Week of Apr 21

Karee to OSU

The Postdoctoral Fellow at the PhonLab, Karee Garvin, has accepted a tenure-track position in the Department of Linguistics at The Ohio State University! Huge congratulations, Karee! 
 

Bhattacharya in 3-Minute Thesis Finals

One of our senior concentrators,  Antara Bhattacharya, has made it to the finals of the 3-Minute Thesis Competition sponsored by The Writing Centre. The final will take place at 4:30pm on April 23 at the Barker Centre. Concentrators are encouraged to attend and support our Linguistics representative! Good luck, Antara! 

LangCog 

The next LangCog meeting of the semester will be on Tuesday, April 22 from 5:30-7:00pm! It will take place in William James Hall, Room #1550. The speaker this week is Natasha Thalluri (Harvard), 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.

Title: Signatures of comparison in natural language

Abstract: Languages employ a variety of strategies for expressing comparison. While on one level there is significant structural variation across languages, on the other hand there is also variation in the semantic tools used to express comparison. I present an experimental method to investigate the semantics of four different strategies of comparison in English: 1. explicit comparatives (A is taller than B) 2. implicit comparatives (A is tall compared to B) 3. intensification (B is tall, A is very tall) 4. iconic comparatives (with a co-speech gesture).

I then show how investigations into comparatives in sign language raise questions regarding the role of iconicity in the expression of comparison. I propose an extension of this experimental setup to investigate iconic comparatives in sign language and present preliminary results from a production study in ASL.