Weekly Digest, 11/17/22

Gobble, gobble, all! Thanksgiving break is just around the corner! Enjoy the time off, everyone—SCLing Wrap will be taking a little post-turkey nap as well before we return for the semester-end push.

If you have news to share, please submit your news for future issues of SCLing Wrap, cause we need your help keeping up with what’s ✨fresh✨ at USC Linguistics.

Colloquium: Tim Hunter

Please join us for Tim Hunter’s colloquium this Monday 11/21, from 3:30–5pm!

Tim Hunter, UCLA

Monday 11/21 @ 3:30pm, Conference Room (hybrid)

Distinguishing mildly context-sensitive modes of tree-building

Over the last 15-20 years, formal computational work has revealed important differences between the kinds of tree-building mechanisms that lie at the heart of various grammatical formalisms. From a linguistic point of view, these differences are more interesting than the perhaps better-known convergences between formalisms at the level of weak generative capacity. But in general it has been difficult to identify empirical cases that tie into the formal differences that have been identified. In this talk I’ll suggest that languages that lack the wh-island constraint (e.g. Bulgarian) provide one such case, where one class of formalisms appears to have a distinct advantage over another class. The structures we find in these languages seem to be best accounted for via either (a) a bottom-up tree-building system that employs unbounded derivational state, or (b) a system that allows for a certain kind of counter-cyclic tree-building. Somewhat surprisingly, these options are more in line with the mechanisms that underlie formalisms such as Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG; Joshi 1985) or Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG; Steedman 2000), than they are with the formalism known as Minimalist Grammar (MG; Stabler 1997) — despite the fact that the relevant structures are not particularly controversial from the perspective of mainstream syntactic theory. This mismatch suggests a revised perspective on what the truly distinguishing features are of the mechanisms employed in our mainstream minimalist theories.

Congratulations to Yifan Yang!

Recent USC alum Yifan Yang (PhD 2022) has accepted a tenure-track assistant professor position at the School of Foreign Languages at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Super congratulations, Yifan!

Look Who’s Talking 🗣

• Travis Major gave a virtual guest lecture on using ELAN and data management for Harvard’s fieldwork class and fieldwork lab on Friday, Nov. 11.

• Zuzanna Fuchs gave a virtual guest lecture at the University of Maryland in the “Heritage Languages and their Speakers” course on Thursday, Nov. 17. The title of Zuzanna’s guest lecture was “New insights from eyetracking.”

Caught in the Moment

The Psycholinguistics Lab welcomed guest speaker Kelsey Sasaki (Oxford) last week. Thanks to Elsi Kaiser for sending in this snapshot!

Upcoming Events

This week

• Monday 11/21, 1pm @ PhonLunch: Jessica Campbell on “Frequency stability of articulatory and acoustic modulation functions”

• Psycholing Lab: no meeting next week

• S-Side Story: no meeting next week

Coming up after the break

• Monday 11/28 2pm @ PhonLunch: Yubin Zhang (title TBA)

• Monday 11/28, 2:10pm @ S-Side Story: Jun Lyu on “Resumptive pronouns and the processing of complex NP islands: An eye-tracking study”

• Monday 11/27, 4:30pm @ MeaningLab: Alexis Wellwood (title TBA)

• Tuesday 11/29, 9:30am @ Psycholing Lab: Muxuan He (title TBA)