Week of October 23
Preceptor Job Positions
Our ASL program is growing! We are hiring two new positions to start next Fall 2024, one senior preceptor (involving both administrative and teaching work) and one preceptor (fully teaching focused) in the American Sign Language program in the department of Linguistics. There is a lot of excitement about this opportunity to significantly expand our ASL related offerings to match the high interest by students and to welcome some new folks to join us in the department! For more details, please refer to the following links:
- Preceptor: https://academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/12880
- Senior preceptor: https://academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/12881
Harvard Linguistics Talk Series
The first GSAS Indo-European and Historical Workshop talk this semester in conjunction with the Harvard Linguistics Talk Series is taking place this Friday! Details are as follows:
Title: Language Acquisition and a Process-Centred View of Language Change
Speaker: Jordan Kodner (Stony Brook University)
Time: Friday October 27th @ 12 PM
Location: Emerson 305
Abstract:
I argue that the actuation of a diverse range of diachronic phenomena in phonology, morphology, and syntax can be subsumed under the process of generalization learning during child language acquisition. These include, among others, a secondary split in 20th century Menominee and instance of phonemicization by phonological 'rule reversal' in Middle High German (Richter, 2021), the sporadic 'irregularization' of Early Modern English past tense forms (Ringe & Yang, 2022), the analogical extension of minority inflectional patterns at the expense of statistically predominant patterns in Late Latin past participles (Kodner, 2022) and Iranian Armenian aorists (Kodner and Dolatian, in prep), 'Dative Sickness' ongoing in Icelandic morphosyntax (Nowenstein, 2021), and the proliferation of the to-dative construction (Kodner, 2020) and argument structure change for psych-verbs (Trips & Rainsford, 2022) in Middle English. But learning in itself is an insufficient explanation for population-level change, both because one does not entail the other and because not every change is apparently child learner-driven (cf. Labov, 1994; Labov, 2007). Combining insights from competing grammar accounts (Kroch, 1994), the sociolinguistics of peer-oriented early childhood interaction (e.g., Roberts & Labov, 1995; Nardy et al., 2014; Loukatou et al., 2021), and experimentation on levelling and matching of variable input by children and adults (e.g., Hudson Kam and Newport, 2005; Newport, 2020; Austin et al., 2022), this yields insights (Kodner, 2023) into how and why some innovations may progress through actuation and gain a foothold in a population while others may not. This in turn provides a means for distinguishing instances of child-driven from adult-driven change in cases where direct observation is no longer possible.
Taken together, this has broad implications for how we conceptualize language change: an ontology of effects in language change will not line up with an ontology of processes. An approach to the study of change which focuses on processes or mechanisms (including but certainly not limited to generalization learning) rather than outcomes and effects stands to bring clarity to a confusing tangle of descriptive phenomena. It reconceptualizes the problem space in a way that cross-cuts and reduces traditional taxonomies of effects (analogical levelling, extension, phonemicization, secondary splits, grammaticalization, bleaching, etc.) and opens the door for new insights into when, why, and how language change occurs.
Meeting information: Please contact Anabelle (acaso@fas.harvard.edu) to sign up for short meetings with the speaker on Friday Oct 27! You can find more information about Jordan's research interests and published work on his website: https://jkodner05.github.io/
Looking forward to seeing you all there!
Milenković at AMP2023
Aljoša Milenković gave a talk titled 'How powerful is too powerful? Constraint conjunction in weighted constraint grammar and its typological consequences' at the Annual Meeting on Phonology 2023, hosted virtually by Johns Hopkins University. Congrats, Aljoša!
Harvard at AFLA30
The 30th annual meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (AFLA) took place over this weekend (20th - 22nd Oct) at Lund University, Sweden. Jian Cui and Jack Isaac Rabinovitch gave a talk on 'Indices in the voice domain: a unified analysis for Javanese passives'. Our recent graduate Tamisha Tan was one of the keynote speakers this year, with a talk on 'Ditropic datives and weak case containment in Amarasi'. Congrats to them all!