07 November 2012
06 November 2012
Southern California Students in Linguistics Workshop
The annual Southern California Students in Linguistics Workshop will be held on Friday, January 18, 2013 at the University of Southern California. It is hosted by the Graduate Students in Linguistics at the USC Department of Linguistics.
Abstracts should be submitted no later than January 11th, 2013. For more information about the workshop, please visit the website.
Abstracts should be submitted no later than January 11th, 2013. For more information about the workshop, please visit the website.
04 November 2012
USC Linguistics Colloquia
The 2012-2013 USC Linguistics Colloquia for the Fall 2012
semester are now winding down. This past Friday, November 2, Dorit Abusch
presented her colloquium talk:
Discourse Pragmatics
and Aspectual Semantics of Temporal Relations in Silent Comics
Dorit Abusch, Cornell University
The presentation inspired lively discussion among attendees,
and the session was followed by a lunch in the linguistics department. Thank
you, Dorit, for your presentation!
The final colloquium of the Fall 2012 semester will be
tomorrow, November 5, 2012, from 3:30 – 5:00 pm in GFS 118 (Reception follows
at GFS 330):
A Recursive Phonology
Interface for WH-F Alternative Semantics
Mats Rooth, Cornell University
All are welcome to attend colloquia. Next semester’s first
colloquium will be on January 25, 2013, with Liina Pylkkännen of NYU (time and
location TBA). Please check back for more details on next semester’s colloquia.
USC at CUSP 5
California Universities Semantics and Pragmatics 5,
a workshop for semantics and pragmatics research, was held this year at the
University of California at San Diego on October 27—28, 2012. USC grad students
Samantha Gordon and Jessica Harmon attended the conference, and Professor
Roumyana presented a paper:
Quantity Superlatives
Roumyana Pancheva
12 October 2012
01 October 2012
USC at Two September Conferences
USC had representatives at two recent conferences, Sinn und Bedeutung 17 in Paris from September 8 to 10, 2012, and South Asian Languages: Theory,Typology, and Diachrony at Yale University from September 28 to 30, 2012.
Sinn und Bedeutung is a conference focusing on aspects of
semantics and pragmatics in several areas of linguistics including syntax and
psycholinguistics. At this conference, USC had one presentation:
Ascending and
Descending’ Escher Illusions in Language: Evidence for Online Repair
Ellen O'Connor with Elsi Kaiser and Roumi Pancheva
South Asian Languages is a conference devoted to growing the
field of research in South Asian linguistics. USC had one presentation at this
conference, as well:
Plurality
in Bangla: from a Crosslinguistic Perspective
Priyanka Biswas
29 September 2012
USC at Interspeech 2012
USC had several representatives at the Interspeech 2012
Conference, this year in Portland, Oregon, on September 9-13. The conference
covers speech and language processing and includes very interdisciplinary
research not only in linguistics but in psychology, engineering, medicine, and
other fields. Presenters from the Department of Linguistics, and the topics of
their presentations follow:
Accounting for Speech
Rate in Spoken Word Recognition
David Li and Elsi Kaiser
Syllable Perception
Depends on Tone Perception
Iris Chuoying Ouyang and Khalil Iskarous
Characterizing Covert
Articulation in Apraxic Speech Using Real-time MRI
Christina Hagedorn, Michael Proctor, Louis Goldstein, Maria
Luisa Gorno-Tempini (UC-San Francisco), Shrikanth Narayanan
Emphatic Segments and
Emphasis Spread in Lebanese Arabic: a Real-time Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study
Assaf Israel, Michael Proctor, Louis Goldstein, Khalil Iskarous,
Shrikanth Narayanan
27 September 2012
USC at AMLaP 2012
This year conference of Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP) took place in Riva Del Garda, Italy on September 6th-8th. This international conference of interdisciplinary research brings together psychological, computational, and theoretical perspectives on the cognitive mechanisms which underlie any aspect of human language processing. USC’s Linguistics Department is proud to have eight presenters at the AMLaP this year.
Online detection and repair of comparative illusions: Evidence from self-paced reading
Ellen O' Connor, Roumyana Pancheva, and Elsi Kaiser
Positional constraints on incremental adjective interpretation
Katherine McKinney-Bock and Elsi Kaiser
Comprehension of anaphora and cataphora in Italian: Comparing null and overt pronouns
Emily Fedele and Elsi Kaiser
Same subject, different marking: Consequences of case-marking on discourse and memory representations
Lucy Kyoungsook Kim and Elsi Kaiser
Free indirect discourse and perspective taking
Elsi Kaiser and Alexa Cohen
Speech rate mediated lexical ambiguity resolution and the role of articulation
David Li and Elsi Kaiser
22 September 2012
USC representatives at GLOW in Asia IX, Japan
Several USC representatives were present in GLOW in Asia IX, Mie University, Japan. Mythili Menon presented a paper on "The Syntax of the Adjective in Dravidian". Priyanka Biswas presented a poster on "Plurality in a Classifier Language: Two Types of Plurals in Bangla". Syed Saurov presented a poster on "DP‐Internal Focus and Topic in Bangla". Yuyun Iris Yang and Roger Liao (USC alum) presented a poster on "Moving to the Left Periphery: Syntax or PF?". USC alumna Fuyun Wu presented a paper on "Audience Design Affects Classifier Positioning in Chinese Relative Clauses: Evidence from Spoken Corpus and Sentence‐Production Data" with Yanan Sheng.
14 September 2012
Alumni News
Michael Shepherd (Ph.D. 2010) is starting as a visiting assistant professor at the Spanish Department at the Arizona State University after his two years as a Dornsife Distinguished Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the University of Southern California.
Congratulations to both of them from the Linguistics Department!
Erika Varis (Ph.D. 2012) has accepted a position as a Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Nevada, Reno, potentially renewable for up to a total of three years.
Congratulations to both of them from the Linguistics Department!
Summer highlights, updates, and so on
Peter Guekguezian joined a group of USC students led by Khalil Iskarous to Taiwan as part of USC's "Problems without Passports" program. He received a NSF grant (along with Khalil and Katy McKinney-Bock) to work on documenting and recording two endangered languages of Taiwan: Squliq Atayal and Saisiyat. Peter spent the month of June hosted by National Tsing Hua University and working with both native speakers of these languages and linguistics colleagues at the university. He got to experience a new culture and cuisine, and visited a village in the mountains where he practiced speaking Saisiyat with the locals. He presented some of his findings at the Austronesian Formal Language Association (AFLA) conference later in June at Academia Sinica in Taipei.
In lighter news, this summer Peter also visited Argentina, turned 26, and got engaged!
Christina Hagedorn traveled to New York in July, where she presented her poster, "Characterizing Covert Articulation in Apraxic Speech Using real-time MRI" at the International Workshop on Language Production at NYU.
Khalil Iskarous has been selected as a recipient of an NSF INSPIRE award, a program designed to fund interdisciplinary, potentially transformative research. Read the press release here.
In lighter news, this summer Peter also visited Argentina, turned 26, and got engaged!
Christina Hagedorn traveled to New York in July, where she presented her poster, "Characterizing Covert Articulation in Apraxic Speech Using real-time MRI" at the International Workshop on Language Production at NYU.
Khalil Iskarous has been selected as a recipient of an NSF INSPIRE award, a program designed to fund interdisciplinary, potentially transformative research. Read the press release here.
Also, Khalil led a group of USC students to Taiwan this June to conduct fieldwork on Atayal and Saisiyat, two endangered Austronesian languages. Read the USC News article here and watch a video here.
Roumi Pancheva taught at three summer schools: The 6th Linguistic Summer School in the Indian Mountains (LISSIM 6) in Sidhbari, Himachal Pradesh, the 10th New York - St. Petersburg Institute of Linguistics, Cognition and Culture, and the 19th Eastern European Summer School of Generative Grammar (The Egg) in Wroclaw, Poland.
Roumi Pancheva taught at three summer schools: The 6th Linguistic Summer School in the Indian Mountains (LISSIM 6) in Sidhbari, Himachal Pradesh, the 10th New York - St. Petersburg Institute of Linguistics, Cognition and Culture, and the 19th Eastern European Summer School of Generative Grammar (The Egg) in Wroclaw, Poland.
In St. Petersburg: some of the students and teachers |
Barbara Tomaszewicz spent her summer in LA, working, and in Europe, co-teaching at the EGG school in Wroclaw, Poland, with Roumi Pancheva, attending the ESSLLI summer school in Opole, Poland, where she presented her experiments on "most" at the Logic & Cognition Workshop, and finally attending the Sinn und Bedeutung conference and the EALing fall school in Paris, France.
At the EGG |
Barbara presenting at the Logic & Cognition Workshop |
Rachel Walker has joined the USC Center for Excellence in teaching as a Faculty Fellow and Canan Ipek (recent recipient of a USC Outstanding Teaching Assistant award!) and Xiao He have joined the CET as Teaching Assistant Fellows. They join two fellow linguists in the CET, Ed Finegan, who is the CET director, and David Li, who serves as a Teaching Assistant Fellow.
04 September 2012
Introducing our new first-year students
Welcome to our ten newcomers! Here are brief introductions to each of them:
Afton Coombs:
"My name is Afton Coombs. After growing up in Southern California, I received B.A.'s in linguistics and English literature from across town at the University of California Los Angeles. At UCLA I was a research assistant to then-graduate student Kristine Yu, working on tone language universals. My senior thesis was on stress patterns in English. Although my focus was always in phonetics and phonology, now at USC I also want to pursue computational applications. I am looking forward to working with the other graduate students, and I hope to collaborate with people in other departments. Outside of linguistics, I love dancing and playing music."
Monica Do:
"Hi! I was born and raised in the wonderful San Fernando Valley. I did my undergraduate work at USC, where I majored in Linguistics, competed nationally on the Trojan Debate Squad, and served as an undergraduate research assistant for the Language Processing Lab. After taking a year off school, I am thrilled to be returning to Troy to further my studies in psycholinguistic and syntactic work and crucially, to watch the #1 ranked Trojans win the BCS Championship. In my free time, I enjoy cooking, trying new foods, playing fantasy football, and hiking with my adorable husky, Bella."
Samantha Gordon:
"My name is Samantha Gordon and I recently moved to Los Angeles from Texas. I grew up in Houston where I attended an arts high school for visual art. For my undergraduate education, I attended the University of Texas at Austin, where I earned a B.F.A. in Studio Art and B.A.s in Linguistics (minoring in Russian) and Plan II, a liberal arts honors program. For my degree in Plan II I wrote a thesis entitled "Gastronomic Aesthetics" about the theory and practice of using food as fine art. After graduating from UT, I stayed in Austin to work in a small house museum, at a humanities non-profit, at the Phonetics Lab at the University of Texas, and I also completed the Baking and Patisserie program at the Le Cordon Bleu college of culinary arts.
My interests in Linguistics are in phonetics (my background is in acoustic/auditory phonetics though I hope to learn more about articulatory phonetics while at USC) and psycholinguistics. When I'm not working or studying, I love to cook and bake (the more complicated the instructions and the harder to find the ingredients, the better). I enjoy practicing Muay Thai kickboxing, hiking and trail running, hanging out with my cats, painting, reading, and attempting to convince people to play Scrabble or go to karaoke bars with me. I also like seeing stand-up and improv comedy and watching movies."
Jessica Harmon:
"I’m a mostly California girl, and I’ve lived in 5, now 6, places around the state, from the tippy-top northern coast (that everyone always forgets is part of CA) down to LA. Driving on these traffic-y freeways down here is somehow terrifying and terribly boring at the same time. I did my undergrad in linguistics at CSU Fresno. I studied Latin/Greek as well and was somehow able to work them into my honors thesis on Chukchansi Yokuts, a language native to the Fresno area. I’m not too sure what my main interests are going to be, but most likely something in syntax/semantics. I love traveling and Asian food (you know, the cuisines from Japan to the Mediterranean), and hopefully one day soon I’ll get to have both at the same time. Too much of my time is spent reading blogs and watching youtube videos about science, language, religion, politics, and the intersections between/among them. But I like print (or at least kindle) books too, mostly scifi/fantasy (Ender’s Game! Harry Potter!). Over the summer I finished cataloguing my library according to the Library of Congress system. I also recently caught up on Doctor Who, and I'm looking forward to the premiere in September."
Chorong Kang:
"My name is Chorong. I am from Korea, and it is the first time for me to live in a foreign country. Thus, I came here with great expectations of living and studying in this beautiful, energetic study area. I have special interest in Syntax, Semantics, and theoretical methods. When I was on MA course, I loved to discuss syntactic phenomena drawing tree diagram and my MA thesis topic is “Issues on Sub-extraction: Morphological Freezing Effects.” I hope that I could learn more about syntax and interdisciplinary issues in Linguistics from this fall. In my free time, I call my husband who is in Korea and I used to eat something sweet when I feel sad or depressed. And I love to go to concert or art gallery, thus if there is a great performance or others you would be also interested in, let’s go and enjoy together."
Cynthia Lee:
"Hi, my name is Yoonjeong, but most of my friends call me Cynthia. I'm from Seoul, South Korea. Seoul is a big, fun, and lively city. The only thing I wasn't very happy about in Seoul was the weather. But, wow, the weather in LA is absolutely amazing. Though I've been here for only a few weeks, I'm sure I'll like this city a lot. I got my M.A. in Linguistics from Hanyang University (in Seoul) and worked as an RA from 2008 spring to 2012 summer. I'd been involved in several projects regarding the prosodic structure of a language that I'd love to know more about. The title of my first published article (Cho, Lee, & Kim, 2011), for which I participated in as the second author, is "Communicatively-driven versus prosodically-driven hyper-articulation in Korean". My M.A. thesis title is "Effects of prosodic strengthening and lexical boundary on /s/-stop sequences in English". Besides studying hard, I love playing Nintendo Wii (still pretty nerdy, huh?), going out with friends, shopping (all sorts of), and singing/dancing! I'm so glad that I've chosen USC for my future study and excited to start my new long journey with you all. Fight on!"
Binh Ngo:
"My name is Binh Ngo and I am from Vietnam. I grew up in Ho Chi Minh city, also known as Saigon, where I received my B.A. in English Linguistics from University of Social Sciences and Humanities. I worked as an EFL teacher for a few language schools there for seven years before leaving for the Master's program in the US. I recently received my M.A. in Linguistics from Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. During the program, I had the wonderful opportunity tutoring undergraduate students in linguistics classes. I also participated in the two one-month workshops which the department conducted for EFL teachers from Chungnam Province in Korea. My thesis was about Vietnamese Classifiers and their role in denoting (Non)Specificity. I plan to work on the Syntax-Semantics interface in Vietnamese as well as in other East Asian languages during my years at USC. Besides nominal constructions, WH-movement and particles are also amazingly intriguing to me. Teaching is my passion and I can't wait to start the TA here at USC. In my free time, I love walking around places, hiking, and going to the movies. Last but not least, a get-together with friends is always great to have."
Andrés Benítez Pozo:
"My name is Andrés Benítez Pozo. I'm from Jerez, in southern Spain. I'm coming to USC from University College London, where I completed a master's degree in the area of speech sciences. Before that, I went to the University of Granada, in Spain, for undergrad. I'm currently on a Fulbright Foreign Scholarship.
My main research interests lie within the area of phonetics. For my master's thesis I did research on second language speech perception, under the supervision of Paul Iverson. I'm interested in many aspects of language and speech, and especially in laboratory phonology and the interaction of speech perception and production.
In my free time I like to run while listening to music, and I also enjoy eating out and reading newspapers and random social psychology articles. Perhaps my biggest hobby is television shows; I love a good sitcom."
Alif Silpachai:
"My name is Alif. (It's pronounced like "a leaf".) I grew up in San Fernando Valley, California, where I spoke Thai (Siamese) at home. I received my B.A. in linguistics from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2012. As an undergraduate student, I found phonetics, intonational phonology, and historical linguistics most fascinating. I also began learning Spanish, Catalan, and French in classes, while I was learning other Thai related languages, namely Lao, Northern Thai, and Shan from native speakers mostly via Skype and telephone. Although I found the prosodies of Spanish, Catalan, and French fascinating, I was more interested in discovering more about the prosodies of these Tai languages, given that these languages are tonal. In particular, I was always interested in discovering how the lexical tones in these languages interact with intonation. And I also wanted to discover how creaky voice in these languages plays a role in perception. Since not too many studies have been done on their prosodic structures, I had to do my studies firsthand with native speakers. However, I find this process rather difficult because my current knowledge of the prosodies in these languages and my research skills are not quite sufficient for me to independently and confidently study these languages. Therefore, as a graduate student at USC, I am looking forward to learn the skills needed to become a better researcher. Furthermore, some of my hobbies are learning different English accents, improving my Lao and Northern Thai accents, reconstructing Proto-Southwestern Tai, studying facial expressions, watching Spanish series from Spain, reading novels in English and Spanish, and making videos on Youtube."
Thomas Borer:
"I am Austrian by birth but was raised in Liechtenstein, a small country (about 61 sq mi) surrounded by Switzerland and Austria. Liechtenstein, if known at all, is most famous for being small, but next to that for banking, Hilti (known for manufacturing hammer drills and direct fastening systems), as well as being the world’s largest producer of sausage casings and false teeth. My hometown is Gamprin, a midsized village at the border to Switzerland.
I studied African studies at the University of Vienna, where I graduated in 2012. The African studies program in Vienna requires every student to have some introductory courses in history, literature as well as linguistics and to specialize in one of these fields. Since I was most fascinated by linguistics I chose to focus on that. I am most passionate about syntax and semantics. I also learned basic Fulfulde, an Atlantic language spoken in the Sahel, and Hausa, a Chadic language spoken mainly in northern Nigeria and southern Niger. In my thesis I worked on voice in Hausa.
In my spare time I like to cook, bake, bike and hike. I am also particularly fond of table tennis and Foosball."
Afton Coombs:
"My name is Afton Coombs. After growing up in Southern California, I received B.A.'s in linguistics and English literature from across town at the University of California Los Angeles. At UCLA I was a research assistant to then-graduate student Kristine Yu, working on tone language universals. My senior thesis was on stress patterns in English. Although my focus was always in phonetics and phonology, now at USC I also want to pursue computational applications. I am looking forward to working with the other graduate students, and I hope to collaborate with people in other departments. Outside of linguistics, I love dancing and playing music."
Monica Do:
"Hi! I was born and raised in the wonderful San Fernando Valley. I did my undergraduate work at USC, where I majored in Linguistics, competed nationally on the Trojan Debate Squad, and served as an undergraduate research assistant for the Language Processing Lab. After taking a year off school, I am thrilled to be returning to Troy to further my studies in psycholinguistic and syntactic work and crucially, to watch the #1 ranked Trojans win the BCS Championship. In my free time, I enjoy cooking, trying new foods, playing fantasy football, and hiking with my adorable husky, Bella."
Samantha Gordon:
"My name is Samantha Gordon and I recently moved to Los Angeles from Texas. I grew up in Houston where I attended an arts high school for visual art. For my undergraduate education, I attended the University of Texas at Austin, where I earned a B.F.A. in Studio Art and B.A.s in Linguistics (minoring in Russian) and Plan II, a liberal arts honors program. For my degree in Plan II I wrote a thesis entitled "Gastronomic Aesthetics" about the theory and practice of using food as fine art. After graduating from UT, I stayed in Austin to work in a small house museum, at a humanities non-profit, at the Phonetics Lab at the University of Texas, and I also completed the Baking and Patisserie program at the Le Cordon Bleu college of culinary arts.
My interests in Linguistics are in phonetics (my background is in acoustic/auditory phonetics though I hope to learn more about articulatory phonetics while at USC) and psycholinguistics. When I'm not working or studying, I love to cook and bake (the more complicated the instructions and the harder to find the ingredients, the better). I enjoy practicing Muay Thai kickboxing, hiking and trail running, hanging out with my cats, painting, reading, and attempting to convince people to play Scrabble or go to karaoke bars with me. I also like seeing stand-up and improv comedy and watching movies."
Jessica Harmon:
"I’m a mostly California girl, and I’ve lived in 5, now 6, places around the state, from the tippy-top northern coast (that everyone always forgets is part of CA) down to LA. Driving on these traffic-y freeways down here is somehow terrifying and terribly boring at the same time. I did my undergrad in linguistics at CSU Fresno. I studied Latin/Greek as well and was somehow able to work them into my honors thesis on Chukchansi Yokuts, a language native to the Fresno area. I’m not too sure what my main interests are going to be, but most likely something in syntax/semantics. I love traveling and Asian food (you know, the cuisines from Japan to the Mediterranean), and hopefully one day soon I’ll get to have both at the same time. Too much of my time is spent reading blogs and watching youtube videos about science, language, religion, politics, and the intersections between/among them. But I like print (or at least kindle) books too, mostly scifi/fantasy (Ender’s Game! Harry Potter!). Over the summer I finished cataloguing my library according to the Library of Congress system. I also recently caught up on Doctor Who, and I'm looking forward to the premiere in September."
Chorong Kang:
"My name is Chorong. I am from Korea, and it is the first time for me to live in a foreign country. Thus, I came here with great expectations of living and studying in this beautiful, energetic study area. I have special interest in Syntax, Semantics, and theoretical methods. When I was on MA course, I loved to discuss syntactic phenomena drawing tree diagram and my MA thesis topic is “Issues on Sub-extraction: Morphological Freezing Effects.” I hope that I could learn more about syntax and interdisciplinary issues in Linguistics from this fall. In my free time, I call my husband who is in Korea and I used to eat something sweet when I feel sad or depressed. And I love to go to concert or art gallery, thus if there is a great performance or others you would be also interested in, let’s go and enjoy together."
Cynthia Lee:
"Hi, my name is Yoonjeong, but most of my friends call me Cynthia. I'm from Seoul, South Korea. Seoul is a big, fun, and lively city. The only thing I wasn't very happy about in Seoul was the weather. But, wow, the weather in LA is absolutely amazing. Though I've been here for only a few weeks, I'm sure I'll like this city a lot. I got my M.A. in Linguistics from Hanyang University (in Seoul) and worked as an RA from 2008 spring to 2012 summer. I'd been involved in several projects regarding the prosodic structure of a language that I'd love to know more about. The title of my first published article (Cho, Lee, & Kim, 2011), for which I participated in as the second author, is "Communicatively-driven versus prosodically-driven hyper-articulation in Korean". My M.A. thesis title is "Effects of prosodic strengthening and lexical boundary on /s/-stop sequences in English". Besides studying hard, I love playing Nintendo Wii (still pretty nerdy, huh?), going out with friends, shopping (all sorts of), and singing/dancing! I'm so glad that I've chosen USC for my future study and excited to start my new long journey with you all. Fight on!"
Binh Ngo:
"My name is Binh Ngo and I am from Vietnam. I grew up in Ho Chi Minh city, also known as Saigon, where I received my B.A. in English Linguistics from University of Social Sciences and Humanities. I worked as an EFL teacher for a few language schools there for seven years before leaving for the Master's program in the US. I recently received my M.A. in Linguistics from Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. During the program, I had the wonderful opportunity tutoring undergraduate students in linguistics classes. I also participated in the two one-month workshops which the department conducted for EFL teachers from Chungnam Province in Korea. My thesis was about Vietnamese Classifiers and their role in denoting (Non)Specificity. I plan to work on the Syntax-Semantics interface in Vietnamese as well as in other East Asian languages during my years at USC. Besides nominal constructions, WH-movement and particles are also amazingly intriguing to me. Teaching is my passion and I can't wait to start the TA here at USC. In my free time, I love walking around places, hiking, and going to the movies. Last but not least, a get-together with friends is always great to have."
Andrés Benítez Pozo:
"My name is Andrés Benítez Pozo. I'm from Jerez, in southern Spain. I'm coming to USC from University College London, where I completed a master's degree in the area of speech sciences. Before that, I went to the University of Granada, in Spain, for undergrad. I'm currently on a Fulbright Foreign Scholarship.
My main research interests lie within the area of phonetics. For my master's thesis I did research on second language speech perception, under the supervision of Paul Iverson. I'm interested in many aspects of language and speech, and especially in laboratory phonology and the interaction of speech perception and production.
In my free time I like to run while listening to music, and I also enjoy eating out and reading newspapers and random social psychology articles. Perhaps my biggest hobby is television shows; I love a good sitcom."
Alif Silpachai:
"My name is Alif. (It's pronounced like "a leaf".) I grew up in San Fernando Valley, California, where I spoke Thai (Siamese) at home. I received my B.A. in linguistics from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2012. As an undergraduate student, I found phonetics, intonational phonology, and historical linguistics most fascinating. I also began learning Spanish, Catalan, and French in classes, while I was learning other Thai related languages, namely Lao, Northern Thai, and Shan from native speakers mostly via Skype and telephone. Although I found the prosodies of Spanish, Catalan, and French fascinating, I was more interested in discovering more about the prosodies of these Tai languages, given that these languages are tonal. In particular, I was always interested in discovering how the lexical tones in these languages interact with intonation. And I also wanted to discover how creaky voice in these languages plays a role in perception. Since not too many studies have been done on their prosodic structures, I had to do my studies firsthand with native speakers. However, I find this process rather difficult because my current knowledge of the prosodies in these languages and my research skills are not quite sufficient for me to independently and confidently study these languages. Therefore, as a graduate student at USC, I am looking forward to learn the skills needed to become a better researcher. Furthermore, some of my hobbies are learning different English accents, improving my Lao and Northern Thai accents, reconstructing Proto-Southwestern Tai, studying facial expressions, watching Spanish series from Spain, reading novels in English and Spanish, and making videos on Youtube."
26 May 2012
Students news
Ben Parell has won the prestigious and highly selective USC Diploma in Innovation. Ben will be leading the project "Ultrasound imaging and automatic quantification of glottal dynamics during speech ". Congratulations for such a well-deserved honor!
20 May 2012
Alumni news
Ana Sánchez-Muñoz has been promoted to Associate Professor in the Department of Chicana/o Studies at the California State University, Northridge.
Michael Shepherd has accepted a visiting assistant professorship in the Spanish Department at the Arizona State University.
Michael Shepherd has accepted a visiting assistant professorship in the Spanish Department at the Arizona State University.
Roger Liao has been offered a tenure-track position at the Academia Sinica research institute in Taiwan. Starting from January 2013, he will be an assistant researcher there with no teaching obligation.
Congratulations!
10 May 2012
Mellon Mentoring Awards
Recently, Elsi Kaiser and Roumyana Pancheva won the USC Mellon Awards for Graduate Mentoring by Faculty. Only ten faculty members were selected across schools this year, and two of them are from Linguistics! The awards ceremony took place on Apr 23.
Elsi and Roumi (photo by Xiao)
awesome mentors and some of their mentees (photo by Priyanka)
09 May 2012
Congratulations!
Alexa Cohen (Class of 2012) received a prestigious award, Dornsife Scholars, which provides $10,000 prizes for graduate/professional school studies. There are only 10 of these awards for all the graduating seniors in Dornsife College. Alexa is a double major in Linguistics and English. She has worked with Michael Shepherd (Dornsife post-doctoral fellow) on a project on the use of dialect in literature. She is also conducting a research project with Elsi Kaiser at the USC Language Processing Lab investigating the relation between perspective-taking, pronoun resolution and free indirect discourse. Congratulations to Alexa!
29 April 2012
Linguist visiting from Amsterdam
This week, Hedde Zeijlstra is visiting us from the University of Amsterdam. Hedde works on syntax and semantics, most notably on negation, polarity, and concord/agreement phenomena. He is giving a talk at Syntax+ on Monday, Apr 30, at noon in GFS 330. His talk is entitled "One law for the rich and another for the poor: The Rich Agreement Hypothesis rehabilitated" [Joint work with Olaf Koeneman].
12 April 2012
USC alumn presenting at CLS
Tommi Leung (2007 PhD graduate) is giving a presentation titled "Sluicing may repair LF-constraints" at Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS) 48 this weekend.
10 April 2012
USC linguists at UA
Two of our faculty members gave invited talks at University of Arizona Linguistic Colloquium recently. Roumyana Pancheva talked about "Superlative movement out of nominal phrases and focus intervention effects" (joint work with Barbara Tomaszewicz) and Maria Luisa Zubizarreta talked about "The origins of the low focus position".
29 March 2012
USC presence at GLOW
This week, Barbara Tomaszewicz is attending Generative Linguistics in the Old World (GLOW) 35, where she will present "A family of exclusives in Polish" at the workshop on Association with Focus.
28 March 2012
USC linguist at PLC @ UPenn
This past weekend, Katy McKinney-Bock presented her work "Deriving Split-antecedent Relative Clauses" at the Penn Linguistics Colloquium (PLC) 36 at the University of Pennsylvania.
27 March 2012
USC presence at PLAS @ Purdue University
Alfredo García Pardo attended this year's Purdue Linguistics Association Symposium on March 24th, where he presented his work "Bare Nouns and Quantity Effects in Romance".
USC Linguists, Great Mentors!
We are extremely pleased to announce that Elsi Kaiser and Roumyana Pancheva have both won the USC Mellon Award for Mentoring from the Mellon Mentoring forum, in recognition of their outstanding mentoring of graduate students!
A list of the awardees is posted on the program's website.
The awards ceremony will take place on April 23rd, 2012.
In previous years, Hagit Borer (in 2010) and Rachel Walker (in 2008) have been the recipients of this award in recognition of their exceptional mentoring.
Cheers to Elsi and Roumi, and to the awesome mentoring spirit among USC Linguists!
25 March 2012
USC linguists invited to GIST 5!
Last week, Barbara Tomaszewicz and Roumyana Pancheva were invited speakers at Generalizing Relative Strategies (GIST) 5 at the Ghent University, Belgium.
Barbara gave a talk on "The morphosyntax of Polish (un)conditionals", and Roumyana gave a joint talk with Rajesh Bhatt on "Two superlative puzzles". The program can be found here.
24 March 2012
USC linguists at FASAL 2 @ MIT
During Spring Break, Priyanka Biswas, Arunima Choudhury, Sarah Ouwayda, Roumyana Pancheva, Saurov Syed, Andrew Simpson, and Mythili Menon went to Boston and gave talks at Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages (FASAL) 2 at MIT. Janet Anderson also came to listen to the talks.
The next FASAL meeting will be held at USC in 2013. We look forward to seeing everyone next year in Los Angeles!
16 March 2012
USC linguists at CUNY
During the spring break, some of us went to CUNY and presented work at CUNY 2012 (Mar 14-16):
Heeju Hwang & Elsi Kaiser
Coordinating lexical and structural information during language production: Evidence from semantic and structural priming
David Cheng-Huan Li & Elsi Kaiser
Speech rate mediated compensation for assimilation in spoken word recognition
02 March 2012
Alumni news!
We are happy to report the great news about two of our alumni:
Carolina Gonzalez (2003 graduate) has been granted tenure. She is in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University, Tallahassee.
Carolina Gonzalez (2003 graduate) has been granted tenure. She is in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University, Tallahassee.
Uffe Bergeton (2004 graduate) has accepted a tenure track position in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Congratulations!
27 February 2012
Travel, and more travel
Earlier this month, Elsi Kaiser travelled to Tuebigen, Germany and gave an invited talk entitled "(Mis)matches in syntactic vs. semantic prominence: Effects on reference-tranking" at the Linguistic Evidence conference (Feb 8-11, 2012). The weather there was a bit chilly, but not as cold as she had expected. Here are some pictures from the trip: snow and steep roofs that you never see in Los Angeles!
Also, in November/December 2011, Elsi spent two weeks running experiments at the University of Stuttgart. She is grateful to Dr. Klaus von Heusinger for helping arrange her visit. She used a Tobii remote eye-tracker, which doesn't require the participant to wear anything on their head. It's also very portable - she carried it all the way from Los Angeles to Stuttgart. Here is a picture of her explaining how the eyetracker works:
17 February 2012
CUSP IV at USC
USC hosted the California University Semantics and Pragmatics workshop on February 3rd and 4th.
The program is here.
A big thanks to the speakers and attendees, and a VERY special thanks to all the volunteers who helped with the organization:
Mythili Menon, Syed Saurov, Ulli Steindl, Mary Byram, Alfredo García Pardo, and Sarah Ouwayda.
And last, but not least, a HUGE thanks to Joyce Perez for all the help with the food!
05 February 2012
February Travel
Elsi Kaiser will be giving an invited talk on "(Mis)matches in syntactic vs. semantic prominence: Effects on reference-tracking" at Linguistic Evidence 2012 on February 9th at the University of Tübingen, Germany.
Priyanka Biswas will be giving a talk on "Reanalyzing the default classifier in Bangla as a degree function" at the 38th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (BLS 38) on February 11th at the University of California, Berkeley.
The program of BLS 38 can be found here: http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/bls/program.html
02 February 2012
USC linguists at WCCFL 30!
On April 13-15, Audrey Li, Roumyana Pancheva, and Barbara Tomaszewicz will be presenting at WCCFL 30 hosted by UC Santa Cruz:
Noun incorporation and non-canonical objects
Noun incorporation and non-canonical objects
Michael Barrie (Sogang University) and Audrey Li
Cross linguistic differences in superlative movement out of nominal phrases
Roumyana Pancheva and Barbara Tomaszewicz
A scalar opposite of scalar only
Barbara Tomaszewicz
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