Week of Oct 13

Harvard at COLM 2025

The Conference on Language Modeling (COLM 2025) took place in Montreal, Canada, from October 7–10, 2025! Final-year graduate student Ankana Saha had a spotlight paper titled “The or That? Evaluating language models’ sensitivity to discourse structure in anaphora”, a collaboration with invited keynote speaker Jennifer Hu (former undergraduate concentrator in Linguistics & Kempner Postdoctoral Fellow, and now Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University) and Kathryn Davidson. The paper was presented at the special workshop on Pragmatic Reasoning in Language Models: Language Models as Language Users (PragLM), featuring exciting work at the intersection of pragmatics and computational linguistics.

We’re delighted to see Harvard Linguistics represented in the growing field of language modeling and pragmatics!

 

Harvard at SCCC4

Four (past) members of our department and the WOLF lab gave presentations at the fourth South Caucasian Chalk Circle (SCCC4) on 7-10 October in Paris. 

  • Faculty Tanya Bondarenko gave a talk titled 'Constraining long-distance wh-movement: The case of Georgian'.
  • Fifth-year graduate student Natasha Thalluri presented her work titled 'Wh-correlatives and free relatives in Georgian'.  
  • Richard Luo (BA '23) gave a talk titled 'I wonder if Georgian can tell us how tu embed(s) questions?'.
  • Jacob Fernandes (BA '24) presented his poster on 'Too big too fail: Selective opacity effects in three types of Georgian relative clauses'.  

Congrats to them all! 👏

 

GSAS Workshop in IE & Historical Linguistics

We are excited to invite you to the first GSAS Indo-European & Historical Linguistics Workshop talk of Fall 2025 this Friday, October 17! 

Jeffrey Bourns will be presenting research on Friday October 17 @ 5 PM in Boylston 335. Information of the talk can be found below:

Speaker: Jeffrey Bourns (Northeastern University)

Time: Friday October 17 @ 5 PM EST

Location: Boylston 335 (Linguistics department, third floor)

Title: "The Cherokee Stative Perfect"

Abstract: The prototypical role of stative perfects is the expression of resultant states. No such morpheme is described for Cherokee, yet a stative perfect of clearly identifiable form and function is reconstructible for Proto-Cherokee, and in both form and function it can be shown to persist synchronically in the guise of other categories defined for the modern language. Evidence for the stative perfect is likewise discoverable in the Cherokee documentary record, as archaisms preserved in the early Cherokee Syllabary tradition reveal. 

 

LangCog 

The next LangCog meeting will be Tuesday, 10/14 from 5:30-7:00pm, in William James Hall, Room 1550. The speaker is Meredith Rowe (Harvard Graduate School of Education), and the title and abstract of their talk can be found below. You can find the schedule for the remainder of the semester on the LangCog website. 

Title: The Importance of Decontextualized Conversations for Preschool Children’s Language and Cognitive Development

Abstract: Young children’s use of decontextualized language, or language that is abstract and displaced from the here-and-now, is associated with development of oral language (e.g., vocabulary, syntax) and cognitive (e.g., theory of mind, autobiographical memory) skills.  In this talk, I present a series of studies from our lab highlighting these relations and suggest some potential mechanisms for why decontextualized language may be so helpful for learning.

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