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Weekly Digest, August 26, 2022
Welcome back, everyone, and welcome to our supersize edition of Summer News SCLing Wrap! Our Trojan linguists have been busy over the summer, and there is lots of news to share, both personal and academic.
Doing things (cause we know you are!)? Please submit your news for future issues of SCling Wrap, cause we need your help keeping up with what’s ✨fresh✨ at USC Linguistics.
Welcome, Zoe!
Please join us in welcoming to the department Zoe Lo, our new Program Specialist. Zoe started in August, and we caught up with her for a little bit more about her. Make sure you say hi when you see Zoe in the department!
Hello! My name is Zoe, and I am very excited to be joining this department as well as the Trojan family this fall. Having majored in linguistics in college and looking for a change of pace in career, I have no doubt that my time here will only invoke inspiration and enrichment. Originally from Malaysia, I moved to the OC area as a child and have resided there since. As for interests, I like to cook and draw/paint digitally, and would love to be able to travel more and discover new places, starting with LA — as I plan to move here soon to be closer to campus.
I appreciate the warmth with which I have been welcomed with so far immensely, and will strive to do my best to support all the wonderful and admirable intellectuals here at USC Linguistics!
Zoe
NASSLLI @ USC
USC Philosophy, Linguistics, and Cognitive Science jointly hosted the biennial North American Summer School for Logic, Language, and Information (NASSLLI) 2022 this summer, and it was a huge hit! We welcomed ~170 in-person participants and over 300 online participants for a weekend of bootcamp courses, followed by 5 days of instruction in 5 parallel sessions, and a closing weekend workshop. This was the first fully hybrid NASSLLI, and many kudos are due to the help of 13 USC students who volunteered to assist with running the school—most were grad students from the Linguistics Department (🙌). Congrats as well to NASSLI Director Alexis Wellwood (Philosophy) and the main organizing committee including Deniz Rudin, Elsi Kaiser, and Khalil Iskarous from Linguistics, and Jeremy Goodman, Jaime Castillo-Gamboa, and Nurit Matuk from Philosophy.
A few additional details about NASSLLI:
Elsi Kaiser and Deniz Rudin organized a workshop, “Subjectivity in semantic interpretation.”
Roumi Pancheva taught a minicourse, “Temporal reference with and without tense.”
Khalil Iskarous taught a course, “Python for Logic and Language.”
Yasha Sapir (Philosolphy) and Adam Woodnutt presented “What ‘Exactly’ and ‘Precisely’ Exactly and Precisely Mean.”
Kudos! 👏👏👏
Reed Blaylock defended his dissertation, “Beatboxing Phonology,” in June and will be joining us as a USC Dornsife Fellow in General Education for two years. He’ll be teaching freshman GE seminars, starting this fall with “The Science of Singing.”
Yifan Yang defended his dissertation, “Generalized Surface Correspondence in Reduplicative Opacity” in May.
Ian Rigby completed an internship this summer as a Linguist Intern at Google. His project looked at how large language models can be used as zero-shot learners for image classification tasks.
Linguistics major Leena Mathur (also majoring in computer science and cognitive science!) received the Computing Research Association’s (CRA) 2022 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award. She also received an NSF Graduate Fellowship in support of her upcoming Ph.D. studies at Carnegie Mellon. Congrats, Leena!
Recent alum Sarah Hye-yeon Lee has been selected as one of the two winners of the inaugural Gibson-Fedorenko 2022 HSP Young Scholar Prize for her presentation “Where do you think the ball is?: Using webcam-based eye-tracking to investigate mental representations of object locations in transfer-of-possession events ” (co-authored with Elsi Kaiser) at the annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing.
Inked ✍️
Elsi Kaiser. 2022. “Evidentiality in Finnish: On the communicative functions of the reportative evidential kuulemma and the dubitative marker muka.” Journal of Uralic Linguistics, 1, 67-120. Link to paper.
Elsi Kaiser. 2022. “Do perspective-sensitive anaphors and subjective adjectives exhibit perspectival uniformity? An experimental investigation.” Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 7(1), 1–52. Link to paper.
Maria Luisa Zubizarreta. 2022. “The Verbal Phrase in Paraguayan Guarani: A Case Study on the Role of Prosody in Linearization.” Languages. Link to paper.
Look Who’s Talking
Roumi Pancheva taught an invited class on Tense and Aspect with Paul Portner (Georgetown) and Sergei Tatevosov (Moscow State University) at the Crete Summer School in Linguistics.
Elsi Kaiser gave two talks at ELM 2 (Experiments in Linguistic Meaning, May 18-20, 2022) at the University of Pennsylvania (Elsi’s Ph.D. alma mater!):
Elsi gave a talk on “Proportions vs. cardinalities: Comparative ambiguities and the COVID pandemic.”
She also presented work with Jesse Storbeck on “Real-time processing of indexical and generic expressions: Insights from, and implications for, COVID-related public health messages.”
Tommy Tsz-Ming Lee, Roumi Pancheva, and Maria Luisa Zubizarreta gave a talk titled “Genuinely tenseless: encoding time in Cantonese” at SALT 32 (COLMEX & UNAM, Mexico City, June 8-10).
Zuzanna Fuchs gave a poster titled “Facilitative use of grammatical gender by Heritage Speakers of Polish: Evidence for access to abstract syntactic features in real-time processing” at ISBPAC (UiT, Tromsø, Norway, Aug. 4-5).
Alexis Wellwood presented a talk, “A window into the mind,” on her NSF-funded researcher into the relationship between event talk and event cognition at Mayfest 2020+2 in College Park, MD.
Ian Rigby and Elsi Kaiser will be giving a talk at AMLaP (University of York, Sept. 7) on “Breaking the Tie: Sound Symbolism Modulates Visual Categorization”.
Linguists are lucky with love
Congratulations are in order for some of our linguists with personal news to share from over the summer!
Upcoming Events
Colloquia for Fall 2022
We’ve got an exciting colloquium schedule this fall, so please mark your calendars! Colloquia will be Mondays at 3:30pm in person this year unless otherwise indicated.
10/17: Naomi Feldman (UMD)
10/24: Paul Portner (Georgetown)
11/14: Annette D’Onofrio (Northwestern)
11/21: Tim Hunter (UCLA)
Department Events
Monday, 8/29, 1pm: Reed Blaylock, TBD at PhonLunch (GFS 330)
Monday, 8/29, 4-5pm: Shinri Ohta (Kyushu University) at S-Side Story (virtual)
Tuesday, 8/30, 9:30 am: Psycholing Lab Organizational Meeting (GFS 330)
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