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Week of February 1, 2016

Spring 2016

Welcome back! As the Spring semester starts, the Department would like to say goodbye to the departing visitors Special Student Guy Williams and Fellow Jovana Gajic. We were fortunate to have you with us during the fall semester! We would also like to welcome Visiting Fellow Stefan Hoefler from University of Vienna. Welcome!

GSAS Indo-European and Historical Linguistics Workshop

Kevin Ryan (Harvard University)
Sanskrit nati: phonetics, morphoprosody, origin, and fate
Monday, February 1 | 5:15pm | Boylston 103

LingedIn

Introducing LingedIn, a series of student talks at the Harvard Linguistics Department, which started unofficially last Fall and will now meet regularly on every other Wednesday. We start with third year Gašper's talk on Tuesday, February 2 (note unusual time). 

Gašper Beguš
Internal reconstruction in historical syntax: Austronesian voice/focus system
Tuesday, February 2 | 5pm | Boylston 303

Liu to National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan

We are excited to share that Chi-Ming Louis Liu (PhD 2014) has accepted a position at National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan. Starting next month, he will be an Assistant Professor at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures. Congratulations, Louis!

Harvard at LSA 2016

The following talks and posters featured Harvard presenters at the 2016 annual meeting of the LSA that took place in Washington, D.C, January 7-10.

  • Laurence B-Violette: Topic-movement and clitic placement in Hittite
  • Zuzanna Fuchs (with Michelle Yuan and Ruth Brillman, MIT): Inuktitut mood-agreement interactions as contextual allomorphy
  • Yujing Huang: Similar but still different: new evidence for tone features
  • Jenny Lee: Derived intransitives are applicatives
  • Yimei Xiang: Deriving the ambiguity of mention-some questions by pre-exhaustifications

Recent graduates:

  • Hazel Pearson (PhD 2012; ZAS) with Tom Roeper, UMass: A methodology for testing for de se/de re ambiguities
  • Lauren Clemens (PhD 2014; U Albany) with Cora Lesure, McGill: Prosodic boundary marking in Ch'ol: acoustic indicators and their applications
  • Jacopo Romoli (PhD 2012; U of Ulster) with Timothy Leffel, UChicago, Alexandre Cremers, École Normale Supérieure, Nicole Gotzner, ZAS: "Not very" adj: vagueness and implicature calculation

Harvard at OCP13

Gašper Beguš presented his work titled "A Natural Origin for Unnatural Gradient Phonotactics" at the 13th Old World Conference in Phonology (OCP), which took place in Budapest, Hungary.

Beguš' article appears in JAOS

Gašper Beguš' paper entitled "A New Rule in Vedic Metrics" has been published in Journal of the American Oriental Society Vol. 135, Issue 3.