Upcoming Event: Humpty Dumpty and the Law

Please join Undergraduate Students in Linguistics and Graduate Students in Linguistics for our first joint event! Dr. Bethany Dumas will present an informative lecture on the connections between linguistics and the law.

Dinner is provided. Please e-mail usil@usc.edu to RSVP. The event will take place on Thursday, October 17th, 2013, at 6pm in Tutor Campus Center, Rm. 332.

Mythili's talk at SuB

On the 13th of September, Mythili presented a talk at the Sinn und Bedeutung conference, which was held in the Basque Country. The talk was entitled "The grammatical life of property concepts in Malayalam". She has provided this link to a video of her talk for us to enjoy.

Congratulations, Mythili, on a job well done! Thanks for sharing your work.

Roumyana Pancheva gives talk at TbiLLC

Professor Roumyana Pancheva was an invited speaker at the Workshop on Aspect held as part of the 10th Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation. It is a biannual international conference and this year it took place in Gudauri, a beautiful mountain resort in Georgia, on Sept 23-27th. The title of professor Pancheva's talk was: "Crosslinguistic variation in the perfect from the perspective of the PTS theory". Congratulations Roumi!

Summer update from Undergrad Linguistics Student Evi Alva

Evi Alva, who is currently a senior in USC's undergraduate linguistics program and a research assistant in Dr. Elsi Kaiser's Language Processing Lab, spent her summer in the Amazon forest of Brazil, in a town called São Gabriel da Cachoeira. There, she worked with University of Rochester professor/field linguist Wilson da Silva on documenting the language Desano.

Desano is spoken by only 200-300 individuals in Colombia and Brazil, making it an endangered language. Desano has been endangered due to language policies in Brazil, which recognize Portuguese as the one official language. Evi's focus was on adding to the database of the Desano translation dictionary (to English, Spanish, and Portuguese) and documenting Desano through photographs and interviews with native speakers about the flora, fauna, food and other topics of their environment. Evi also helped in recording data, transcribing and interviewing the native Desano speakers, and collecting data on their cultural views.

Thanks for sharing your impressive summer work with us, Evi!

Evi working with Desano speakers

USC at AMLaP 2013

The main European psycholinguistics conference, AMLaP; Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP), was held at Aix-Marseille University in Marseille, France this year from Sept 2-4. USC had several representatives attending the conference this year:

Effects of syntactic flexibility on Korean production: Cross-linguistic Asymmetries

Heeju Hwang & Elsi Kaiser (talk)

Auditory and Articulatory Interference on Rhyme Judgments

Dasha Henderer & Elsi Kaiser (poster)

Perspective-taking Effects on Pronoun Interpretation

Elsi Kaiser & Emily Fedele (poster)

Causality in Vision and Language

Elsi Kaiser, David Cheng-Huan Li & Iris Chuoying Ouyang (poster)

Some photographs follow:

Professor Elsi Kaiser presents a poster to attendees

Dasha Henderer with her poster 

Heeju Hwang outside the conference

Sunset at Marseille's Vieux Port (old harbor)

Congratulations to all who presented at the conference!