Weekly Digest –– 01/26/21

Welcome back! Happy 2021 to everyone. We hope that you had a nice and restful break, and most importantly, that you are safe and sound!

Are you ready for some interesting updates? Check them out!!

Congratulations to NSF recipients!

Congratulations to Sarah Lee (5th year PhD) for being awarded a Dissertation Research Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation, for her project entitled Processing the Dynamicity of Events in Language. Fantastic achievement Sarah!

Congratulations also to Cindy Chiang for being awarded a Dissertation Research Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation. Cindy is a PhD student in the Psychology Department at USC who works with Dr. Toby Mintz at the USC Language Development Lab. That is excellent news!!

USC at the LSA

The 95th meeting of the Linguistic society of America took place on 01/07-01/10 and our department was very well represented in all areas: from syntax and semantics to psycholinguistics and language acquisition/bilingualism to phonetics. Find a list of the talks and posters, including a plenary lecture, presented by USC faculty and students:

• Louis Goldstein gave a plenary talk entitled Structure in time: Dynamical Systems and Phonology

• Jun Lyu presented a poster entitled The effect of pitch accent on the perception of English lexical stress by native and non-native listeners with Fenqi Wang and Kevin Tang from the University of Florida.

• Jun Lyu and Elsi Kaiser presented a poster entitled Reconsidering sensitivity to Condition A of two types of Chinese reflexives.

• Jina Song and Elsi Kaiser presented a poster Learning how to scramble like a native speaker? L2 acquisition and L1 processing of noncanonical OSV word order in Korean.

• Silvia Kim and Elsi Kaiser presented a poster entitled Interpretation of Korean null pronouns in subject and object position: Comparing native and non-native speakers

• Ian Rigby presented a poster entitled Gender and Source-Word Ordering in English Name Blends.

• Colin Davis had a whole session for himself including one single-author talk and two co-authored talks:

  • On parasitic gaps in relative clauses and extraction from NP.

  • Radical successive cyclicity and the freedom of parasitic gaps, with Patrick Elliott (MIT)

  • What cross-clausal scrambling in Balkar reveals about phase edges, with Tatiana Bondarenko (MIT)

• Luis Miguel Toquero Pérez presented a poster entitled What Antilocality and the Principle of Minimal Compliance tell us about extraction and subextraction.

Roumyana Pancheva at NY-St Petersburg Institute of Linguistics

Study abroad programs are scare these days. But one of the few that is happening is The V-NY-St Petersburg Institute of linguistics, January 18-29, organized by John Frederick Bailyn (Stony Brook University). And we are happy to announce that our department is very well represented!

Roumyana Pancheva is teaching an invited mini-course on Tenselessness at NYI, held virtually in St. Petersburg, January 18-29, 2021.

Luis Miguel Toquero Pérez is serving as ZA (Zoom Assistant) for Rob Pasternak’s (ZAS Berlin) course Semantics: A teaser.