Abigail Thornton successfully defended her dissertation titled “Morphophonological & Morphosyntactic Domains” on May 14th in our first doctoral defense since moving online.
Congratulations, Abbie!
Dr. Thornton with her committee:
Abigail Thornton successfully defended her dissertation titled “Morphophonological & Morphosyntactic Domains” on May 14th in our first doctoral defense since moving online.
Congratulations, Abbie!
Dr. Thornton with her committee:
The 29 Annual Meeting of Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics is taking place virtually from May 8th-10th, hosted by the University of Washington. A number of UConn linguists are going to be presenting their work at the conference:
Franc Lanko Marušič (University of Nova Gorica) and Zheng Shen (PhD 2018, now at National University of Singapore). Gender agreement with exclusive disjunction in Slovenian
Ivana Jovović. On discourse licensing of co-indexed readings of pronouns: Serbo-Croatian strong pronouns as topic-shift anaphors
Sandra Stjepanović (PhD 1999, now at West Virginia University). Multiple Source Left Branch Extraction in Serbo-Croatian
Pasha Koval. Case transmission as long-distance phi-concord
The 43rd annual GLOW conference is taking place virtually from April 8th-10th, hosted by the Humboldt University of Berlin. UConn linguists are also going to be presenting their work at the conference:
The 42nd Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) is taking place from March 4-6th in Hamburg, where two talks will be given by UConn linguists:
The 38th meeting of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL) is taking place from March 6-8th at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where two talks will be given by UConn linguists:
Alexandre Vaxman (PhD 2016) will present a poster titled Addressing exceptionality: Lexical accent systems as scalar weight-sensitive systems at the Berkeley Linguistics Society Workshop on Phonological Representations at UC Berkeley on February 8th, 2020.
Yuya Noguchi presented his poster titled On the embeddability of cleft wh-questions in Japanese at the 28th Conference of the Student Organisation of Linguistics in Europe, which took place at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona on January 29th-31st 2020.
Željko Bošković will be giving an invited talk on the 24th January 2020 at the University of Leiden as part of the Workshop in honor of the defense of Anastasiia Ionova. The talk will be titled On wh and subject positions.
A number of UConn linguists presented their work at the 44th Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD) on November 7th-10th, with a talk by:
… and poster presentations by:
A paper co-authored by Marie Coppola, “The noun-verb distinction in established and emergent sign systems” (Language 95, no. 2 (2019): 230-267), has won this year’s Best Paper in Language Award.
Congratulations to Marie and her co-authors: Natasha Abner, Molly Flaherty, Katelyn Stangl, Diane Brentari, and Susan Goldin-Meadow!
Abstract: In a number of signed languages, the distinction between nouns and verbs is evident in the morphophonology of the signs themselves. Here we use a novel elicitation paradigm to investigate the systematicity, emergence, and development of the noun-verb distinction (qua objects vs. actions) in an established sign language, American Sign Language (ASL), an emerging sign language, Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL), and in the precursor to NSL, Nicaraguan homesigns. We show that a distinction between nouns and verbs is marked (by utterance position and movement size) and thus present in all groups–even homesigners, who have invented their systems without a conventional language model. However, there is also evidence of emerging crosslinguistic variation in whether a base hand is used to mark the noun-verb contrast. Finally, variation in how movement repetition and base hand are used across Nicaraguan groups offers insight into the pressures that influence the development of a linguistic system. Specifically, early signers of NSL use movement repetition and base hand in ways similar to homesigners but different from signers who entered the NSL community more recently, suggesting that intergenerational transmission to new learners (not just sharing a language with a community) plays a key role in the development of these devices. These results bear not only on the importance of the noun-verb distinction in human communication, but also on how this distinction emerges and develops in a new (sign) language.