Category: Student News

GREENWOOD, OSTROVE AND ZYMAN WIN SUMMER RESEARCH AWARDS

Graduate students Anna Greenwood, Jason Ostrove, and Erik Zyman also received the good news this week that they had won summer research awards from the Institute for Humanities Research. Anna won a summer dissertation research award for work towards her thesis on The Role of Channel Bias in Naturalness Effects. Jason’s award will go to support his work with the local Mixtec community on the complex tonal system of that language, work which has both a theoretical component and a practical and community-based component (the development of a viable writing system for this largely unwritten language). Erik’s award will fund his return to the island of Janitzio on Lake Pátzcuaro in the state of Michoacán, Mexico, to continue working with native speakers of P’urhepecha to elucidate aspects of the language’s syntax. In particular, he will be investigating apparent raising to object out of finite clauses in this language and its implications for the theory of movement.

PHLUNCH PRESENTATIONS BY UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCHERS

Phlunch on Friday May 8 hosted four presentations of papers from Grant McGuire‘s Phonetic Analysis class. Everyone had a good time and got some great experience and feedback. The papers presented were:

Queena Lee and William Wang: Don’t Use that Tone with Me: A study of tone perception of L1 and L2 speakers of Mandarin

Alex Curtis: Gender Identification

Alyssa Billys, Zoë Kirsch, and Greta Lieberman: Perception of English and Italian Vowels by Monolingual English Speakers

Amelia McMillian and Eileen O’Neill: The Perception of Palatalization by Native English Speakers

CHANTALE YUNT PRESENTS AT CORNELL AND HARVARD

Over the past two weekends, undergraduate Chantale Yunt visited Cornell University and Harvard University to present at the undergraduate linguistics conferences hosted by both universities. At the Cornell conference, Chantale’s was one of just ten abstracts selected for oral presentation from a nationwide competition. Her presentations at both conferences summarized work she has been doing for her undergraduate senior thesis, Tu comprends tu? – Questions of Quebecois, which develops an analysis (syntactic and pragmatic) of a type of yes-no question characterisitic of contemporary Quebecois French. Chantale reports that the back-to-back trips to the East Coast were arduous, but that receiving constructive feedback from the presentations, getting a chance to visit the Cornell, Harvard, and MIT campuses, and making connections with other undergraduate linguists made it all incredibly worthwhile.

GRADUATE RESEARCH SYMPOSIUM

The 11th Annual Graduate Research Symposium (2015) took place in McHenry Library on Friday April 24th, and the Linguistics Department had quite a showing. Maho Morimoto presented on Degemination in Japanese Loanwords from Italian, Jed Pizarro-Guevara presented on the Developmental Trajectory of Relative Clauses in Tagalog, while Jenny Bellick presented a poster on Covert Harmony in Turkish, Kelsey Kraus presented a poster titled German Doch does not Signal Contradiction, but Might Doch be Mirative?, Deniz Rudin had a poster on Deriving a Variable-Strength Might and Erik Zyman presented a poster based on his work on Quantifier Float and Clause Structure in Janitzio P’urhepecha.

ZYMAN AT BERKELEY

On Friday April 17th, Erik Zyman travelled to Berkeley to give a talk in the Syntax & Semantics Circle of the Berkeley Linguistics Department. Erik’s talk was on Quantifier Float and the Driving Force for Movement: Evidence from Janitzio P’urhepecha. He reports that he received a warm welcome and a host of extremely helpful comments, questions, and suggestions. The abstract for Erik’s talk is here.

 

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