GSIL Movie Night

Today, 1/31/13, the Graduate Students In Linguistics will present the first of a series of movie nights. Tonight's screening will take place in the Department's conference room (GFS 330) at 7:30pm. This week's movie will be the 1987 classic, The Princess Bride. 

Light refreshments will be provided. In order to offset the cost of beverages and snacks, donations are encouraged; proceeds will go towards funding future department movie nights.

USC at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America

The 2013 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) was held this year from January 3rd - 6th in Boston, Massachusetts. Several USC graduate students attended and presented posters. The presenters and the titles of their posters are listed below:

Using Visual World Eye-tracking to Investigate Semantic Differences between Adjectives
Katy McKinney-Bock (co-authored with Professor Elsi Kaiser)

Oils and Waters: On Arabic Mass Plurals 
Sarah Ouwayda

The English It-Cleft: No Need to Get Exhausted
Mary Byram (co-authored with Professor Elsi Kaiser and Professor Maria Luisa Zubizarreta)

Anaphora and Cataphora in Italian: Consequences of Linear Order on Null and Overt Pronouns
Emily Fedele (co-authored with Professor Elsi Kaiser)

Graduate student Binh Ngo also attended the conference as a graduate student volunteer. 

Several USC alumni also attended and presented posters:

Variation and Preferences in Modern Hebrew Nonce Verbs

Michal Temkin Martinez, 2010 alumna (Boise State University) 

The Syntax of Prepositional Datives in Lebanese Arabic
Lina Choueiri, 2002 alumna

Erika Varis (2012 alumna), Karine Megerdoomian (2002 alumna) were also in attendance.

SCSIL 2013 Pictures

The Southern California Students in Linguistics Workshop, SCSIL, was held by the USC Linguistics Department on January 18^th, 2013. Thank you to the organizers and those who presented at the workshop, and thank you to all who attended and participated! Some pictures from the workshop follow. We look forward to futures meetings of the SCSIL!

Afton Coombs, USC graduate student, presents her research

Karen Jesney, Assistant Professsor in Linguistics at USC, presents the keynote speech

Brian Hsu, USC graduate student, presents his work

Thomas Graf, UCLA graduate student, presents his talk. Slides may be found here.

Huilin Fang, USC graduate students, presents her work

Center for Excellence in Teaching Event

Two linguists will be involved in presenting the following Center for Excellence in Teaching event:

"Going old school: Using the chalkboard effectively for teaching and learning”

Rachel Walker, Canan Ipek and Bo Jin 
Thursday, February 7, 2013 12:30 – 1:30 pm
ACB 238


Everyone is welcome. Come out and participate! Free lunch will be provided during the event. Please RSVP here: http://www.usc.edu/programs/cet/calendar/index.html.

USC at the “How Categorical are Categories?” Workshop

Professor Pancheva presenting her talk

Professor Roumi Pancheva and graduate student Barbara Tomaszewicz participated in the workshop ‘How Categorical are Categories?’ organized by the Research Group TRAIT at the Center for General and Comparative Linguistics at the University of Wroclaw. The workshop was held January 7-9, 2013.

A view of the Market Hall (left) and a university building with the Cathedral of St. Vincent behind it (right) across from the Oder river

Professor Pancheva gave an invited talk on "Grammatical categories in the Mind/Brain". Barbara presented a poster “Comparison of degrees or of individuals? Focus effects in superlatives”. After the workshop they visited the TRAIT lab to plan a collaborative project.

A performance by the Historical Dance Group of Wrocław University during the workshop dinner

Professor Pancheva at Wrocław

USC at the CUNY Conference on the Feature in Phonology & Phonetics

The CUNY Conference on the Feature in Phonology and Phonetics took place on January 16-18, 2013.

Professor Rachel Walker gave a talk titled “Two relational dimensions in featural phenomena.”

USC alumna Jong-mi Kim, now at Kangwon National University in Korea, gave a poster titled “Non-native acquisition of phonological features: Evidence from Korean and English consonants.”

Jong-mi Kim will be visiting the USC Department of Linguistics this semester. Welcome Jong-Mi!

Upcoming Colloquia

The USC Dornsife Linguistics Department Colloquium Series is pleased to present two colloquia:

Liina Pylkkänen
Departments of Linguistics and Psychology
New York University

The Computations of the Composing Brain: Cross-modal Generality and Steps Towards Mechanisms

Friday, January 25th, 10:30 am - 12:00 noon, GFS 101
Reception to follow in GFS 330

                                                                                           

Alec Marantz
New York University

Words and Rules Revisited:  Separating the Syntagmatic and the Paradigmatic in Morphology

Monday, January 28th, 3:30 - 5:00pm, GFS 118
Reception to follow in GFS 330

See you at the colloquia!

Southern California Students in Linguistics Workshop

The Southern California Students in Linguistics Workshop will be held this Friday, January 18, in the Tutor Campus Center, room 227, on the USC University Park Campus. All are cordially invited to attend the workshop. Check-in and breakfast will begin at 9:30am. For more information on the workshop, please refer to the schedule. Any other questions may be directed to the workshop organizers atSoCaSIL13@gmail.com.

Sarah Benor Has Received Tenure

Sarah Benor has recently received tenure at Hebrew Union College. Sarah is an adjunct associate professor in the USC Linguistics Department and she teaches 'Language and Identity among ‘Hyphenated’ Americans' at USC.

In addition to earning this honor, Sarah has also been busy with several other projects. She is founding editor of a new journal named the Journal of Jewish Languages. Her book Becoming Frum: How Newcomers Learn the Language and Culture of Orthodox Judaism was published in November 2012 by Rutgers University Press. She has also started an online database of Jewish English. Other information about Sarah may be found on her website.

Congratulations to Sarah on these wonderful achievements!

Rachel Walker Promoted to Full Professor

As of November 2012, Rachel Walker has been promoted to full professor in the Department of Linguistics. Congratulations, Rachel!

USC at the Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America 2012

The 164th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America was held from October 22nd to October 26th, 2012 in Kansas City, Missouri.  The ASA meeting covers developments in theoretical and applied acoustics across a variety of academic and professional fields.

The USC linguistics department had two representatives this year:

How Tongue Posture Differences Affect Reduction in Coronals: Differences between Spanish and English*

Benjamin Parrell

*Best Paper award for students and young professionals, second place

Prosodic Characteristics of Three Sentence Types in Thai (PDF)

Alif Silpachai

Jangwon Kim, Michael Proctor, and Shrikanth Narayanan of USC’s department of Electrical Engineering and Adam Lammert of Computer Science also presented at the conference.