Week of April 17

Sixteenth Annual Whatmough Lecture

 

The sixteenth annual Joshua and Verona Whatmough Lecture will take place on Monday, May 1, 2023. This year's lecture will be delivered by Lenore Grenoble, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Chicago.   The lecture will take place at 4:00pm in Sever Hall 113 and will be followed by a reception at the Harvard Faculty Club.

 

Harvard LangCog

 

 Ariel Goldberg (Tufts University)   Title:  Phonological and Semantic Influences on ASL Signs and Processing   Abstract: With relatively few exceptions, most of what is known about linguistic structure and language processing has come from studies of spoken languages. As a consequence, factors that are important in sign languages but limited in speech have played a marginal role in linguistic and psycholinguistic theorizing. In this talk I report the results of a large-scale quantitative analysis of the American Sign Language (ASL) lexicon and a number of behavioral studies with the goal of improving our understanding of how sign languages are structured and processed. A number of phonological properties are found to influence the formal structure of ASL signs and their processing while some properties considered to be extremely common in spoken languages do not appear to be similarly influential. Intriguingly, semantic properties are also found to affect sign form and processing; these properties appear to interact with phonological properties while also varying considerably in their importance across tasks. I then bring together data from spoken and signed languages to shed new light on foundational linguistic and psycholinguistic questions. By looking across modalities, we can begin to discern which aspects of linguistic structure and lexical processing are invariant and which aspects are dependent on the specific properties of the language and/or modality.   Tuesday April 18 | 5:30-7:00 PM | William James Hall #1550

 

Harvard at GLOW 2023

This year, the 46th Generative Linguistics in the Old World (GLOW) Colloquium took  place at the University of Vienna and the University of Graz on 11th-15th April, 2023. The following members of Harvard linguistics presented their work

Deniz Satik gave a talk titled  `An economy theory of PRO'. He was also awarded a $750 Conference Grant by the GSAS GSC to attend this event.

Tanya Bondarenko gave a talk titled  `Between triviality and redundancy: evidence from Korean for the ban of CP conjunction'

Jonathan Bobaljik presented a poster titled `Redundant coding is not a good account for OV/VO alternations in Itelmen'

 

Sağ at UMass Amherst

Yağmur Sağ-Parvardeh gave a talk at UMass Amherst on April 7th titled `Number marking, kind reference, and singularity'.