Week of April 1, 2013

8th Annual Whatmough Lecture

Bruce Hayes (UCLA)
The 8th Annual Joshua and Verona Whatmough Lecture: Saltation in Phonology
Monday, April 1 | 4pm | Sever Hall 113

Polinsky Lab Meeting

Workshop on Construction Grammar
Wednesday, April 3 | 5:15-7pm | Polinsky Lab Room 420 (Conference Room)

Information Structure and Word Order: Focusing on Asian Languages

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Saturday, April 6 | 9:15am-5:30pm
Sunday, April 7 | 9:30am-12:30pm | Harvard-Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave, Cambridge, MA

Saturday, 6th April, 2013 
Chair: Shuha Hu

9:15-9:30
Opening (C. T. James Huang, Harvard University)
9:30-10:20
Caroline Féry (Goethe University Frankfurt am Main) The role of Hindi and Indian English for a typology of intonation systems at the level of the sentence
10:20-10:50
Julie Jiang (Harvard University) Sentence initial position in Mandarin = Topic position?
10:50-11:00
Coffee break
11:00-11:50
Andrew Simpson (University of Southern California) On the syntactic derivation of post-verbal elements in SOV languages: Hindi, Bangla and the rightward scrambling debate
11:50-12:20
Edwin Tsai, Gregory Scontras, Kenneth Mai, Nina Radkevich, and Maria Polinsky (Harvard University) Quantifier scope in Chinese: An experimental study

Chair: C.-T. James Huang

2:00-2:50
Shuhua Hu (Minzu University of China) Does word order encode ergativity?-A case study on the split word order of SOV and OSV in Nuosu Yi language
2:50-3:20
Suleyman Ulutas (Harvard University) Word order alternation in Turkish: Stress, focus & linearization
3:20-3:30
Coffee break
3:30-4:20
Lauren Eby Clemens (Harvard University) What can prosody tell us about the derivation of verb-initial word order?
4:20-4:50
Sun-Hee Bae & Miwako Hisagi (Harvard University) Information structure and particle choice: Native and near-native speakers of Japanese and Korean
4: 50-5:30
C. -T. James Huang (Harvard University) Left-right asymmetries in extraction and information structure
6:30
Dinner

Sunday, 7th April, 2013 
Chair: Maria Polinsky

9:30 - 10:15
Chenlong Huang (Chinese Academy of Social Science) Word Order and information structure in Qiang
10:15-10:50
Bei Wang (Harvard-Yenching Institute & Minzu University of China) Effect of information structure and animacy on word order: A cross-linguistic study
10:50-11:00
Coffee Break
11:00-11:30
Noah Constant (University of Masschusetts Amherst) On the positioning of Mandarin contrastive topic –ne
11:30-12:20
John Whitman (Cornell University and Tsukuba University) T.B.A.
12:20-12:30
General Discussion