Week of Oct 27

Harvard at NELS 56

The 56th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistics Society (NELS 56) took place on October 17–19th, 2025 at New York University. One of the keynote speakers is our own faculty Tanya Bondarenko, who gave a talk on 'Selective opacity and clausal embedding'. Another faculty member Jonathan Bobaljik gave a talk on 'The Itelmen Inclusive Imperative: Treetops, Clusivity, Allomorphy' in Session 4A: What the PF?. 

The former College Fellow of our department, Yağmur Sağ, also presented her work on 'From Numeral to Indefinite: A Kind-Sensitive Pathway in Turkish' with Metehan Eryılmaz and Ömer Demirok. Dorothy Ahn, who graduated in 2019, also presented a poster titled 'The semantics of demonstrative spreading in Kipsigis' with Maria Kouneli. 

Well done, Harvard linguists! 

GSAS Workshop in IE & Historical Linguistics

We are excited to announce the second GSAS Indo-European & Historical Linguistics Workshop talk of Fall 2025, this Friday, October 31st! Natasha Thalluri will be presenting research on Friday October 31 @ 5 PM in Boylston 335. Details can be found below:

Speaker: Natasha Thalluri (Harvard University)

Time: Friday October 31 @ 5 PM EST

Location: Boylston 335 (Linguistics department, third floor)

Title: "A diachronic perspective on correlatives"

We look forward to seeing you all there!

LangCog 

The next LangCog meeting will be Tuesday, 10/28 from 5:30-7:00pm, in William James Hall, Room 1550. The speaker is Dorothy Ahn (Rutgers University), and the title and abstract of her talk can be found below. You can find the schedule for the remainder of the semester on the LangCog website. Food will be provided, as always. 

Title: Reference makers in discourse

Abstract: Formal semantics literature often assume different underlying mechanisms for pronouns, definites, and demonstratives. In this talk, I compare the semantic contributions of different building blocks of these expressions and highlight similarities that surface upon closer investigation across different contexts of use and across different languages. I propose a uniform analysis in which all three types of expressions function minimally as labels for given entities of the discourse, which have implications on how the space of reference is partitioned. The apparent differences among the expressions along the scale of uniqueness, saliency, or at-issueness are argued to arise from broader discourse factors such as focus and Question Under Discussion (QUD) sensitivity that cut across the minimal lexical distinction.