MERİÇLİ AT CONCALL

Graduate student Ben Meriçli spent last weekend in Bloomington, Indiana rubbing shoulders with linguists from every corner of Central Asia at the second biennial Conference on Central Asian Languages and Linguistics (ConCALL). (Our very own Jorge Hankamer was an invited speaker at the first.) While other presenters hailed from such Silk Road capitals as Urumqi, Dushanbe, and Ulaanbaatar, Ben gave a paper from the fringes of the region, entitled “Perfective by Default: Aspect-Shifting Affixes in Turkish.”

Highlights of the conference included an invited talk by renowned Turkologist Marcel Erdal, as well as by linguists including Barış Kabak and Arsalan Kahnemuyipour, not to mention an evening of musical performances in Azerbaijani, Persian, Turkish, and Uyghur. Ben’s wasn’t the only talk on Turkish. Another presented new research on the phonetics of “intrusive vowels,” taking fellow Santa Crucian Jenny Bellik’s second qualifying paper as it’s starting point.