Week of Sept 16

Harvard Linguistic Colloquium 

The first talk in the Harvard Linguistics Colloquium Series this semester is going to take place on Friday Sept 20 at 12-1:30pm. The speaker will be our own alum Gašper Beguš (UC Berkeley). The title and the location of the talk will be announced later this week.

A wonderful piece of news about the speaker: Gašper Beguš is to be congratulated for receiving an early tenure (in fact, he has been tenured retroactively for a year)! Huge congratulations, Gašper! 

Welcome, Andra! 

Our new departmental administrator, Andra Pham, is joining us today from the Harvard Trademark Program in the Office of the Provost! Her office will be Boylston 323. Please drop by and say hello!

Fall Reception

Please be reminded that the department Fall Reception is taking place on Sept 19th from 5-6:30pm on the 3rd floor of Boylston Hall. All students, faculty, visitors and staff are cordially invited. Refreshments will be provided. See you on Thursday!

LangCog

The next LangCog meeting of the semester will be on Tuesday, September 17th from 5:30-7:00pm! It will take place in William James Hall, Room #1550. The speaker next week is Valerio Pepe (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: Loose LIPS Sink Ships: Asking Questions in Battleship with Language-Informed Program Sampling

Abstract: Questions combine our mastery of language with our remarkable facility for reasoning about uncertainty. How do people navigate vast hypothesis spaces to pose informative questions given limited cognitive resources? We study these trade-offs in a classic grounded question-asking task based on the board game Battleship. Our language-informed program sampling(LIPS) model uses large language models (LLMs) to generate natural language questions, translate them into symbolic programs and evaluate their expected information gain. We find that with a surprisingly modest resource budget, this simple Monte Carlo optimization strategy yields informative questions that mirror human performance across varied Battleship board scenarios."

Bikina in SOUL 5

PhD student Dasha Bikina and her colleague Aleksey Starchenko from HSE School of Linguistics gave a talk (via Zoom) at Syntax of Uralic Languages 5 (SOUL 5) at Hamburg University. The talk was called 'General noun modifying clause constructions in Northern Khanty: from semantics to syntax'. The talk discussed clausal modifiers of nouns that go beyond canonical relativisation in Khanty. Such constructions have been previously defined purely on semantic/pragmatic basis, and no syntactic differences between them were presupposed. They demonstrated that in Khanty, they exhibit syntactic restrictions, and the class is not homogeneous syntactically. Congrats, Dasha and Aleksey! 

Tenure-Track Professor of Linguistics

The Department of Linguistics at Harvard University seeks to make a tenure-track appointment in the area of historical linguistics, with an anticipated start date of July 1, 2025. The tenure-track professor will teach and advise at the undergraduate and graduate levels and conduct an innovative program of research in historical linguistics. Preference will be given to applicants whose research centres on Indo-European or another language family. Application deadline is 10/31/2024. 

To apply: (https://academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/14037)