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!