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.

USC presence at the Hispanics Linguistics Symposium

USC presence at the Hispanics Linguistics Symposium

Graduate students Sergio Robles Puente and Héctor Velásquez attended the Hispanic Linguistics Symposium in Gainesville (Florida), in October 25-28. Sergio presented his work "Acquiring Rhythm in Language Contact Situations - Spanish and English in Los Angeles", whereas Héctor presented "Sentence Modal Adverbs as Focus Sensitive Units". I attach a picture of Héctor during his presentation.

Southern California Students in Linguistics Workshop

The annual Southern California Students in Linguistics Workshop will be held on Friday, January 18, 2013 at the University of Southern California. It is hosted by the Graduate Students in Linguistics at the USC Department of Linguistics. 

Abstracts should be submitted no later than January 11th, 2013. For more information about the workshop, please visit the website.

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.