Week of Oct 28 - Happy Halloween!
Napoli at Harvard Linguistics Colloquium Talk Series
The third talk for Harvard Linguistics Colloquium Talk Series of the semester was given by our own alum Donna Jo Napoli (Swarthmore College) on Friday Oct 25th. The talk was titled 'Movement in Sign Languages' and was based on the collaborated work by Donna Jo Napoli and Cornelia Loos. Thank you so much, Donna Jo, for the thought-provoking talk! It was nice to have you back at Harvard again.
LangCog
The next LangCog meeting of the semester will be on Tuesday, October 29th from 5:30-7:00pm. It will take place in William James Hall, Room #1550. Our speaker is Ezer Rasin (Tel Aviv University/MIT) and the title and abstract of the 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.
Speaker: Ezer Rasin
Title: How children learn the hidden sound patterns of their language: a computational approach
Abstract: The sound system of a language contains patterns that humans learn from their input in the first few years of their lives. Some of those patterns are "hidden" (also called "opaque"), in the sense that they are only observable at a level of abstraction that is remote from the surface sounds that children hear. Such patterns pose a cognitive puzzle: how do learners make the inductive leap required to abstract away from the surface and discover a hidden pattern? I will present an approach to this puzzle based on the principle of Minimum Description Length (MDL) -- a mathematical formalization of Occam's Razor -- according to which children look for the system of rules that provides the simplest description of their input. This approach provides the first implemented learning algorithm that can acquire hidden patterns from distributional evidence alone.
Indo-European and Historical Linguistics Workshop
The third GSAS Indo-European & Historical Linguistics Workshop talk of the Fall 2024 semester will take place this Friday! Setayesh Dashti will be presenting research on Friday November 1 @ 5 PM on ZOOM. Attendees may choose to attend on zoom or gather in-person in Boylston 335 (highly encouraged!). Please find all details below.
Speaker: Setayesh Dashti (University of Oxford)
Time: Friday November 1 @ 5 PM EST
Title: “Breaking Free: Rethinking Free Relatives Through the Lens of Old Avestan”
Location: ZOOM or Boylston 335 (Linguistics department, third floor)
Zoom invite link: Please contact the workshop coordinator Anabelle Caso for the link.
We look forward to seeing you all there!
Halloween Social
There will be a very SPOOKY and very FUN department HALLOWEEN PARTY on October 31! Please make sure that you have added this event to your calendar and recall that costumes are highly encouraged!
To reiterate:
WHAT: department Halloween party with costume contest
WHEN: Thursday October 31 @ 5pm
WHERE: Boylston Hall, 3rd floor
WHY: fun!