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Week of April 15

LangCog 

The next LangCog meeting of the semester will be on Tuesday, April 16th from 5:30-7:00pm! It will take place in William James Hall, Room #1550. The speaker next week is Peng Qian (Harvard/MIT), and the title and abstract of his talk can be found below. Food will be available at the meeting, and you can find the schedule for the remainder of the semester on their website.

Title: The Cognitive Basis of Flexible Communication: Two Case Studies

Abstract: here

 

Senior Preceptor 

Frances Conlin (currently at Yale University) has accepted our offer and will be joining the department starting July 1 as Senior Preceptor, heading the ASL program. This is the department’s first Senior Preceptor, which is a non-term-limited position. We look forward to meeting you, Frances! 

Frances Conlin

 

Eclipse

Thousand of people in North America got excited by the sun eclipse last Monday. A fun linguistic fact about eclipse: in many Asian languages, eclipse is literally called 'sun-eating'. Such languages include: 

  • Chinese: 日食
  • Manchu (thanks, Jack): šun jeterengge
  • Japanese: にっしょ

 

Harvard Linguistics Colloquium

The next Harvard Linguistics Colloquium of the semester is taking place on Friday April 19 at 12pm in Emerson 305. Details are as follows: 

Title: Revisiting universals of prosodic structure

Abstract: A key motivation for introducing the concept of prosodic constituents in the late 1970s and 1980s was their ability to provide generalizations about the domains of phonological patterns. For instance, Hayes and Lahiri (1991) reported that the domain where coronal and voicing assimilation processes apply in Bengali exactly coincides with the domain of a postlexical rising tonal melody---exemplifying how phonological patterns "cluster" on a single prosodic domain. Yet, many prosodic studies on languages across the world in the past couple decades motivate prosodic domains purely as a side effect of proposing an inventory of boundary tones. Are tones "different" from segments in being conditioned by prosodic structure? Here, we assess the evidence for "clustering" of phonological patterns around prosodic constituents, and examine the relation between prosodically conditioned tonal and segmental processes, as well as evidence that lenition/weakening processes occur domain medially rather than at domain edges.