September 2016

Week of September 26, 2016

Senior Faculty Syntax Opening

The Department of Linguistics at Harvard University seeks to make a tenured appointment at the rank of Professor in the area of syntax. Details may be found here. Please contact Cheryl Murphy for more details.

Ahn and Fuchs Win Teaching Award

The Department of Linguistics is happy to announce that two of our graduate students have received Bok Center teaching with distinction awards for the spring 2016 term. 

Congratulations to Dorothy Ahn who received the award for Linguistics 106.  

Congratulations to Zuzanna Fuchs who received two awards, one for teaching EMR 11, one of our general education requirements and one for teaching Linguistics 83.

Well done Dorothy & Zuzanna!

Harvard at IG Fachtagung 15

The following talks featured Harvard presenters at the 15th Fachtagung der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft that took place at the University of Vienna, September 13 - 16.

  • Marek Majer - "The 'Caland roots' of Balto-Slavic"
  • Julia Sturm - "πίμπλημι and πίμπρημι: An Instance of Aggressive Reduplication in Greek"
  • Hannes Fellner (PhD 2013) - "Unfreie Radikale: Wurzelkomposita im Griechischen"
  • Laura Grestenberger (PhD 2014) - "Vollstufige media tantum Wurzelaoriste im Griechischen"
  • Professor Jay Jasanoff - "The aspectual profile of PIE *gwhen- ‘strike, slay’"

Harvard at SCCC

The following posters featured Harvard presenters at the South Caucasian Chalk Circle (SCCC) that took place at the University of Chicago Center in Paris, September 22 - 24.

 GSAS Indo-European and Historical Linguistics Workshop

Lukas Kahl (Harvard University)
The Insular Celtic Equative(s)
Friday, September 30 | 5pm | Boylston 105

 LingedIn

Dora Mihoc
More evidence of heterogeneity in the class of (comparative and superlative) numeral modifiers
Friday, September 30 | 12pm | Location: Boylston 303

Week of September 19, 2016

Senior Faculty Syntax Opening

The Department of Linguistics at Harvard University seeks to make a tenured appointment at the rank of Professor in the area of syntax. Details may be found here. Please contact Cheryl Murphy for more details.

Linguistics - Departmental Teaching Award

Last June, Laine Stranahan was awarded the Department of Linguistics Distinguished Teaching Award in Linguistics for tutorials she taught in the 2014-15 academic year.  Congratulations Laine!  

The tutorial titles were:

  • Semantic Internalism and Externalism
  • Semantics and Philosophy of Time
  • Psycholinguistics of Scalar Implicature

Language and Cognition

Isabelle Charnavel 
Steps towards a grammar of dance
Tuesday, September 20 | 5:30pm | William James Hall 1305

... Read more about Week of September 19, 2016

Week of September 12, 2016

Senior Faculty Syntax Opening

The Department of Linguistics at Harvard University seeks to make a tenured appointment at the rank of Professor in the area of syntax. Details may be found here. Please contact Cheryl Murphy for more details.

 LingedIn

Dorothy Ahn
The, That, and THAT: Three definites across languages
Friday, September 16 | 12pm | Location: Boylston 303

Harvard at AMLaP

The following talks featured Harvard presenters at the 22nd Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP) conference that took place in Bilbao, Spain, in September.

  • Laine Stranahan with Dylan Hardenbergh and Jesse Snedeker (Harvard Psychology) - "Cognitive Load Impairs but does not Suspend Contrastive Inference" (Poster)
  • Yujing Huang - "The Unaccusative Hypothesis revisited: on the mismatch between syntax and lexical semantics" (Talk)

Harvard at CogSci 2016

Yujing Huang presented her work with Laine Stranahan and Jesse Snedeker,  titled "Reexamining the Unaccusative Hypothesis: a Visual World Paradigm study" at Cognitive Science Society Annual Meeting 2016 (CogSci 2016), a meeting that took place in Philadelphia, in August.

Harvard at SuB21

Dorothy Ahn presented her work in a poster titled "Weak, Strong, and Deictic: Three Kinds of Definites" at the 21st Sinn und Bedeutung, a workshop that took place in Edinburgh, UK, September 4-6.

Harvard at MIT Workshop on Exhaustivity 2016

Harvard was well represented at the MIT Workshop on Exhaustivity 2016 that took place at MIT on September 10. The following talks featured Harvard presenters:

  • Yimei Xiang (PhD 2016) - "Mandarin particle dou: A pre-exhaustification exhaustifier", commentated by Professor Gennaro Chierchia.
  • Andreea Nicolae (PhD 2013) - "Reducing the locality of PPI anti-licensing to an instance of PPI shielding"
  • Assistant Professor Kathryn Davidson - "The contribution of sign languages toward a new unified picture of conjunction and disjunction"

... Read more about Week of September 12, 2016

Week of September 6, 2016

Senior Faculty Syntax Opening

The Department of Linguistics at Harvard University seeks to make a tenured appointment at the rank of Professor in the area of syntax. Details may be found here. Please contact Cheryl Murphy for more details.

Department Fall Reception

The Linguistics Department welcomes all undergraduates, graduates, faculty and visitors to the Department's fall reception on Thursday, September 8th at 5PM on the third floor of Boylston Hall. 

Welcome G1s!

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

Shannon Bryant Shannon Bryant graduated with a BA in English from the University of Georgia. As an undergraduate, she centered her studies on stylistics, incorporating linguistic theory into literary analysis. Now, her primary academic interests include semantics, pragmatics, language acquisition, and language processing. In her spare time, Shannon enjoys hiking, aimless wandering, and knitting scarves for winter. 
Yingtong Liu Yingtong Liu graduated from Utrecht University with a MA degree in linguistics. Before that, she did her BA study in Renmin University of China. Her MA thesis investigates the link between reflexivization and binding in Chinese languages, with a decomposition perspective of Chinese anaphors. Her current research interests lie in syntax, lexicon semantics and formal semantics. In her spare time, she enjoys music, hiking and movies. 
Giuseppe Ricciardi Giuseppe Ricciardi graduated from University of Bari with a BA in Philosophy, from University of Genova with a MA in Philosophy of Language and Mathematical Logic and from University of Toronto with a MA in Linguistics. His MA at University of Toronto investigates into the so-called 'epistemic use' of the Italian future morphology. His academic interests include formal semantics and pragmatics, theory of argumentation, syntax-semantics interface, philosophy of linguistics and any other research area that aims to understand the relationship between language and reasoning. In his spare time, Giuseppe enjoys walking at a fast pace, practicing a light physical activity in the gym and having conversations that help him to regain his mental energies.
Zachary Rothstein-Dowden Zachary Rothstein-Dowden holds an MA in medieval history from Central European University and a BA in Classics and Indology from Brown. He is interested in Indo-European historical linguistics and especially historical morphology.  He also plays cello and enjoys going to concerts in the Boston area.