Linguistics Undergrad won top prize for THI fellowship

Linguistics major Cal Boye-Lynn was selected to receive a 2023-24 Undergraduate Research Fellowship from The Humanities Institute, for his research project titled “Investigating visual information as a constraint on sound change”. Only a handful of students across all Humanities majors receive fellowships every year. Even more impressive, Cal’s project won the top award for THI fellowships, the Bertha N. Melkonian Prize. Congratulations, Cal!

New admits to BA-MA program

Two undergraduate Linguistics majors Cal Boye-Lynn and Josh Lieberstein were recently admitted to the department’s BA-MA program. This program puts Cal and Josh on a pathway that can obtain an M.A. in Linguistics possibly one year after graduating.

Congrats and welcome, Cal and Josh!

Three slugs at AMP 2023

Three Ph.D. students presented their works at the 2023 Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP) hosted virtually on Oct 20-22. Fifth-year Ph.D. candidate Maya Wax Cavallaro gave a talk titled “The syllable in domain generalization: Evidence from artificial language learning” (see slides here). First Ph.D. student Hanyoung Byun presented a poster on “Aggressive Reduplication in Japanese high vowel devoicing” (see poster here) in addition to his joint work with Jaehyun Yim (Seoul National University) on “Extension of phonotactic constraints across morphological subdomains: Evidence from Korean” (see slides here). Second-year student Richard Wang presented a poster on “Distribution of neutral tone and retroflex lenition in Beijing Mandarin” (see poster here).

Gong and Tamura at WAFL17

Two banana slugs presented their work at WAFL17, which took place Sep 27-29 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Assistant Professor Mia Gong gave an invited talk titled “On the Nature of Reflexive Binding in Mongolian: From Nominals to Clauses“, and third-year Ph.D. student Jun Tamura presented a talk on “Compounding Words in the Syntax can Produce Phrasal Phonology: Evidence from Aoyagi Morphemes“.

Professor Mia Gong (right) and Jun Tamura (left)

Professor Mia Gong (right) and Jun Tamura (left)

Upcoming Centennial LSA Annual Meeting

First-year Ph.D. student Ruoqing Yao‘s honors thesis research, completed at William & Mary under the supervision of Ph.D. alum (2006) Anya Hogoboom, has been accepted for a talk at the Centennial LSA Annual Meeting in New York, to be held in January 2024. Her talk is titled, “Resumptive pronouns in islands show confusability advantage effect.”

Fifth-year Ph.D. candidate Yaqing Cao will present a poster on “Modals and negations LF-PF (mis)matches in English and Mandarin” and second-year Ph.D. student Richard Wang will present a poster on “Rhotic lenition and neutral tone in Beijing Mandarin”. First-year Ph.D. student Aidan Katson‘s work “Vowel nasalization does not cue ambisyllabicity in American English nasal consonants: evidence from nasometry” in collaboration with Jose Alvarez Retamales, Sarah Rose Bellavance, Lisa Davidson, Amanda Eads, Alden McCollum, and Auromita (Disha) Mitra, will also be presented.

Cao at SS-Circle at UC Berkeley

Fifth-year Ph.D. candidate Yaqing Cao gave an invited talk at UC Berkeley’s Syntax & Semantics Circle last Friday, Oct 6. Her talk is titled “Modals and negations LF-PF (mis)matches in English and Mandarin”, and her abstract is attached below:

Studies on modal auxiliaries and negation revealed cross-linguistic differences in (mis)matches between their surface linear orders (PF representation) and scopal interpretations (LF representation): while modals like can in English demonstrate LF-PF mismatch properties w.r.t. negation, modals in Mandarin show strict isomorphism w.r.t. the negation bu. There are three potential accounts to such a cross-linguistic difference: scope economy approach, head movement/reconstruction, rich base-generation approach. In this paper, I argue that rich base-generation approach made the right prediction because there does not exist head movement of modals in Mandarin, contrary to the prediction made by the scope economy and head movement approach.

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