Summer Highlights

GLOW in Asia, Beijing, August 2010, Roger Liao, Fuyun Wu, Audrey Li, and Sarah Ouwayda

Janet Anderson:
Janet spent the summer in Vermont, as a (temporary) police officer!

Priyanka Biswas
Priyanka spent time with her family in India! Initially it was intolerably hot and humid, which restricted her activities outside, but she enjoyed staying at home. She did some reading, both linguistic and non-linguistic, e.g., some literature from the temporal domain, more specifically, on the 'Perfect', which she thought was very interesting! Besides reading, she managed to do a pilot acceptability judgment study on reference resolution of Bangla anaphoric and non-anaphoric (distal) pronouns. She also learned driving!! Her summer was fun and restful enough to gear up for the Fall.

Hagit Borer:
Hagit spent her summer in Paris working on her book and looking for Dante, and alas, had to pass on the trip to China.
She gave an invited talk on “Language: The Generative Perspective” At the Communist University 2010 in London in August, and is giving invited talks at the Sprachwissenschaftliches Institut in Germany in September, Université Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle in October, the Autonomous University of Barcelona in December, and the University of Munich in December (one day after Barcelona!).

Phillip Carter:
Starting in late May, Phillip spent one month studying Polish language at Glossa Szkoła Języków Obcych in Kraków. Following that trip, he spent the rest of the summer writing in LA, and has submitted two manuscripts based on that work. In the fall he'll be teaching 115 with Andrew Simpson and will present papers at Linguistic Association of the Southwest (LASSO) and New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV).

Katy McKinney-Bock:
Over the summer, Katy started preparing a follow-up experiment to her eye-tracking study, which is looking at whether listeners are sensitive to ordering constraints on prenominal adjectives (color and dimension, e.g. red and big). Part of that involved asking Emily Nava to 'borrow' her voice one last time to record the new stimuli, before she moved to her new job (congrats, Emily!). She also started working on her (syntax) qualifying paper, to be continued this year. In May she got a chance to go home and visit her family and attend a friend's wedding. She drove all the way from L.A. to Portland (Oregon) and back, which was beautiful. This fall she'll be presenting the results of the first eye-tracking study, as well as theoretical implications, in Paris at RALFe as a co-authored paper with Elsi Kaiser.

Ellen O'Connor Mohun:
In July Ellen got married in Santa Cruz, and she and her husband spent three weeks exploring Thailand, including Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Ko Samui, Phuket, and Ko Phi Phi. She also spent some time working on the syntax and semantics of comparatives in Dari and Tajik, focusing specifically on the obligatory inclusion of the nonfinite light verb kada in than-phrases. She will present the results -- which suggest that Dari phrasal comparatives are underlyingly small clauses -- at RALFe in Paris and NELS 2010 this October.

Sarah Ouwayda:
Sarah spent the summer term at the American University of Beirut. She taught a class in Phonetics, and had meetings with Lina Choueiri (alumna) discussing their respective research. She also went to Beijing for GLOW in Asia in August. This fall, she is teaching Arabic III, working on her qualifying paper on numerals, plurals, and quantifiers, and thinking a lot about modality in her free time. She is preparing for a talk on Arabic plurals in BAALL's conference on Afro-Asiatic Grammar in Paris, and is looking forward to discussing her tentative proposal on modals at the California University Semantics and Pragmatics informal meeting at Stanford in October.

Roumyana Pancheva:
Roumi spent most of July at the New York Institute summer school in St. Petersburg. She taught Meaning and Structure -an introduction to formal semantics, specifically focusing on its close links with syntax. She also gave a short presentation at the NYI CogFest on "Complex Syntax -> Simpler Language".
In August, she traveled with her daughter to Munich and spent time with the rest of her family in Sofia.

Barbara Tomaszewicz:

Barbara Tomaszewicz was awarded an International Summer Field Research Award from USC College for Summer 2010. Thanks to the grant, she was able to conduct two experimental studies in Bulgaria and Poland, following up on the research she did last year for her MA thesis project on the interpretation of the quantifier 'most' and the ways in which the linguistic and the visual cognitive systems interact to verify the truth/falsity of statements involving 'most'. In July, she presented the results of her MA thesis at the VSSoL International Conference on Language, Nature, and Cognition in Vigo, Spain . Earlier in the summer, she gave a talk at the GIST 1 workshop on "Antilocality and Snowballing movement" in Ghent, Belgium (June 24-25) , discussing the results of an experimental project on comparatives with Roumi Pancheva. Currently, Barbara is getting ready for her talks at 15th Sinn und Bedeutung Conference in Saarbrücken, Germany (Sept 9-11) , and at the GIST 2 Conference: "Main Clause Phenomena" in Ghent, Belgium (Sept 29-Oct 1) .