to celebrate:
Kara Becker, "Regional Dialect Features on the Lower East Side of New York City: Sociophonetics, Ethnicity, and Identity"
Maryam Bakht, "Lexical Variation and the Negotiation of Linguistic Style(s) in a Long Island Middle School"
Congratulations, Kara and Maryam!
Posted July 18, 2010
Rahul Balusu Assistant Professorship at EFLU
Rahul Balusu (PhD 2009) has accepted an Assistant Professor position in the Department of Computational Linguistics, within the School of Language Sciences, at EFLU (formerly CIEFL), Hyderabad. Congratulations, Rahul!
Posted June 14, 2010
Paper by Pylkkanen and colleagues in Cognition
Shifting senses in semantic development by Hugh Rabagliati, Gary Marcus, & Liina Pylkkänen is now in press in Cognition.
Posted June 2, 2010
Suzanne Dikker postdoctoral fellowship
Suzanne Dikker has just accepted a post-doctoral fellowship at the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology, working with Jason Zevin. Congratulations, Suzanne!
Posted May 27, 2010
Kara Becker on NPR
Kara Becker talked about New York City accents with Leonard Lopate on the local NPR station, WNYC. Listen to the program here!
Posted May 26, 2010
New papers by Brennan, Dikker, and Pylkkanen
... and, fittingly, some new papers by Liina and colleagues:
Pylkkänen L, Okano K. (2010) The Nature of Abstract Orthographic Codes: Evidence from Masked Priming and Magnetoencephalography. PLoS ONE 5(5): e10793. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010793 here
Dikker S, Rabagliati H, Farmer TA, Pylkkänen L. (2010) Early occipital sensitivity to syntactic category is based on form typicality. Psychological Science 1;21(5):629-34. here
Brennan J, Nir Y, Hasson U, Malach R, Heeger DJ, Pylkkänen L. (2010) Syntactic structure building in the anterior temporal lobe during natural story listening. Brain and Language. May 14. [Epub ahead of print] here
Brennan, J., Pylkkänen L. (2010) Processing Psych Verbs: Behavioral and MEG Measures of Two Different Types of Semantic Complexity. Language and Cognitive Processes. DOI: 10.1080/01690961003616840. here
Liina Pylkkanen promotion and tenure
Three cheers to Liina Pylkkanen on account of her promotion to Associate Professor with tenure, effective September 2010.
Posted May 15, 2010
Jon Brennan dissertation in neurolinguistics
Cheers to Jon Brennan, who has defended his dissertation entitled "Incrementally Dissociating Syntax and Semantics". His advisor is Liina Pylkkänen.
Continue reading "Jon Brennan dissertation in neurolinguistics" »
Posted May 4, 2010
Rabagliati, Shaw defend their dissertations
We have two successful dissertation defenses to celebrate:
Hugh Rabagliati, "Shifting senses in lexical semantic development"
Jason Shaw, "The temporal organization of syllabic structure"
Please join us in congratulating Hugh and Jason, as well as their advisors Liina Pylkkänen and Gary Marcus (Rabagliati) and Adamantios Gafos (Shaw)!
Posted April 22, 2010
Dan Lassiter to give Syntax Colloquium at Yale
Dan Lassiter is speaking on "Restrictions on adverbial modification with auxiliary and adjectival modals" in the Syntax Colloquium series at Yale on April 23.
Report from the Undergraduate Research Conference
There were many excellent talks at the Linguistics session of the NYU Undergraduate Research Conference, which showcased the research done by our majors in their courses as well as honors thesis work. The award for the best talk of the session went to Anna Greenwood, who reported on her senior honors thesis in a talk entitled "The Syllabic Status of Prevocalic Glides in Italian." Congratulations, Anna!
Posted April 17, 2010
Becker and Cogshall article in American Dialect Society
Cheers to Kara Becker and Libby Cogshall, whose paper on "African American English Speakers and their Participation in Local Sound Changes: A Comparative Study," has appeared in Publication of the American Dialect Society 94.
Posted April 16, 2010
Gillian Gallagher joining us next year
We are pleased to welcome Gillian Gallagher as our Visiting Assistant Professor in phonology in 2010-11. Gillian is currently finishing her degree at MIT.
Talks by John Singler
John Singler will be the keynote speaker at the The 12th Annual University of Michigan University of Chicago “Michicagoan” Graduate Student Conference in Linguistic Anthropology, which is to be held at the University of Chicago on May 14-15. The theme of the conference is "Linguistic Terrains: Landscapes and Socioscapes." His talk is titled "Keeping Pace with Space: The Negotiation of Linguistic Landscapes."
He also gave a colloquium at Penn on April 15, on "Variationist Sociolinguistics in the Niger-Congo Languages of West Africa: The Non-State of the Art."
Amanda Rysling receives Beinecke Scholarship
Our junior linguistics major Amanda Rysling just received the Beinecke Scholarship award. This scholarship offers funds for applying to graduate programs for further study in the student's chosen field, as well as funding for graduate work. In 2010, only twenty students were named Beinecke Scholars nationwide, and Amanda is the only linguist. Amanda is currently pursuing research on the morphosyntactic and phonological properties of prefixes in Polish (and more broadly in Slavic).
Congratulations, Amanda!
Posted April 15, 2010
Jim Wood to give Syntax Colloquium at Yale
Jim Wood is speaking in the Syntax Colloquium Series at Yale on April 16. The title of his talk is "Title: Singular -st Syncretism and Featural Pied-Piping".
Posted April 9, 2010
Tricia Irwin speaking at CUNY
Tricia Irwin will be giving the CUNY Psycholinguistics Supper next Tuesday, April 13.
title: "The Prosodic Consequences of Unaccusativity"
location: CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave., Room 7102
time: 6:30 to 8:00pm
Posted March 31, 2010
Simanique Moody UCSB postdoc
Cheers to Simanique Moody, who has accepted a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship starting with Fall 2010. She will be housed at the Santa Barbara campus. This summer she will also be a fellow in the Linguistics Department at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.
Lisa Levinson article in NLLT
Arguments for pseudo-resultative predicates by Lisa Levinson (NYU PhD, 2007) has appeared in the 28/1 issue of Natural Language & Linguistic Theory. Cheers, Lisa!
Six NYU semanticists to present at MACSIM
Six of our (neuro-)semanticists are presenting at the Mid-Atlantic Colloquium of Studies in Meaning (MACSIM) held at IRCS, UPenn, April 10:
Doug Bemis, Evidence for a Domain-General Cognitive Mechanism in the Construction of Basic Linguistic Meaning
Jon Brennan, Teasing apart structure-building and semantic composition during story-reading with MEG
Simon Charlow, Two kinds of de re blocking
Tim Leffel, Continuation semantics for expressives and epithets
Salvador Mascarenhas, Contextual givenness vs. existential quantification
Mike Solomon, Quantifiers, alternatives, and ‘certain’ indefinites
Posted March 30, 2010
NYU Alumni News: Haddican, Smith
2005 NYU Ph.D. alum Bill Haddican has accepted a tenure-track job at CUNY Queens College. He will be returning to New York in the Fall of 2011.
2007 BA alumna Megan Smith has been accepted to the MA program at Texas Tech in Applied Linguistics.
Congratulations, Bill and Megan!
Posted March 22, 2010
Semantics/Pragmatics Talk: Edward Stabler (March 25)
Time: Thursday March 25, 4:00pm
Location: Syntax/Semantics Lounge, 4th floor
Parsing of the second kind
Edward Stabler, UCLA
The first parsing problem is this: given a sequence of pronounced elements (with their stress, intonation, etc), what is the set of grammatical structures pronounced this way? A second kind of analysis is then needed: among those possible structures, which one is (probably) intended in context, how are its morphemes interpreted, and what kind of speech act is being performed? In ordinary conversation, it seems (at first) that both kinds of analysis are effortless and instantaneous, even though the second is typically based on considerations that go well beyond the order and intonation of pronounced elements. Interpretation that includes this second stage is studied by psycholinguists and computational linguists, and is obviously relevant in language acquisition, but it goes beyond grammar as traditionally conceived. But are there really two kinds of analysis here? Focusing on some proposals about the second kind of analysis, the existence of important distinctions will be defended, setting the stage for a reassessment of some recent proposals about stochastic influences, and about semantic and pragmatic properties. It is a familiar fact that certain semantic and pragmatic distinctions can be represented in the form of a language. Could all of them be syntactic, in a relevant sense, in a theory of human language? Some of these questions can be answered easily once they are pinned down.
Posted March 8, 2010
Kara Becker accepts tenure track position at Reed College
Kara Becker just accepted an offer for a tenure track job at Reed College. Congratulations, Kara!
Posted March 6, 2010
Dan Lassiter, Simon Charlow and Chris Barker to present at SALT 20
Three of our semanticists are presenting at Semantics and Linguistics Theory 20 (SALT 20), April 29-May 1, Vancouver:
Papers:
Daniel Lassiter (New York University)
Gradable epistemic modals, probability and scale structure
Raffaella Bernardi (Free University of Bozen/Bolzano) and Chris Barker (New York University)
Principles of interdimensional meaning interaction
Poster:
Simon Charlow (New York University)
De re anaphors
See the abstracts at the conference web site.
Posted March 2, 2010
NYU hosts the 2010 CUNY Conference
NYU is hosting the 2010 CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing on March 16-20.
Invited Speakers:
Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky (University of Marburg)
Matt Davis (MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, UK)
Colin Phillips (University of Maryland, College Park)
Kuniyoshi Sakai (University of Tokyo)
Michael Tanenhaus (University of Rochester)
Conference website: http://psych.nyu.edu/cuny/
Presentations by locals:
Posted February 23, 2010
Neuroscience of Language Lab at NYU Abu Dhabi
Alec Marantz, Liina Pylkkänen and David Poeppel have been awarded a $9 million research award from the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute to establish the Neuroscience of Language Lab (NeLLab) at NYU AD. A new state-of-the-art MEG laboratory should be operational in Abu Dhabi by the spring of 2011.
Posted February 21, 2010
Chris Barker to speak at CLS
Chris Barker will be one of the invited speakers at the Chicago Linguistic Society's annual meeting. He is speaking at the parasession on "Re-evaluating the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface".
Posted February 13, 2010
Semantics Group meetings Spring schedule
Jan. 22, 1:30pm, Igor Yanovich: "Introducing evaluation tree logics"
Feb. 5, Chris Barker colloquium at Rutgers: "Free choice permission as resource sensitive reasoning"
Feb. 12, 10am, Mike Solomon on indefinites
Feb. 19, 10am, Dan Lassiter on gradable modals
Feb. 26, 1:30pm, Katrina Przyjemski: "The Lewis semantics for dream reports: an impossible dream"
Mar. 5, 10am, Dan Lassiter on quantity implicatures and Geurts's new book
For the schedule after the Spring break, see updates here.
Posted February 1, 2010
Dan Lassiter paper in Biolinguistics
Dan Lassiter's “Where is the conflict between internalism and externalism? A reply to Lohndal and Narita (2009)” will appear in the next issue of Biolinguistics. A preprint is available on his website. It is a response to their paper "Internalism as Methodology", which appeared in Biolinguistics 3:4 (2009). That paper, in turn, is a response to Dan's "Semantic Externalism, Language Variation, and Sociolinguistic Accommodation", published in Mind and Language 23:5 (2008) -- see also on Dan's website.
Posted January 21, 2010
Simon Charlow to speak at MIT's Ling-Lunch
Simon Charlow is giving a talk about "De re anaphors" at Ling-Lunch in the Linguistics Department at MIT on March 11.
Posted January 4, 2010
Renee Blake receives MLK award
Professor Renee Blake has been selected from over two dozen nominees as a winner of this year's Martin Luther King, Jr. Faculty Awards. Nominated by her students, and selected by a committee of faculty, administrators, and students, Prof. Blake was chosen for her leadership, excellence in scholarship and teaching, and modeling of the values represented by Dr. King.
Posted December 26, 2009
Laura Rimell paper in Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Unbounded Dependency Recovery for Parser Evaluation by Laura Rimell, Stephen Clark, and Mark Steedman appeared in Proceedings of the 2009 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 813–821, Singapore, 6-7 August 2009. ACL and AFNLP. Laura is working in the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge while finishing her dissertation at NYU.
Posted December 21, 2009
Approaches to Hungarian Volume 11: Papers from the 2007 New York Conference
In May 2007 NYU and CUNY co-hosted an installment of the International Conference on the Structure of Hungarian. A selection of the papers have been published by John Benjamins as Volume 11 of the Approaches to Hungarian series. The editors are Marcel den Dikken and Robert Vago.
Posted December 16, 2009
Salvador Mascarenhas defends Inquisitive Logic MSc thesis, Amsterdam
Cheers to Salvador Mascarenhas, who just defended his MSc thesis "Inquisitive Semantics and Logic" in the Logic Program of the University of Amsterdam. The thesis supervisors were Jeroen Groenendijk and Dick de Jongh.
Posted December 14, 2009
Kevin Roon NSF dissertation improvement grant
Cheers to Kevin Roon, who has been awarded an NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant titled "Temporal and spatial properties of speech at the intersection of production and perception" (PI Diamandis Gafos).
Gafos receives ERC grant
Congratulations to Adamantios Gafos, who received an ERC Advanced Grant, the top grant for senior researchers from the European Research Council. The research is to explore the temporal dimension of phonological form using a number of approaches, including the 3D EMA system in Munich, analytical methods from theory, and computational modelling.
Posted November 28, 2009
Renee Blake and Chris Collins to speak at the CUNY Graduate Center
Renee Blake is giving an Urban Sociolinguistics colloquium at the CUNY Graduate Center on December 3. Chris Collins is giving a Syntax Supper talk on December 8. See the program here.
Posted November 24, 2009
SYNC (SunyYaleNyuCuny) mini-conference
This year's mini-conference (hitherto CUNY/SUNY/NYU, henceforth SunyYaleNyuCuny = SYNC) is going to take place on December 5th at Yale. The alumnus keynote speaker is David Pesetsky. NYU speakers are Dan Lassiter, Oana Savescu, and Jim Wood. The link to the program and other relevant info is here.
Posted November 23, 2009
Zvjezdana Vrzic to present at Borders & Identities, Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Zvjezdana Vrzic, NYU alum (PhD '99) and adjunct instructor in the department, will be presenting a paper at the Borders & Identities Conference in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England on January 8, 2010. Her talk is titled 'Interpretations of the identity of the Vlaski/Zejanski speaking community in Istria'.
Posted November 19, 2009
Maria Gouskova to speak at Eastern Michigan
Maria will be giving a colloquium at her undergraduate alma mater, Eastern Michigan University, on Friday the 20th of November.
Eytan Zweig in Linguistics and Philosophy
Cheers to Eytan Zweig (PhD January 2008), whose article on "Number-neutral bare plurals and the multiplicity implicature" has just appeared online in Linguistics and Philosophy; read here; doi: 10.1007/s10988-009-9064-3 .
Co-incidentally, Eytan is in town this week, and tomorrow he is giving a talk related to this article in the Semantics Group (10am -- meet at 9:45 for coffee).
As a reminder, the schedule of the Semantics Group presentations is to be found here.
Posted November 13, 2009
Mike Taylor in American Speech
Cheers to Mike Taylor, whose article with David Eddington on "T-glottalization in American English" has just come out in American Speech 84(3): 298-314 (2009).
Posted November 6, 2009
Kara Becker in Journal of Sociolinguistics
Cheers to Kara Becker, whose article on "/r/ and the construction of place identity on New York City's Lower East Side" has appeared in Journal of Sociolinguistics 2009, 13.5: 634-658. Here is the link to the on-line article.
Posted October 28, 2009
Amanda Rysling is Silverstein Scholar
Amanda Rysling, an undergraduate linguistics major, has been named Silverstein Scholar for 2009-2010 by the College of Arts and Sciences. Congratulations, Amanda!
Sonya Fix wins NWAV 38 Best Student Poster Award
Cheers to Sonya for winning the best student poster award at NWAV 38! Her title was `Representations of blackness by white women: Linguistic practice in the
community versus the media'.
Best student paper/poster awards to our grads at previous NWAV's:
Karen Kirke paper 2004
Libby Coggshall paper 2007
Kara Becker & Amy Wong poster 2008
Posted October 26, 2009
Maria Gouskova to speak at MIT
Maria Gouskova is giving a colloquium at MIT on Oct. 30, 2009. The title of her talk is "Exceptionality as a Property of Morphemes: the Case of Yers".
Posted October 14, 2009
NYU linguists at NWAV 38, Ottawa
Seven NYU linguists are presenting at NWAV 38, University of Ottawa, October 22-25, 2009:
Kara Becker, 'Is Coffee Talk Lost? BOUGHT raising on Manhattan’s Lower East Side'
Renee Blake, Cara Shousterman, Lindsay Kelley, 'Rethinking AAE research: The use of postvocalic /r/ by two groups of black New Yorkers'
Gregory R. Guy, 'Co-variables: Are sociolects coherent?
Sonia Fix, `Representations of blackness by white women: Linguistic practice in the
community versus the media'
Philipp Angermeyer (York U.),
`Translation effects as evidence in language contact studies: The case of variable subject pronouns in NYC Spanish'
Posted October 10, 2009
Upcoming talks of Marcos Rohena-Madrazo
Marcos Rohena-Madrazo is presenting at two conferences in October:
"Perceptual assimilation of obstruent voicing contrasts by Buenos Aires Spanish listeners" at the 2009 Hispanic Linguistics Symposium in San Juan, Puerto Rico on October 23.
"Perception of non-native voicing contrasts by Buenos Aires Spanish listeners", a poster at the 2009 Acoustical Society of America meeting in San Antonio, Texas on October 30.
Posted October 8, 2009
Bennett (alum), Davidson, Schlenker, and Shaw to present at NELS
Jason Shaw and and Lisa Davidson will be presenting a talk called “Perceptual Similarity Does Not Account for Repairs of Non-native Phonotactics”.
Lisa Davidson is also presenting another talk at NELS with Colin Wilson (JHU) called "Explaining non-native consonant cluster processing".
NYU Linguistics BA alum Ryan Bennett, currently at UC Santa Cruz, will be speaking about "Wh-reciprocals, quantifier raising, and phasehood."
Philippe Schlenker (Jean-Nicod and NYU) is talking about "Non-restrictive relative clauses in a unidimensional semantics" and also about Donkey anaphora in French Sign Language.
Posted October 7, 2009
Bemis, Dikker, Pylkkanen, and Marantz to present in the Neurobiology of Language conference in Chicago
The following three posters by NYU linguists (with psychologist and philosopher friends) will be presented at the first Neurobiology of Language Conference (NLC 2009) in Chicago, IL, on Oct 15-16:
Suzanne Dikker, Hugh Rabagliati, Thomas Farmer, and Liina Pylkkänen: "Sensitivity to syntax in visual cortex: the role of form typicality."
Douglas Bemis and Liina Pylkkänen: "The neural correlates of basic linguistic composition: an MEG investigation."
Gwyneth Lewis, Alec Marantz and Olla Solomyak: "The neural basis of obligatory decomposition of suffixed words: Tracking the “broth” in “brother”."
Marantz, Pylkkanen and Brennan to speak at the MEGLANG 2009 workshop in Paris.
Jon Brennan, Alec Marantz and Liina Pylkkänen will be giving talks at the MEG and Language (MEGLANG) 2009 workshop in Paris on Oct 8-9.
Jon Brennan: "Incrementally dissociating syntax and semantics with MEG"
Alec Marantz: "Single trial regression analyses in source space for linguistic variables: some results for visual word recognition"
Liina Pylkkänen: "Studying the neural bases of semantic composition with MEG"
Dikker, Rabagliati and Pylkkanen to publish in Psychological Science
Cheers to Suzanne, Hugh, and Liina re: the acceptance of this paper in Psychological Science!
Dikker, S., Rabagliati, H., Farmer, T. A., & Pylkkänen, L. (in press). Early occipital sensitivity to syntactic category is based on form typicality. Psychological Science.
Posted September 23, 2009
Mike Solomon to speak at Sinn und Bedeutung, Vienna
Mike Solomon is giving a talk on "Partitives and the semantics of same" at Sinn und Bedeutung 14, Vienna, Sept. 28-30, 2009.
Posted September 22, 2009
Semantics Group meetings
The semantics group will be meeting 10am to 12pm on Fridays, save for the first Friday of each month, when it meets at noon. The first talk was given by Violeta Vazquez Rojas on 9-18 (on the quantificational adjective puros), the second one will be by Inna Livitz on 9-25 (on the distributive vs collective readings of both). The subsequent schedule will be posted here. Members of the department and longer-term visitors should email Anna if they wish to be on the email list of the group.
Posted September 6, 2009
Anna Szabolcsi to speak at Logic, Language, Mathematics
Anna Szabolcsi is giving a talk entitled "Certain verbs are syntactically explicit quantifiers" at Logic, Language, Mathematics, a philosophy conference in memory of Imre Ruzsa, Sept. 17-19, 2009, Budapest.
Posted September 4, 2009
Oana Savescu dissertation on pronominal clitic clusters in Romance
Cheers to Oana Savescu Ciucivara, who has just filed her dissertation entitled "A Syntactic Analysis of Pronominal Clitic Clusters in Romance. The View from Romanian" (chair: Richard Kayne). The dissertation is posted at her home page.
Marantz receives NSF grant
Congratulations to Alec Marantz, who has been awarded a 3-year research grant from the NSF for the project, 'Morphological Decomposition in Derived Word Recognition: Single Trial Correlational MEG Studies of Morphology Down to the Roots' ($600K in funding).
Posted September 1, 2009
Rahul Balusu's dissertation defense
Congratulations to Rahul Balusu on the successful defense of his dissertation, "OCP effects in Telugu." The committee consists of Lisa Davidson, Maria Gouskova, Adamantios Gafos, Gregory Guy, and Adam Albright.
Posted August 31, 2009
We've moved!
The Department of Linguistics is now in its own building at 10 Washington Place (map). The newly renovated building is between Mercer and Greene Streets, about a block and a half west from our previous location at 726 Broadway. Come visit us!
Posted August 25, 2009
Jen Nycz to speak at Language Variation and Change
Jen Nycz will be presenting a paper with Dom Watt, Carmen Llamas, Gerry Docherty, & Damien Hall at The 7th UK Language Variation and Change Conference, to be held at Newcastle University (Sept 1-3). The title of the paper is "Variation and Change in /r/ in the Scottish/English borderland".
Posted August 15, 2009
Dan Lassiter to speak at IUC, Croatia
Dan Lassiter is giving a talk on 'Externalist intuitions and coordination games', at the conference Philosophy of Linguistics, Inter-University Center, Dubrovnik, Croatia, September 7-12, 2009.
Posted July 14, 2009
Liina Pylkkanen to speak at the Max Planck Institut in Leipzig
Liina will talk about Studying the neural bases of semantic composition with MEG on July 28.
Posted July 13, 2009
Chris Barker is invited speaker at Colloque de Syntaxe et Semantique a Paris
Chris's CSSP talk is on "Linear implicature and free choice permission".
Posted July 12, 2009
Philipp Angermeyer and Erez Levon in Journal of Sociolinguistics
The latest issue of Journal of Sociolinguistics contains a paper by Philipp Angermeyer (PhD 2006) on "Translation style and participant roles in court interpreting" and one by Erez Levon (PhD 2007) on "Dimensions of style: Context, politics and motivation in gay Israeli speech".
Posted June 30, 2009
Upcoming talk by Vincent Chanethom
Vincent Chanethom will be presenting a paper entitled "Acquisition of English Aspiration: a Longitudinal Study" at the 7th International Symposium on Bilingualism, which will be held at Utrecht, the Netherlands on July 8-11.
Posted June 21, 2009
Jen Nycz to speak at ICLaVE
Jen Nycz will be presenting a paper at ICLaVE (International Conference on Language Variation in Europe), at the University of Copenhagen on behalf of the Accents & Identity on the Scottish-English Border project. The paper is entitled "The Scottish-English Borderland: Phonological Production, Perception and Attitude" (authors: Carmen Llamas, Dominic Watt, Gerry Docherty, Damien Hall & Jennifer Nycz).
Posted June 18, 2009
Paul Postal's book to be published by MIT Press
Paul Postal's book on "Edge-based Clausal Syntax" will be published by the MIT Press. An earlier version is posted at Lingbuzz.
Suzanne Dikker to speak at the Leipzig Max Planck
Suzanne Dikker will give an invited lecture entitled Sensitivity to syntax in visual cortex at the Leipzig Max Planck Institute on July 8th.
Posted June 6, 2009
SSWL, an open-ended database of the syntactic structures of the world's languages
We are pleased to announce SSWL, an open-ended database of the syntactic structures of the world's languages. (Alternatively, Google: sswl database.)
Please feel free to go to the site and play around with it, doing searches and browsing the languages and properties.
Ultimately, we hope to fill the database with thousands of grammatical properties and thousands of languages all provided by members of the wider linguistic community.
If you have any questions or comments, please send them to: linguisticexplorer@gmail.com
Chris Collins
Department of Linguistics
NYU
Posted June 2, 2009
Dan Lassiter, Simon Charlow, Salvador Mascarenhas, and Eytan Zweig at ESSLLI Bordeaux
Cheers to Dan Lassiter, Simon Charlow, Salvador Mascarenhas, and Eytan Zweig (PhD 2007), who will be busy and keeping others busy at ESSLLI (European Summer School on Logic, Language, and Information), Bordeaux, July 20-31.
Dan has three talks (plus papers in the proceedings):
"Symmetric presupposition satisfaction is intra-sentential presupposition correction", Workshop on New Directions in the Theory of Presupposition.
"Vagueness as probabilistic linguistic knowledge", Workshop on Vagueness in Communication.
"The algebraic structure of amounts: evidence from comparatives", ESSLLI Student Session.
Simon has two talks (plus papers in the proceedings):
“Strong predicative presuppositional objects", Workshop on New Directions in the Theory of Presupposition.
"Can DP be a scope island?", ESSLLI Student Session.
Salvador is co-chair of the Logic and Language section of the ESSLLI Student Session.
Eytan co-teaches Plurality and Distributivity Across Language(s) and Logic(s) with George Tsoulas.
Posted May 22, 2009
Liina Pylkkanen to teach at EALing VII, Fall 2009 School in Linguistics
The Department of Cognitive Studies at the Paris Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS) organizes its seventh international Fall School in Linguistics. The goal of this interdisciplinary Fall school is to provide exposure to linguistic theory, and to grammar based approaches to cognitive studies. The EALing VII teachers include Guglielmo Cinque, David Pesetsky, Liina Pylkkänen, Luigi Rizzi, Benjamin Spector, Megha Sundara, Roger Schwarzschild, Michael Ullman, and Alan Yu.
Posted May 14, 2009
Another DURF award
Katerina Souliopoulos, a freshman, has just received a Dean's Undergraduate Research Fund grant to do research on the spatio-temporal properties of syllables using data collected with the three-dimensional eletromagnetic articulometry method under Dr. Adamantios Gafos. Katerina presented the results of her research in Dr. Gafos's Freshman Honors Seminar at the Cornell Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium
this past April.
Posted May 11, 2009
Liina Pylkkanen receives Whitehead Fellowship
Cheers to Liina Pylkkanen, who has just been awarded NYU's 2009-2010 Whitehead Fellowship for Junior Faculty in Biomedical and Biological Sciences. Her research project that this grant will support is called "Neural Mechanisms in Combinatoric Semantics".
Posted May 10, 2009
NYU linguists at the Acoustical Society (ASA) workshop
Three people from the department are participating in the Cross-Language Speech Perception and Variations in Linguistic Experience workshop at the Acoustical Society of America meeting in Portland, OR, May 18-22. Lisa Davidson and Jason Shaw will present a poster called "A closer look at perceptual epenthesis in cross-language perception", and Tuuli Adams will present a poster on "Second language word segmentation in a fluent speech listening task".
Upcoming talk by Gregory Guy
Gregory Guy will be presenting the keynote address at SIS-Vogais II (The second International Symposium on Vowels), at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, on May 23.
Posted May 9, 2009
African Linguistics School
During the summer of 2009, there will be a two-week school at the NYU-in-Ghana campus in Accra, Ghana that focuses on the study of African languages and linguistic theory. Chris Collins and John Singler are both organizers and lecturers; Violeta Vazquez-Rojas is one of the lecturers.
Posted May 4, 2009
Amanda Rysling off to IRCS Undergraduate Workshop
Amanda Rysling has been accepted to an Undergraduate Summer Workshop held at the UPenn Institute for Research in Cognitive Science. This workshop is prestigious and competitive, and those who get admitted also get financial aid for attending. Congratulations, Amanda!
NYU linguists at the Eastern Generative Grammar school
NYU Linguistics is going to be pretty well represented at this year's Eastern Generative Grammar summer school in Poznan, Poland. A few of our current majors and Bachelor's alumnae are attending as students, and Eytan Zweig, PhD (2007), is one of the teachers.
Three linguistics majors receive DURF grants
Congratulations to three of our linguistics majors, who received Dean's Undergraduate Research Fund grants for 2009-10: Alexandra Furukawa, Anna Greenwood, and Shannon Mooney. Anna Greenwood got a grant for her project on the structure of Italian syllables. She will be going to Italy to collect data for her honors thesis in phonology, directed by Maria Gouskova. Alexandra Furukawa will be working on an honors thesis on (in)formality in the speech of teachers at New York City schools. Her thesis is directed by Greg Guy. Dr. Guy is also directing Shannon Mooney's research on the sociophonetics of /r/ in Glasgow English.
Posted April 28, 2009
NYU Working Papers, Vol. 2
The editors of NYU Working Papers in Linguistics are happy to announce that the second volume of NYUWPL is now online at http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/lingu/nyuwpl/.
NYUWPL Volume 2, Spring 2009: Papers in Syntax
Posted April 20, 2009
Upcoming talks of Liina Pylkkanen
Liina Pylkkanen is presenting two papers in May, and Hugh Ragliabati is presenting a third one co-authored with Liina and Hanna Gelfand, this week:
The Anterior Midline Field: Progress Report. Maryland Mayfest: Moving Beyond Truth Conditions: The Computation of Meaning. University of Maryland, College Park, MD. May 8-9, 2009.
Event coercion in brain and development. Events across categories: Theoretical and experimental approaches to event structure. Madrid, Spain. May 27-29, 2009.
Hugh Rabagliati, Hanna Gelfand, Gary Marcus & Liina Pylkkänen: The acquisition of ontological shifts and the process of lexical semantic development. XPrag, April 23-25, Lyon, France.
Posted April 19, 2009
Chris Barker course at the LSA Institute
Chris Barker is going to teach a six-week course in semantics at the 2009 LSA Linguistic Institute (UC Berkeley).
Posted April 16, 2009
Upcoming talks by Maria Gouskova and Violeta Vázquez-Rojas
Maria Gouskova is going to UMass Amherst on April 17 to give a talk on "Unexceptional Segments: A Non-Representational Theory of Yers".
Violeta Vázquez-Rojas Maldonado is giving a talk at SULA5 (Semantics of Under-represented Languages of the Americas) on "Case Marking and Semantic Incorporation in Tarascan", May 15-17.
Posted April 10, 2009
Three NYU linguists get NSF Grad Fellowships
Congratulations to Elika Bergelson, Simon Charlow, and Rachel Flamenbaum on receiving NSF Graduate Fellowships in 2009! Simon is currently a first-year graduate student at NYU. Elika graduated from NYU in 2007 with a BA in Language and Mind, and Rachel's 2007 BA is in Anthropology and Linguistics. For a full list of awards, see the NSF website.
Posted April 7, 2009
Maria Gouskova to talk in Tromsø
Maria Gouskova is going to the Center of Advanced Studies in Theoretical Linguistics in Tromsø, Norway to give two talks: "The prosodic and morphological structure of compounds in Russian" and "A non-representational theory of ghost vowels." The talks will be on April 30.
Posted March 11, 2009
Upcoming talks by Jon Brennan, Vincent Chanethom, Txuss Martin, and Anna Szabolcsi
Jon Brennan will be giving a talk on "Irish pronouns and inflection" at Yale on April 17.
Vincent Chanethom is giving a colloquium talk entitled "Acquisition of English aspiration: a longitudinal study" on April 17 at Syracuse University.
Txuss Martín is presenting a poster on "The internal structure of dative clitics" at the Colloquium on Generative Grammar, to be held in Vitoria, Basque Country, April 1st - 3rd.
Anna Szabolcsi is giving a colloquium on "Raising verbs as quantifiers" at MIT on March 20.
Recent publications by Tom Leu and Chris Barker
Tom Leu, The Internal Syntax of Determiners. PhD Dissertation, 2008. Groninger Arbeiten zur germanistischen Linguistik vol. 47.
Chris Barker, Wild Control Operators, Proceedings of the 36th annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages, 2009, ACM 978-1-60558-379-2/09/01, 152--152.
Chris Barker, Clarity and the grammar of skepticism, 2009, Mind and Language.
Chris Barker, Reconstruction as delayed evaluation. In Erhard Hinrichs and John Nerbonne (eds), 2009, Theory and Evidence in Semantics, CSLI Publications.
Chris Barker and Chung-chieh Shan, Donkey anaphora is in-scope binding, 2008, Semantics and Pragmatics, 1.1: 1--46.
Posted March 10, 2009
Very recent publications by Jason Shaw, Diamandis Gafos, Kevin Roon, and Maria Gouskova
Jason Shaw, Temporal evidence for syllabic structure in Moroccan Arabic: data and model. Phonology, 2009 [with A. Gafos, P. Hoole,C. Zeroual].
Jason Shaw, Compensatory lengthening via mora preservation in OT-CC: theory and predictions. NELS 38, 2009.
Maria Gouskova and Kevin Roon, Interface Constraints and Frequency in Russian Compound Stress, to appear in the proceedings of Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics 17: The Yale meeting.
Posted March 9, 2009
Andrew Canariato to grad school
One of our senior linguistics majors, Andy Canariato, just got accepted to the Ph.D. program in linguistics at Stony Brook. Congratulations, Andy!
Posted March 6, 2009
Recent publications by Richard Kayne
Richard S. Kayne, “Some Preliminary Comparative Remarks on French and Italian Definite Articles”, in R. Freidin, C.P. Otero and M.L. Zubizarreta (eds.) Foundational Issues in Linguistic Theory. Essays in Honor of Jean-Roger Vergnaud, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 291-321. 2008.
Richard S. Kayne, “Expletives, Datives, and the Tension between Morphology and Syntax” in T. Biberauer (ed.) The Limits of Syntactic Variation, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 175-217. 2008.
Richard S. Kayne, “Some Silent First Person Plurals”, in J.M. Brucart, A. Gavarró and J. Solà (eds.) Merging Features. Computation, Interpretation, and Acquisition, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 276-292. 2009.
Richard S. Kayne, “A Note on Auxiliary Alternations and Silent Causation”, in L. Baronian and F. Martineau (eds.) Le français d’un continent à l’autre. Mélanges offerts à Yves Charles Morin, Presses de l’Université Laval, Québec, 211-235. 2009.
Recent publications by Lisa Davidson, Diamandis Gafos, Greg Guy, Kevin Roon, and John Singler
Davidson, Lisa and Kevin Roon. 2008. Durational correlates for differentiating consonant sequences in Russian. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 38:2, 137-165.
Adamantios Gafos, Hoole, P., Roon, K., Zeroual, C. Variation in timing and phonological grammar in Moroccan Arabic clusters. Laboratory Phonology 10: Variation, Detail and Representation, Ed. Cécile Fougeron (Mouton de Gruyter: Berlin/New York).
Gregory R. Guy and Ana M.S. Zilles, Sociolingüística Quantitativa: Instrumental de Análise, São Paulo: Parabola Editorial, 2007.
Singler, John Victor. 2008a. [with Silvia Kouwenberg] The handbook of pidgin and creole studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Singler, John Victor. 2008b. The sociolinguistic context of creole genesis. In The handbook of pidgin and creole studies, ed. by Silvia Kouwenberg and John Victor Singler, 332-358. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Singler, John Victor. 2008c. [with Silvia Kouwenberg] Introduction. In The handbook of pidgin and creole studies, ed. by Silvia Kouwenberg and John Victor Singler, 1-16. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Posted March 5, 2009
NYU linguists at ACAL
We have five people going to ACAL this year, including one undergraduate. Shupamem was the language in Chris Collins's field methods course last year.
Verb Focus in Shupamem
Chris Collins and Laziz Nchare
The Definite Interpretation of Shupamem Numerals
Violeta Vázquez Rojas Maldonado
Spatial Expressions in Shupamem
Arhonto Terzi and Laziz Nchare
Contour Tones on Short and Long Vowels in Shupamem
Corey Silverstein
The Syntax of Agreement/Definiteness in
Shupamem DP and Greenberg’s Universal 20
Laziz Nchare
Posted March 4, 2009
Recent publications by Jon Brennan, Suzanne Dikker, Liina Pylkkanen, and Eytan Zweig
Jonathan Brennan, Prepositions in Modern Irish: Agreement and Impoverishment. Proceedings of WCCFL 26, 2008.
Jonathan Brennan, Only Finally. The Proceedings of NELS 37, 2008.
Jon Brennan and Liina Pylkkänen, Processing Events: Behavioral and Neuromagnetic Correlates of Aspectual Coercion. In Brain and Language, 2008.
Suzanne Dikker, Hugh Rabagliati, Liina Pylkkänen, Sensitivity to syntax in visual cortex. Cognition doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2008.09.008
Suzanne Dikker, Spanish prepositions in Media Lengua: redefining relexification, In: Stolz, Thomas, Dik Bakker & Rosa Salas Paloma (eds.), Hispanisation. The Impact of Spanish on the Lexicon and Grammar of the Indigenous Languages of Austronesia and the Americas (EALT 39). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008.
Pylkkänen, L., Martin, A. E., McElree, B., & Smart, A. (2008). The Anterior Midline Field: Coercion or Decision Making? Brain and Language, doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2008.06.006. [pdf]
Pylkkänen, L. (2008). Mismatching Meanings in Brain and Behavior. Language and Linguistics Compass 2/4, 712¬738.
Pylkkänen, L. (2008). Introducing Arguments. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. [BOOK]
Eytan Zweig & Liina Pylkkänen, (2008). A visual M170 effect of morphological complexity. Language and Cognitive Processes. DOI: 10.1080/01690960802180420.
[pdf]
Posted February 28, 2009
Marcos Rohena-Madrazo at Romance Languages Symposium
Marcos Rohena-Madrazo will be giving a talk titled "Perception of non-native fricative voicing contrasts by Buenos Aires Spanish listeners: does native variation help?" at the 39th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (Tucson AZ, March 28).
Tricia Irwin at CUNY
Tricia Irwin will be giving a talk called "Polarity and Degree in "so totally" Constructions" at the CUNY syntax supper on March 10.
Posted February 27, 2009
More NYU linguists at the CUNY Conference
Suzanne Dikker, Hugh Rabagliati, Thomas A. Farmer (Cornell), and Liina Pylkkanen will give a poster entitled "Sensitivity to syntax in visual cortex: the role of phonological typicality" at the 22nd CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, UC Davis, CA, March 26-28 2009.
Posted February 24, 2009
Jen Nycz off to University of York
In a few weeks, Jen Nycz will be joining the research team of the Accent and Identity on the Scottish~English Border Project at the University of York (UK). The Linguistics program at York is already home to two NYU alumni, Bill Haddican and Eytan Zweig. The University of York is not to be confused with York University in Ontario, which also has an NYU alum on its staff: Philipp Angermeyer.
Posted February 23, 2009
Upcoming talks by NYU linguists
Gregory Guy is attending the International Congress and Institute of the Associação Brasileira de Lingüística (Brazilian Linguistics Association, ABRALIN), in João Pessoa, Brazil, March 5-15. He is presenting a paper on Linguistic minorities in the USA, and teaching a one-week course on language change in progress.
Anna Szabolcsi is giving colloquium on "Raising Verbs as Quantifiers?" on February 27 at the Umass Amherst Department of Linguistics.
Dan Lassiter is giving a talk at the Penn Linguistics Colloquium in Philadelphia on March 29 entitled "Explaining a restriction on the scope of the comparative operator".
Inna Livitz is giving a talk on March 28 at the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing at UC Davis, entitled "The role of animacy information in syntactic processing: a case study of middle constructions."
Posted January 16, 2009
MEG Opening and MEG Analysis Workshop
[Please note RSVP instructions for each event]
Opening Ceremony
The opening ceremony and reception for the new MEG Lab in Psychology
will take place Friday, January 23rd, from 5pm-7pm in Hemmerdinger
Hall, 100 Washington Square East (part of Silver, but with its own
entrance on Wash Sq E). There will be a few short presentations about
MEG and about the history of MEG at NYU, followed by food and drink.
This will be an opportunity to talk informally with experts on MEG and
on the MEG system at NYU, including the team from the Kanazawa
Institute of Technology that designed and built our MEG system.
I believe this will be a fun and informative event, and provide a good
background for those of you contemplating MEG experiments in the
coming years.
Please RSVP to me, Alec Marantz, marantz@nyu.edu , if you think you
will be attending the ceremonies.
Posted December 5, 2008
Undergraduate Linguistics Holiday Party
What: Undergraduate Linguistics Holiday Bash!
Where: Linguistics Department, 726 Broadway, 7th floor, Library
When: Friday, December 12th. 5:00 p.m.--on
Come and meet your fellow linguistics majors and relax a little just before finals, or blow off steam from an exam. All linguists welcome.
Food will be provided along with non-alcoholic beverages!
Posted December 3, 2008
Hanna Gelfand receives DURF grant
Congratulations to one of our linguistics majors, Hanna Gelfand, on receiving a Dean's Undergraduate Research Fund grant for her honors project "The Innateness of Speech Perception and the Importance of the Speech Source." She is working on the project under the direction of Athena Vouloumanos of the Psychology Department.
Posted November 24, 2008
Angela Fink receives DURF grant
Congratulations to one of our linguistics majors, Angela Fink, on receiving a Dean's Undergraduate Research Fund grant! Angela will use the grant to continue working on her honors thesis entitled "The Acoustics of Arabic Pharyngeal and Glottal Fricatives and their Effects on Non-Native Discrimination." The thesis is supervised by Lisa Davidson.
Posted November 18, 2008
Congratulations to Kara Becker and Amy Wong!
Becker and Wong's poster, "The short-a system of New York City English: An update," won the Charles Ferguson Prize at NWAV for the best student poster presentation. The prize carries with it a cash award of $200.
Posted September 22, 2008
David Harrison to speak on Endangered Languages at NY Public Library
Mid-Manhattan Library welcomes
K. David Harrison DISCUSSING
When Languages Die: The Extinctions of the World’s Languages and The Erosion of Human Knowledge
Monday, September 22nd, 2008
6:30 p.m.
on the 6th floor
Mid-Manhattan Library
The New York Public Library
40th Street and 5th Avenue
New York, NY 10016
212-340-0873
Speakers of thousands of the world’s languages are now abandoning their ancestral tongues at an unprecedented rate. What exactly is lost when speakers of indigenous languages switch to speaking English, Hindi, Russian, or other global tongues? Why should we care if small languages vanish?
Languages are the repository of thousands of years of people’s science and art – from observations of ecological patterns to creation myths. The disappearance of a language is not only a loss for the community of speakers itself, but for our common human knowledge of mathematics, biology, geography, philosophy, agriculture, and linguistics. In this century, we are facing a massive erosion of the human knowledge base.
David Harrison is assistant professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College.
Elevators access the 6th floor after p.m.
All programs are FREE.
Posted September 5, 2008
Linguistics Welcome Back Party
The Department of Linguistics is celebrating the beginning of Fall 2008 with a party in the Department Library (726 Broadway, 7th floor) at 5 p.m. on Friday, September 5. All linguists and friends are welcome to attend!
Posted September 2, 2008
Prof. Marantz Honored
Congratulations to Professor Alec Marantz who received the Samuel Williamson award for outstanding contributions to the field of biomagnetic research at the Biomag 2008 conference.
Posted August 19, 2008
Morphology Start Date
Introduction to Morphology at an Advanced Level (G61.1029-001) will NOT meet on September 3rd. The first day for this course will be September 10th.
Please e-mail the instructor, Alec Marantz, at marantz@nyu.edu if you are intending to take this class but did not receive information about changes for the class this semester.
Posted April 24, 2008
Some new publications
Some recent publications by NYU linguists:
Tom Leu, "What for Internally"--in Syntax (2008)
Chris Barker, "Parasitic Scope"--in Linguistics and Philosophy (2008)
Chris Collins, Simanique Moody, and Paul Postal, "An AAE Camouflage Construction"--in Language (2008)
Congratulations!
Posted April 23, 2008
DURF grants for two linguistics majors
Two of our linguistics majors, Amanda Rysling and Ethan Mandel, just received awards from the Dean's Undergraduate Research Fund. Amanda got funding for her project "Computational Principles Underlying Poetic Structures," supervised by Ray Dougherty, and Ethan will be collecting data in Okinawa for his work on phonological reconstruction of Proto-Japanese, "The Search for Japanese Roots: A reconstruction of the Amami Ryukyuan Dialect," under the supervision of John Costello. Congratulations!
Posted February 25, 2008
NYU Linguist in the news
Grad Student Kara Becker was featured in today's AM New York (Feb. 25, 2008). The story, about New York City English, can be found online here. Over 300,000 copies of AM New York are distributed daily. Congrats Kara!
Posted February 19, 2008
Open House Schedule
Participation in the open house is by advance arangement only.
Please contact Chris Barker <chris.barker
nyu.edu> with any
questions about the open house.
Friday morning, 29 February, 2008
9:00-10:00am Breakfast and Introductions
10:00-11:00am Presentation on department and program by Alec Marantz and Chris Barker
11:00-11:45am Subfield meeting: Phonetics & Phonology
12:00-12:45pm Subfield meeting: Sociolinguistics
12:45-2:30pm Lunch locally (graduate students lead groups of at most 10)
2:30-3:15pm Subfield meeting: Neurolinguistics
3:30-4:15pm Subfield meeting: Syntax
4:15-5:00pm More time for meetings
5:00-6:00pm Reception at Department
7:00-9:00 Department-provided dinner at 19 University Place.
9:00pm+:Drinks with Grads
Saturday morning, 1 March, 2008
9:00-10:30am Breakfast and informal meetings
10:30-11:15am Subfield meeting: Semantics
12:00pm+ Groups off on tours of New York, Brooklyn, etc.
Newly admitted students are encouraged to attend at least two but no more than three of the subfield meetings, using the remaining time to make appointments to speak with professors and current graduate students. The purpose of the subfield meetings is to introduce the professors, graduate students, and lab facilities most relevant to the main subdisciplines emphasized at NYU.
Posted February 10, 2008
Open House for Admitted Prospectives
The department will hold an Open House for admitted and wait-listed prospective graduate students on February 29 - March 1 (Friday-Saturday), 2008. Prospective students should arrive on February 28 (Thursday). The organized program starts Friday morning.
Sunday will be free for enjoying New York City. The department will provide accommodation and contribute to the travel expenses of those admitted to the program.
Posted June 17, 2007
Department Moved
The Department of Linguistics has moved. As of Monday, June 25th 2007 we are located at 726 Broadway, 7th Floor.
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