FYI: The blog has moved to a new address!

This is a reminder that the USC Linguistics Department blog has moved to our new home at USCling! Thanks for following us on SCROLL. If you want to continue receiving notifications about new posts, please follow us at USCling. See you there!
-The Editors

Hey everyone! We have a new blog address: please visit us at USC Ling https://uscling.wordpress.com/

And here’s what is going on in our department this week:

USC is sending several presenters to NELS at Concordia University in Montreal: Jessica Harmon, Alfredo Garcia-Pardo, Brian Hsu, Lanko Marusic, and Charlie O'Hara!

Monday, October 12

Phon Lunch, 11am in the Conference Room: Charlie O'Hara on "Harmony in Harmonic Grammar by reevaluating faithfulness" 

Colloquium, 3:30pm in the Conference Room : Sam Tilsen (Cornell University) will be presenting on Selection-coordination theory. Reception to follow.

Tuesday, October 13
Phon Lunch, 2:30pm in the Conference Room: Hayeun Jang on "Super cumulative OCP effect in Swedish" 

Notification about the Alumni in Industry event:
The event has been moved to November 30th (it has originally been scheduled for November 2nd). It will still be held after colloquium reception, from 7pm to no later than 8:30pm in the linguistics department conference room. Here's a reminder of the plan for this event:
The linguistics department will be hosting a professionalization event for graduate students to talk to recent graduates of the department who have secured jobs outside of academia. Topics of discussion include day-to-day job duties, necessary skills, how linguistic expertise is applied, and how non-academic positions are found. There will also be a Q&A session. Additional details about the event, including the list of participating graduates in industry, will be provided soon.

Reminder: LING4Change!

Don’t forget that we have put up collection boxes in the student’s lounge to gather donations for the Downtown Women’s Center! Clothing & Accessories (laundered, folded, and in good condition) are more than welcome, as well as donations of food and personal hygiene items.
We also have a box to collect commonly used items for recycling that are not recyclable by municipal programs so we can take those to Terracycle: any old Brita filters, used toothbrushes, cereal bar wrappers, snack bags and broken pens are welcome to this box!

Weekly Digest!

Hi folks! Here's a preview of what has happened/will be happening this week:

USC is sending a delegation of presenters to the Annual Meeting in Phonology in Vancouver: Peter Guekguezian, Karen Jesney, Caitlin Smith, and Rachel Walker. USC alum Michal Temkin Martinez (Boise State University) will also be presenting at this meeting. Next year we will be hosting Phonology at USC!

Monday, October 5

Syntax +, 3:15pm in the Conference Room: Chorong Kang gave a poster presentation on "Covert movement, audible in prosody". Alfredo Garcia Pardo gave a practice talk for NELS titled: "Decomposing the VP: Aspect, argument structure and the instrumental-subject alternation".

Tuesday, October 6

Phon Lunch, 2:30pm in the Conference Room: Meeting to discuss preliminary organization plans for next year's Annual Meeting in Phonology.

Thursday, October 8

Tea Time! 3:30pm in the Linguistics Department.

Friday, October 9

The first annual USC Hearing and Communication Neuroscience Symposium at Herkholtz Auditorium, in the Health Sciences Campus (more information on the post below!)

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Hearing and Communication Neuroscience Symposium this Friday, October 9th!

This is the first annual HCN Symposium

There is a fantastic lineup of speakers, and of course the HCN Training Program wants to put their best foot forward by having a great turnout. Lunch will be provided. The event will be held on the Health Sciences Campus, at the Zilkha Neurogenetics Institute (ZNI) in the Herklotz Auditorium. Everyone is invited!

Linguists presenting at the Center for Excellence in Teaching

Two professors from the Linguistics Department are presenting during Academic Careers Week (September 28 - October 1), organized by the Center for Excellence in Teaching. On Monday, Sept. 28, Professor Rachel Walker presented "Writing Your Cover Letter & CV." On Wed, Sept. 30, Professor Dani Byrd will present "Negotiating the Academic Job Offer."  Lunch is provided. More information is available at the CET website.

Several USC linguists are representing the department in the CET this year. Ed Finegan, Professor of Linguistics and Law, is the Director of the CET. Rachel Walker is a Faculty Fellow, and Canan Ipek is a TA Fellow. The CET is looking for Graduate students who are interested in being involved in the CET as a TA Fellows. Interested students are encouraged to apply to the TA Fellows program. Talk with Rachel Walker to find out more!

Welcome (Back) Picnic, Fall 2015

This past Saturday, September 12, was GSIL's annual Welcome (Back) picnic. The event was held in the Old Zoo area of Griffith Park, on an uncharacteristically muggy (for LA) day. Grad students, their significant others and pets, and USC linguistics alumni all came out and enjoyed the outdoors. Rousing games of Kubb and Jenga were played! Delicious food was enjoyed! Some highlights are on view below. Thanks to our GSIL Event Coordinators, Maury and Ana, for putting together this fun event.

The group gathers around our picnic table

L-R: Jessica, Monica, Thomas, Brian and Caitlin; starting a game of Jenga

Monica and Thomas with Jenga aftermath

Caitlin with her dog, Kirby

L-R: Sarah, Brian, Ana, Maury, Andrés, & Jesse; playing Kubb 

Summer 2015 (and beyond) updates from Faculty and Students

Welcome back from summer break, everyone! The Fall 2015 semester is already off to a great start. Many people in the USC Linguistics community had a busy Spring and Summer 2015, so we'll share their updates here.

Sierra Chinn-Liu
A recent graduate of the Linguistics BA program at USC, Sierra was recently accepted to UCLA's very prestigious Law School. Congratulations, Sierra!

Sandy Disner
Professor Disner was interviewed by USA Today in June for a story about the National Spelling Bee and the value of spelling in the age of spell-check.

Professor Disner was also a discussant in the "Session on Forensic Phonetics and Speaker Characteristics" presented by Professor Francis Nolan of Cambridge University at the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in Glasgow, Scotland in August.

Hajime Hoji
Professor Hoji is back at USC after his time off, and he has exciting news. He has finished writing a book on his research, Language Faculty Science, and it will be published soon. Follow the link to order your copy from Amazon.

Roumyana Pancheva
Professor Pancheva was an invited speaker at the workshop "Gradability, Scale Structure and Vagueness: Experimental Perspectives" in Madrid in May. Her talk was on "Cardinality Comparison and Plurality: The Processing of Comparative Illusions." She has also provided some lovely pictures (below) from her sightseeing in Madrid.

Parque del Retiro in Madrid, Spain

Plaza Mayor in Madrid, Spain

In July, Professor Pancheva taught a class on Quantifier Raising at the St. Petersburg Institute of Linguistics, Cognition, and Culture (NYI) at St. Petersburg State University in Russia.

Lastly, Professor Pancheva gave a workshop on "Patterns and Models of Semantic Change" during the 22nd International Conference on Historical Linguistics in Naples.

Saurov Syed
Graduate student Saurov spent much of the Spring 2015 semester traveling to present at conferences.  First up, he presented a talk called "Decomposing Definiteness: arguments for a split D-Domain in Bangla" at WCCFL 33, hosted by Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.

Saurov presenting at WCCFL 33 in March

Then, Saurov gave a poster presentation entitled "Is there a lexical distinction between lower and higher numerals in Bangla?" at FASAL 5, hosted by Yale University. 

Finally, Saurov presented a talk called "Definiteness in terms of Identifiablity and Inclusiveness: Splitting the D-domain in Bangla"  at CLS 51 hosted by the University of Chicago.


Congratulations to all of our students and faculty on an extremely productive spring and summer. We're looking forward to all of the updates that Fall 2015 will bring!

Welcome to the new cohort!

We are so happy to introduce the new cohort of Linguistics graduate students at USC: Welcome, class of 2020!

Betül Erbaşı

Hi! My name is Betul (with a high front round vowel in Turkish). I am from Turkey and so far I have spent all of my life there. I had my BA in Foreign Language Education and MA in Linguistics, both from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul.  My main linguistic interest lies in the interfaces of prosody with other parts of Language, especially syntax. To that end, my MA thesis focused on prosodic and morpho-syntactic structure (and their interaction) of a reduplication case in Turkish. I am also interested in other sub-fields of linguistics that relate to sound, such as phonology and phonetics. Actually, phonology and phonetics were what drew me into linguistics as a field in the first place, besides historical linguistics. So, I still love them all!

What do I love other than languages? Watching films is becoming more and more of a passion for me (which is why I think I made the right decision by coming to LA!). I also like walking, exercising (not professionally, though), listening to music. Lately, I do not know why but I have started liking cooking. In real life, I like combining the things I like doing. For example, I often exercise or even cook while watching films! For me, this brings more joy to these activities and saves time! This is the first time I will be living in a foreign country for such a long time and I am really curious what kind of experiences I will have. From what I have seen so far at USC and LA in general, it seems that wounderful times are awaiting me! Glad to be at USC and LA!

Tanner Sorensen

My name is Tanner Sorensen and I am from Omaha, Nebraska. I was an undergrad at the University of Nebraska from 2010 to 2013 before I did the MSc Linguistics at the University of Potsdam from 2013 to 2015. 

I am wrapping up three research projects right now. First, my thesis with Adamantios Gafos analyzed the primitive units of speech production as dynamical systems. I presented this work at the Second Workshop on Dynamical Modeling at the University of Cologne. A second project involved assessing the influence of two tongue movements on one another when they are produced in overlapping time intervals but with different functional segments of the tongue. This work was presented at the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in Glasgow. Third, I did some work with Shravan Vasishth for the 2nd Bayesian Young Statisticians Meeting in Vienna which resulted in a tutorial on linear mixed effects models in the Bayesian setting. I'm looking forward to getting started at USC, learning some new things, and taking my work in some new directions. 

Yifan Yang

My name is Yifan Yang (I think I have to reverse the order of my names in order to indicate Yifan is my first name), and I believe my name is much easier for you to pronounce than other Chinese names. I was born in a small city in North China, and have got a Bachelor of Arts in Tianjin and an MA in linguistics in Shanghai (by the way, Tianjinese is quite famous for its complicated tone sandhi pattern, but I think I am a successful Tianjinese learner!). As for my field of study, I mainly focus on phonology, especially Chinese segmental phonology. Previously, I worked on a special phenomenon called ‘rime change’. This phenomenon exclusively exists on the boundary of Shanxi Plateau and North China Plain, which was my birthplace, and it has phonetic, phonological, morphological and even sociolinguistic significance. I am now quite excited about joining this program of linguistics. I hope I could move further on this topic and I am also looking forward to doing more research on other varieties of Chinese, including Mandarin. I used to be a violin player but have not played it for quite a long time (that is a pity). I also enjoy running. Hope I could finish a half marathon and then a full marathon in the future! Nice to meet you all!

Jesse Storbeck

Hello! I'm Jesse, originally of the western Philadelphia suburbs. I graduated from Yale University in 2011 with a double major in linguistics and classics. My focus as an undergrad was on the development of the ancient Indo-European languages, with particular attention to the morphological systems of Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. After I graduated, I worked as an English teacher in Seoul, South Korea and later as a paralegal at a criminal defense law firm in New York City. After a few years outside of academia, I decided that I wanted to go back to school in linguistics and, in particular, that I wanted to work in a more experimental/quantitative subfield than Indo-European studies. I'm currently most interested in first language acquisition and psycholinguistics, with a focus on morphology and syntax. When I'm not working, I love being outdoors. I'm especially fond of hiking and road cycling. I'm working on becoming a better bicycle mechanic and considering participating in some amateur racing... if I can get myself in shape. In addition, I recently adopted a cat, so I spend a good bit of time hanging out with her. Her name is Lucinda (after the song by Tom Waits), and she is a six-year-old medium-haired tortoiseshell. I'm really excited to be joining a department as talented and welcoming as USC's!

Sarah Harper

My name is Sarah, and I grew up in southeastern Michigan (although I’m originally from New York, which is why I have weird diphthongs). I graduated from the University of Michigan with a B.A. in Linguistics and Spanish in 2014, and then spent a year working as an English teacher at an elementary school in northern Spain.

Research-wise, my focus is on phonetics and (laboratory) phonology. Right now I'm particularly interested in phonetic gradiency and variation, and in non-native speech production. My undergraduate honors thesis examined patterns of phonetic influence in third language acquisition through an acoustic study on voiced stop production by Portuguese learners; I'm currently working on a follow-up to that study that additionally looks at L3 effects on the L2. Outside of linguistics, I enjoy cooking and baking, singing, going for epically long walks and drinking lots and lots of coffee.

Recent USC Linguistics News

Hello everyone-

We are really pleased to report some great news from one of our USC Linguistics alumna:

Michal Temkin Martínez (PhD, 2010) was recently promoted to the rank of Associate Professor, with tenure, at Boise State University.

Way to go Michal!

But wait, there is more-

Check out this video, posted earlier this week on the Dornsife homepage, which features undergraduate Linguistics alumna Evangeline Alva and Dr. Khalil Iskarous discussing the documentation of an endangered language in Taiwan.