Week of September 4th - Welcome back!
PhonLab
Prof. Jonah Katz from West Virginia University is invited to give a talk at the PhonLab on Monday, September 11th. Detailed information:
Title: A prosodic-phonetic approach to intervocalic lenition
Date/Time: Monday, September 11th, 10:00 AM
Location: 90 Mt. Auburn St., Room 020 (basement), or on Zoom. If you did not receive the Zoom link please contact the Lab Manager of PhonLab, Eliana Spradling.
Abstract: This talk reviews cross-linguistic evidence that some common lenition processes such as spirantisation, intervocalic voicing, and flapping take place in a component of grammar that governs the fine-grained temporal dynamics of speech sounds and their interaction with prosodic structure. I argue that these lenition patterns are different from other processes sometimes referred to as ‘lenition’; that they do not manipulate phonological features; that they lie on a broader continuum of prosodically-driven phonetic variation; and that they are implemented primarily through subphonemic adjustments to duration and the temporal separation between prosodic units. With data from Campidanese Sardinian, I illustrate a schematic approach to modelling lenition as a language-specific property of phonetic implementation, operating on prosodic structure and the output of narrow phonology.
Department Fall Reception
The department Fall Reception will take place on Thursday, September 14, tentatively from 5-6:30 pm, location TBA. All department faculty, staff, students and visitors are welcome to attend. Details will be forthcoming.
Welcome to the Department of Linguistics at Harvard!
Four students are joining us as G1s this fall. They are Nayantara Das, Jacob Kodner, Nofar Rimon and Xiaotian (Alice) Wang.
We also have four visitors to our department in the coming academic year. They are
- Visiting Scholar Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini from the Linguistics and Cognitive Science and Psychology Departments at the University of Arizona
- Fellow Mirella Blum from the University of Edinburgh Department of Linguistics and English Language
- Fellow Yiyang Guo from the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, Trinity College, University of Cambridge
- Fellow Marianthi Koraka from Research Training 2636 Group, Form-Meaning Mismatches, University of Göttingen
A big warm welcome to you all!
Bobaljik Publication
Our very own Jonathan Bobaljik published as an editor a new book with two other excellent linguists this summer:
Jonathan David Bobaljik, Maria Pupynina, and Arzhaana Syuryun, (eds.) 2023. Bogoras's 1901 Itelmen Notebooks. Fürstenburg/Havel: Kulturstiftung Sibirien and Archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
This book is Scholarly edition of previously unpublished texts with new transcription and translations, available open access as .pdf.
WOLF lab field trip to Georgia
Four members of the WOLF Lab (James Lee, Natasha Thalluri, Richard Luo, and Valerio Pepe) travelled to Tbilisi, Georgia in August to conduct fieldwork on the Georgian language. They held elicitation sessions with various consultants, including some linguistics Ph.D. students, professors and lecturers from Tbilisi State University and the Georgian National Academy of Sciences. It was a very memorable and productive trip!
