September 2015

Week of September 28, 2015

GSAS Indo-European and Historical Linguistics Workshop

Laurence B-Violette (Harvard University)
The syntax of Hittite ma-phrases
Friday, October 2 | 5pm | Boylston 103

Xiang at UCL

Yimei Xiang gave a talk titled "Questions are higher-ordered: Solving the dilemma between uniqueness and mention-some" at University of College London (UCL) on September 21.

Harvard at EACL 9

The following talks and posters featured Harvard presenters at the 9th Conference of the European Association of Chinese Linguistics (EACL9) that took place in Stuttgart, Germany, September 24-26.

  • Yuyin HePossessive Clitic de and Separable Verbs in Mandarin
  • C.-T. James Huang & Jowang Lin (National Chiao Tung University)Quantificational Binding in Chinese
  • Yimei XiangMandarin 'Dou' as a Pre-Exhaustification Operator: Quantification and Free Choice

Harvard Linguistics Circle: Fall 2015

  • October 9: Ian Roberts (University of Cambridge)
  • October 30: Juliette Blevins (CUNY)
  • December 4: Claire Bowern (Yale University)

Week of September 21, 2015

Linguistics Department Fall Reception (Photo by Edwin Tsai)

Harvard at LAGB 2015

Yimei Xiang presented her work titled "Mandarin dou as a preexhaustification operator: Quantification and free choice" at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB), which took place at the University College London, September 15-18.

Ahn and Majer Win Teaching Award

Teaching Fellows Dorothy Ahn and Marek Majer have won the Harvard University Certificate of Distinction in Teaching from the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning for the following courses:

Week of September 14, 2015

Harvard at SLS 2015

Marek Majer presented his work titled "Šatrovački – the autosegmental status of vowel length and tone in a syllable switching argot" at the 10th Annual Meeting of the Slavic Linguistics Society (SLS), which took place at Heidelberg University, Germany, September 4-6.

Harvard at SuB20

The following talks and posters featured Harvard presenters at the 20th meeting of Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB20) that took place at the University of Tübingen, Germany, September 8-11.

  • Dorothy Ahn: NPI intervention of too
  • Andreea Nicolae (PhD 2013) & Uli Sauerland (ZAS): A contest of strength: "or" versus "either or"
  • Yimei Xiang: Complete and true: a uniform analysis for mention-some and mention-all questions

Polinsky Named LSA Fellow

Professor Maria Polinsky has been named a Class of 2016 LSA Fellow. Congratulations, Masha!

Language Universals Workshop: Fall 2015

  • Oct 16: Noah Goodman (Stanford)
  • Nov 13: Colin Wilson (Johns Hopkins)

For more information and updates, please check the Language Universals Workshop page.

... Read more about Week of September 14, 2015

Week of September 7, 2015

Department welcome picnic on Tuesday, September 1. (Photo by Edwin Tsai)

Ling 108: MW 11-12 in Boylston 303

The schedule for Linguistics 108: Introduction to Historical Linguistics has changed. The course is now scheduled for Mondays and Wednesdays 11am-12pm, in Boylston 303; the section will be on Fridays 11am-12am in Boylston 105 starting this Friday, Sept. 11.

September Events

  • Study Card Day: Thursday, September 10
  • Department Fall Reception: Thursday, September 17 5:00pm

Davidson Joins as Assistant Professor

The Department is excited to welcome Kathryn Davidson, who joined us as Assistant Professor of Linguistics on July 1.

Kathryn Davidson's research focuses on formal and experimental semantics and pragmatics, as well as language acquisition, trying to understand how we comprehend sentences we've never heard before, how these change in different contexts, and how both children and adults learn to do this. She's especially interested in linguistics from the perspective of visual language, including full natural sign languages like American Sign Language and co-speech gesture to spoken languages like English.

Kate began her linguistic studies at the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in math and linguistics. She received her PhD in Linguistics in 2011 from the University of California, San Diego, where she wrote her dissertation on "The Nature of the Semantic Scale: Evidence from Sign Language Research" under the direction of Ivano Caponigro and Rachel Mayberry. She's previously visited Harvard Linguistics as a graduate student in 2009, and later held a postdoctoral position in Linguistics at the University of Connecticut working under Diane Lillo-Martin on bimodal (sign and speech) bilingualism and most recently a joint postdoctoral appointment in Cognitive Science and Linguistics at Yale where she's advised students on projects related to semantic acquisition, bilingualism, and formal semantics in ASL.

Besides establishing her lab as a place that welcomes research on both formal and experimental approaches to language meaning and language modality, Kate looks forward to teaching and participating in the extremely active community of researchers interested in the mind at Harvard and the greater Boston area.

Welcome, Kate!

Congratulations, Dr. Bae!

Congratulations to Sun-Hee Bae who has successfully defended her dissertation, "The Syntax-Phonology Interface in Native and Near-Native Korean" on Wednesday, September 2, 2015.

Left to right: Maria Polinsky, Sun-Hee Bae, C.-T. James Huang.

... Read more about Week of September 7, 2015