NYU Linguistics

Maria will be giving a colloquium at her undergraduate alma mater, Eastern Michigan University, on Friday the 20th of November.

John Singler, on sabbatical in this semester, gave the keynote address to the annual conference of the Linguistics Society of Southern Africa / Southern African Applied Linguistics Association at Cape Peninsula, University of Technology in Cape Town. The talk was entitled "Variationist Sociolinguistics and the Niger-Congo Languages of West Africa: The Non-State of the Art."

He has recently given colloquia at the University of Western Australia, the University of Cape Town, and the University of the West Indies (Mona). The Mona campus of UWI is in Jamaica.

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".

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'

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.

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.

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”."

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"

Mike Solomon is giving a talk on "Partitives and the semantics of same" at Sinn und Bedeutung 14, Vienna, Sept. 28-30, 2009.

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.

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.

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".

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.

Liina will talk about Studying the neural bases of semantic composition with MEG on July 28.

Chris's CSSP talk is on "Linear implicature and free choice permission".

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.

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).

Suzanne Dikker will give an invited lecture entitled Sensitivity to syntax in visual cortex at the Leipzig Max Planck Institute on July 8th.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

Chris Barker is going to teach a six-week course in semantics at the 2009 LSA Linguistic Institute (UC Berkeley).

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.

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.

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.

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

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 will be giving a talk called "Polarity and Degree in "so totally" Constructions" at the CUNY syntax supper on March 10.

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.

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."