Summer Highlights

Aug 30, 2020

2 min read

Welcome back everyone! As we all know this summer has been bizarre, to put it mildly. From USC Linguistics we hope that you and your family were safe and are looking forward to spending a whole new semester together.

925d7cdd-5297-40f7-91b6-33b650f68137 — Choya cacti from Luismi’s garden

Despite all the difficult circumstances, we have managed to find some joy, happiness and productivity this summer. Here are some of the summer highlights from the USC Linguistics community. If you want to share your summer highlights, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Stephanie’s Zine

Stephanie Shih produced a short-run home cooking zine, What We’ve Been Eating, to raise donations for LA Food Bank. (Deniz Rudin contributed serious dishwashing efforts, and also a recipe).

Elsi’s high school zoom reunion

Elsi Kaiser participated in a ‘zoom reunion’ with people from her high school, many of whom she had not seen for decades: “It was fun to catch up with everyone, and it was somehow reassuring that most people still looked very similar to how they looked in high school — everyone was very recognizable. My old math teacher was also there for the zoom meeting. He was a great teacher and managed to get me to understand calculus – and he is still teaching now, decades later!”

Roumi’s invited talk and minicourse

Roumi Pancheva gave an invited talk entitled Two types of synthetic comparatives in Slavic, Athens semantics group, June 25, 2020. Link below: https://sites.google.com/view/semanticsgroup

She also taught a mini course on numerals with Rajesh Bhatt (UMass) at the (virtual) NYI summer school in St. Petersburg, July 20-31, 2020

Luismi’s miscellaneous events

Luismi presented gave a talk entitled The syntax and semantics of Spanish comparatives: a uniform account at LSRL50, hosted by UT Austin on zoom: http://sites.utexas.edu/lsrl50/.

Outside of linguistics, he has taken refuge in preparing nice and healthy foods, specially for breakfast. He has also enjoyed learning how to prepare espresso and making good coffee; social distance picnicking; and his time in Baltimore, MD. He also went to IKEA for the first time in his life and drove a 220 inches long Ford van.