HOME / SPELL-OUT BLOG /

November 2014

Week of November 24, 2014

Language Universals Workshop 

Andrew Nevins (University College London)
The Rise and Fall of the L-Shaped Morphome: Diachronic and Experimental Studies
Monday, November 24 | 5:30pm | Boylston 303

Huang Receives Lifetime Achievement Award

The Department is excited to share the news that Professor  C.-T. James Huang has received the 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Linguistic Society of Taiwan "in recognition of [his] distinguished contribution in linguistic research and in sowing seeds of linguistics, inspiring young minds and mentoring promising scholars in Taiwan and elsewhere in the world". He was unable to attend the ceremony, but made a face-time appearance to deliver his speech. Congratulations, Jim!

Graduate Student Workshop 2014

The 4th Annual Harvard Graduate Student Workshop in Linguistics, co-sponsored by the Department of Linguistics and the Harvard Graduate Student Council, took place on Saturday, November 22. Thanks to the hard work of the HGSL committee, the event was a great success with seven presentations and more than 25 students, visitors, and faculty attending.

  • Lena Borise: Dissecting stress: peculiar developments in a Belarusian dialect
  • Zuzanna Fuchs: When and where can we use coordinated WH questions?
  • Yuyin He: Focus and the idiosyncratic copular sentence in Mandarin
  • Peter Schuelke: Case marking and word order in Roviana
  • Laine Stranahan & Yujing Huang: Testing the Unaccusative hypothesis: an eye-tracking study
  • Julia Sturm: The nota accusativi in Classical Armenian
  • Yimei Xiang: Mention-some and mention-all readings of modalized questions


Photos by Edwin Tsai

Assistant Professor Position Announcement

For more information, please visit the academic positions website.

Week of November 17, 2014

Polinsky Lab Meeting 

Reading Group 3: "Universals in comparative morphology : suppletion, superlatives, and the structure of words"
Wednesday, November 19 | 5:15pm | 2 Arrow Street (4th floor conference room)

GSAS Indo-European and Historical Linguistics Workshop

Andrés Enrique-Arias (University of the Balearic Islands)
On the Origin of si as an Interrogative Particle in Old Spanish
Friday, November 21 | 4:30pm | Boylston 104

Language Universals Workshop 

Andrew Nevins (University College London)
The Rise and Fall of the L-Shaped Morphome: Diachronic and Experimental Studies
Monday, November 24 | 5:30pm | Boylston 303

Harvard at SNEWS

Two students gave talks at the 2014 Southern New England Workshop in Semantics (SNEWS 2014) which was held at UMass Amherst on Saturday, November 15.

  • Zuzanna Fuchs: Towards a Focus Analysis of Almost Wackernagel Clitics in Wakhi
  • Alex Klapheke: An Alternative Semantics for English Aspectual Particles

Welcome, Class of 2017!

The Department is delighted to welcome the following Class of '17 members as the new concentrators in Linguistics:

  • Isabella Chiu
  • Gabriela Diaz-Quinones
  • Ian Maynor
  • Alice Newkirk
  • Betty Richardson
  • John (Jake) Seaton
  • Andrew Sheeler

HGSL Photo Contest Results

HGSL announced the two winners of the departmental Photo Contest:

  • Edwin Tsai, the author of the picture 'Paradise' (graduate student)
  • Carl Rogers, the author of the picture 'Itchy' (undergraduate student)

The winning pictures will be printed and displayed in the departmental lounge. Congratulations, Edwin and Carl!

Assistant Professor Position Announcement

For more information, please visit the academic positions website.

Week of November 10, 2014

Language Universals Workshop 

Larry Hyman (Berkeley)
Initial Vowel Length in Lulamogi: Cyclity or Globality?
Monday, November 10 | 5:30pm | Boylston 335

Polinsky Lab Meeting 

Neil Myler (Boston University)
A brown-eyed girl: a generative approach to "predicativization"
Wednesday, November 12 | 5:15pm | 2 Arrow Street (4th floor conference room)

GSAS Indo-European and Historical Linguistics Workshop

Anthony Yates (UCLA)
Luwian ‘Indeterminate’ Relative Clauses and their Prehistory
Wednesday, November 12 | 5:00pm | Boylston 105

Ling-Lunch 11/13 - Isabelle Charnavel 

Speaker: Isabelle Charnavel (Harvard)
Date/Time:Thursday, November 13, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

Linguistics Circle Workshop 

Draga Zec (Cornell University)
At the right edge: coda segmentism and coda weight
Friday, November 14 | 4:30pm | Boylston 104

Fall Open House

The Linguistics Department Fall Open House for prospective concentrators, which took place last Tuesday, November 4, was a big success. Here is a photo taken by Edwin Tsai at the event.

Good bye, Helen!

After seven years in the Department of Linguistics, our very own administrative staff Helen Lewis is leaving to accept a new position at Harvard. Beginning November 10, she will be Student Coordinator in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC). While we all congratulate her on the promotion and wish her the best of luck, she will be painfully missed! Here are some photos from the Good bye lunch that took place last Thursday, November 6.


Left to right: Gennaro Chierchia, Jim Huang, Cheryl Murphy, Helen Lewis, Masha Polinsky, Jay Jasanoff

Harvard graduate students with Helen

Harvard at Pronouns@Tübingen 2

Isabelle Charnavel and Chrissy Zlogar presented their work titled "Exempt Anaphors and Logophoricity in English" at Pronouns, a workshop that took place at the University of Tübingen, in the Brechtbau, November 7.

Assistant Professor Position Announcement

For more information, please visit the academic positions website.

Week of November 3, 2014

Linguistics Department Fall Open House

The Linguistics Department Fall Open House for prospective concentrators will take place this Tuesday, November 4 from 5:30 to 7:00pm (Please note the change of date). Please check the poster for more information.

Polinsky Lab Meeting 

Lyn Tieu (ENS)
Exhaustification in child language: Free choice and embedded questions
Wednesday, November 5 | 5:15pm | 2 Arrow Street (4th floor conference room)

GSAS Indo-European and Historical Linguistics Workshop

Thomas Palaima (University of Texas at Austin)
Mycenaean Kingship Ideology in Its Cultural Context: megaron, thronos, skēptron
Friday, November 7 | 4:00pm | Boylston 105

Harvard at NELS45

The following talks and posters featured Harvard presenters at the 45th Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS) that took place at MIT, October 31 - November 2.

Assistant Professor Position Announcement

For more information, please visit the academic positions website.