SCROLL issue for the week of September 26, 2011

SCROLL issue for the week of September 26, 2011

New Faculty Profile:

Welcome to our two new faculty members Khalil Iskarous and Karen Jesney!

Khalil Iskarous:

"I'm one of the two new phonologists at USC, and quite excited to be here. It's great to be in Southern California! My research centers on the interaction between phonological representations and the grammatical constraints that shape those representations. Do the physical differences between voice, nasality, place of articulation, etc. play a role in shaping the rules/constraints that affect each of these gestures? Or should we expect phonological phenomena affecting each of them to be roughly the same? The goal is not just to understand how language is affected by the physical medium that carries it, but, reciprocally, how language deeply structures the dynamics of that physical medium. I've spent the last 10 years working at Haskins Laboratories, a great place for investigating speech production and speech perception, and their relation to grammatical structure. Most of my work there related to the incredible tongue, and how its motions are discretized in the act of speaking. I'm hoping to continue this work here at USC and to collaborate with my new colleagues to extend it in new directions: the relation between prosodic structure and speech production, the relation between syntactic and phonological pattern formation principles, and computational approaches to linguistic structure. Oh, and I like cafe-hopping, traveling, hiking, movies, walking (a lot), and hanging out with friends."

(From the USC Dornsife New Faculty profiles 2011-12)

Karen Jesney:

"Karen's research focuses on the modeling of sound patterns in adult language and the developing language of children. Using simulation techniques, she studies the learning paths that are predicted to emerge given different theories of phonology, and tests these predictions against corpora of child language data. Most recently, her work has specifically concentrated upon the differences that emerge depending if phonological systems are modeled using ranked versus weighted constraints." (From the USC Dornsife New Faculty profiles 2011-12)

Talks This Week:

Phonlunch: Nancy Hall: Epenthetic Vowels in Lebanese Arabic
Linguistics Reading Room (GFS 330) - Sept 26th

PhonLunch Schedule for the Fall Semester: (Mondays 1-2 pm)
September 19th: Khalil Iskarous
September 26th: Nancy Hall
October 3rd: Reading for Matt Goldrick Colloquium
October 10th: Daylen Riggs
October 17th: Karen Jesney
October 26th: Peter Guekguezian
November 7th: Reading for Michael Kenstowicz Colloquium
November 14th: Christina Hagedorn
November 21st: Mike Proctor
November 28th: Daylen Riggs


USC Linguists at Sinn und Bedeutung:
Mythili Menon: “Two ways of forming comparatives in Malayalam”
Sarah Ouwayda: “Cardinals, Agreement, and Plurality in Lebanese Arabic”

USC Linguists at NELS:
Katy McKinney-Bock: "An Argument for Interval Semantics of Gradable Adjectives"
Sarah Ouwayda: "Plurality, Agreement, and Interpretation"

USC Linguists at LSA:
Iris C-Y Ouyang & Elsi Kaiser: "Focus-marking in a tone language: Prosodic cues in Mandarin Chinese."

Bin Yin & Elsi Kaiser: "L2 acquisition of event structure: Effects of complexity on the acquisition of telicity"

Barbara Tomaszewicz: "Semantics and visual cognition: the processing of Bulgarian and Polish majority quantifiers"



Editors: Alfredo García Pardo, Iris C-Y Ouyang, Sarah Ouwayda, and Roumyana Pancheva