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

Professor Pancheva's abstract, along with the other abstracts and handouts presented at the workshop, may be found in the workshop's program. 

A glimpse of the Welcome (Back) Picnic

The long-awaited pics from the annual picnic are finally posted! These pics show that we chat, we bbq, and we play! Photo courtesy - Evangeline Alva.

Finally, the pic of the photographer

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

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