HOME / SPELL-OUT BLOG /

August 2015

Week of August 31, 2015

Welcome to the Fall 2015 semester!

Classes begin this Wednesday, September 2. Classes on this day will follow a Monday schedule. Please remember that Thursday, September 10 is Study Card Day. For more information, please check the 2015 Academic Calendar.

Welcome G1s!

The Linguistics Department is delighted to welcome this year's incoming students to the PhD program:

Lukas Kahl has studied Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, Romance Studies and Classics at the University of Bonn, and Indo-European Studies at the University of Jena. He is interested in the historical linguistics of Indo-European, the areal linguistics of the ancient Near East, and issues in language classification, reconstruction, and typology. He also enjoys music, poetry, and physical exercise.

Kate Hodges graduated with a BS in neuroscience from King University and spent an additional year studying linguistics at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland. Her academic interests include formal semantics, the semantics-pragmatics interface, and psycholinguistics. In her spare time Kate enjoys exploring Boston, reading, cooking, and spending time with her dog, Baylie.
Gunnar Lund graduated from Boston College with a BA in Linguistics and Philosophy. There, he completed a thesis investigating the context sensitivity of gradable predicates. His main interests are semantics, pragmatics, and the philosophy of language, with further interests in computational linguistics and logic. In his spare time, he enjoys drawing, making experimental music, and watching baseball and weird movies.
Tsai-Heng (Tiffany) Yang graduated with a MA in Linguistics and a BA in Chinese Literature from National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. Her MA thesis investigates the distributive readings of Mandarin Chinese. She is interested in syntax, semantics, and syntax-semantics interface. In her spare time, she enjoys traveling, discovering new places, and watching NBA games of her favorite team, the San Antonio Spurs.

 

This Year's Visitors

The Department would like to give a warm welcome to the four visitors who will be joining the department this academic year:

  • Professor Wei Liu (Beijing Jiaotong University)
  • Professor Liying Zhou (Jiangnan University)
  • Jovana Gajic (University of Gottingen)
  • Fanjun Meng (Tsinghua University)

Thesis Defense

Sun-Hee Bae
The Syntax-Phonology Interface in Native and Near-Native Korean
Wednesday, September 2 | 7pm | Boylston 303

Lunch will be served September 3 at 12:30pm in the Boylston Hall 3rd Floor Lounge.

... Read more about Week of August 31, 2015

Summer 2015

Here are some news from the summer:

Harvard at LSRL45

Assistant Professor Isabelle Charnavel presented her work titled "Exempt Anaphors and Logophoricity in French" at the 45th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL 45), which took place in Campinas, Brazil, May 6-9.

Harvard at MFM

Gašper Beguš presented his work titled Devoicing in intervocalic position? at the 23rd Manchester Phonology Meeting (mfm), which took place at the University of Manchester, May 28-30.

Harvard at ECIEC34

The following talks featured Harvard presenters at the 34th East Coast Indo-European Conference (ECIEC34), which took place in Vienna, Austria, June 4-7.

Harvard at TEAL10

The following talks and posters featured Harvard presenters at the 10th International Workshop on Theoretical East Asian Linguistics (TEAL10) that took place at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (TUFS) in Tokyo, Japan, June 13-14. In celebration of its 10th anniversary, the workshop also featured a speech by Professor C.-T. James Huang, one of the co-founders.

Harvard at ImPres

Yimei Xiang presented her work titled "Mention-all versus mention-some: Exhaustivity and sensitivity to false answers" at Experimental and crosslinguistic evidence for the distinction between implicatures and presuppositions (ImPres), a workshop that took place at ZAS Berlin, Germany, July 1-3. Also at the workshop was Jacopo Romoli (PhD 2012) who gave his invited talk titled "On the idea that some presuppositions are scalar implicatures: the view from acquisition and Broca’s Aphasia”.

Harvard at XPRAG 2015

Experimental Pragmatics 2015 (XPRAG 2015) took place from July 16 to July 18, at the University of Chicago. The following talks and posters featured Harvard presenters:

Harvard at EGG 7

Aurore Gonzalez's collaboration work with Elizabeth Heredia Murillo (University of Nantes) and Hamida Demirdache (University of Nantes) titled "Negative Coordination in Spanish vs. French" was presented at VII Encuentro de Gramática Generativa (EGG 7), which took place in Buenos Aires, Argentina, July 29-31.

Harvard at SICOGG17

Jenny Lee presented her work titled "Null applicative in Ranmo" at the 17th Seoul International Conference on Generative Grammar (SICOGG 17) which took place in Seoul, South Korea, August 5-8.

Harvard at ESSLLI 2015

The 27th European Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information (ESSLLI 2015) took place at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain, August 3-14, 2015. Second-year Aurore Gonzalez and third-year Zuzanna Fuchs attended the summer school, and Assistant Professor Kathryn Davidson taught a course titled "The meaning of space: New advances in Sign Language Semantics" with Jeremy Kuhn. The following talks featured Harvard presenters: