news from The college of arts and sciences
department of linguistics
2013
spotlight on the
Buckeye Language Network Lab at COSI Right now, visitors to Columbus’s Center of Science and Industry have the opportunity to see Ohio State faculty and student language scientists in action. As part of COSI’s Labs in Life exhibit, the Buckeye Language Network (BLN) is operating a laboratory pod in the museum. At the pod, COSI guests can watch experiments in progress, learn about linguistics, and even take part in an experiment. This is an exciting opportunity to increase the visibility of language research of many kinds, while giving researchers access to a much more diverse subject pool than typical university subject pools allow. Already several research projects have been conducted in the pod, including acquisition, parsing and eye-tracking experiments, dialect studies, and even a study on the genetics of specific language impairment.
Researchers test the eye-tracking apparatus at the Buckeye Language Network laboratory at COSI
Also, Ohio State students use the pod as a chance to learn. Undergraduates in the Science Education Outreach course (Linguistics/Psychology/Teaching & Learning 5700) make use of the pod as a class project workspace. Students develop linguistics demonstrations for museum guests. They also take demonstrations into little kidspace® for the museum’s younger patrons. In addition to outreach students and faculty-student research teams, the pod is staffed by linguistics graduate student Michael Phelan, undergraduate student Katie Bauer, and systems specialist Ping Bai. “Working in the pod is a great opportunity to get the public interested in linguistics research,” Michael says. “Most people we talk to don’t know that language science exists, but at the BLN Language Pod they get the chance to not only learn about this research, but see it happen and participate in it themselves.” For more information, visit the pod online at http://www.facebook.com/BLNLanguagePod
Michael Phelan shows off some experimental stimuli at the Buckeye Language Network at COSI
The Linguistics faculty support fund We are happy to announce that the Linguistics Faculty Support Fund has grown large enough to be established as an official endowed fund by the Ohio State University Board of Trustees. Endowment gifts are invested in perpetuity, with distribution from the invested contributions used to fund important programs or activities. The Linguistics Faculty Support Fund was started in November of 2012 with gifts from Professors Ilse Lehiste and Peter Culicover, and since then has benefited from the generosity of many others. The fund was created to support an endowed professorship in linguistics. Until the fund’s principal amount
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becomes large enough to meet that goal, the accrued income can be used to support the department’s faculty research mission—or be re-invested in the endowment fund. We express our sincere thanks to everyone who has made it possible to establish the fund. If you are interested in donating to the Linguistics Faculty Support Fund, visit giveto.osu.edu and search for Fund #644214 (also called the Distinguished Linguistics Professorship Fund).
Spotlight
Welcome New Faculty Marie-Catherine de Marneffe has joined our computational linguistics faculty. Marie received her PhD in linguistics from Stanford in December 2012. Prior to her doctoral studies, she received a Fulbright scholarship to visit the Stanford NLP research group for two years, where she worked with Christopher D. Manning. She has a master’s degree in classical languages, and a master’s degree in computer science, both from the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium). Her research focuses on developing computational linguistic methods that capture what is conveyed by language beyond the literal meaning of the words. She recently worked on “veridicality:” how people interpret events they read about in the news— do they think such events really happened, did not happen, or are just a possibility? She also has done research on grounding meanings from Web data, showing how such meanings can drive pragmatic inference. Her other interests include work on recognizing textual inference and on contradiction detection.
Rebecca Morley has been hired as a new faculty member in phonology. In addition to undergraduate degrees in physics and Japanese, she has a PhD in cognitive science from Johns Hopkins University (2008). Since that time, she has worked at Ohio State as a postdoctoral researcher and as a visiting assistant professor. Becca is interested in the question of possible and impossible phonological systems and determining which aspects of linguistic universals can be attributed to learning mechanisms, speech transmission, or grammatical competence. She officially joins the faculty in the upcoming Autumn Semester.
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Congratulating
Outstanding students and faculty Researcher Amanda Miller was nominated for an Outstanding Research Mentor award from the Undergraduate Research Office. The nomination recognizes Amanda’s generous contributions to the education and personal growth of undergraduate researchers. Graduate student Rachel Burdin and MA student Jeff Parker were awarded fellowships to attend the 2013 Summer Linguistic Institute. Graduate student Cindy Johnson received a 2012-2013 Arts and Humanities Graduate Research Small Grant to present her paper, “Multiple Antecedent Agreement: A Comparative Study of Greek and Latin” at the annual meeting of the Indo-European Conference in Los Angeles, California.. Graduate student Jane Mitsch won an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant for her dissertation project: Linguistic and Political borders in the Senegambia region. The project is funded jointly by the NSF programs in Linguistics and in Cultural Anthropology. Faculty member Judith Tonhauser received a Research Enhancement Grant from the College of Arts and Sciences, division of arts and humanities, for her proposed work, “Content and context in the study of meaning variation.” Tonhauser also won the Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). The award allows her to be
2012-13 members of the UnderLings, the undergraduate Linguistics club
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in residence at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University during 2013-14. Graduate student Marty van Schijndel and faculty member William Schuler, along with Luan Nguyen (University of Minnesota), won the Best Paper Award at COLING 2012, in Mumbai, India for their paper “Accurate Unbounded Dependency Recovery using Generalized Categorial Grammars.” Congratulations to faculty member Brian Joseph, elected fellow of the Center for Hellenic Studies at Harvard for the academic year 2013-2014. Graduate student Jefferson Barlew received a 2012-2013 Arts and Humanities Graduate Research Small Grant to present his paper, “Anchored to What? An Anaphoric Approach to Frames of Reference” at the meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society in Berkeley, CA, in February. Faculty members Judith Tonhauser and Cynthia Clopper each received an Arts and Humanities Grant-in-Aid to attend the German Linguistics Society meeting in Potsdam, Germany, in March. Their paper is titled, “Variation in the Prosody of Contrastive Focus in Head- and Edge-Marking Languages.” Faculty member Mike White was given the International Research Collaboration Award by the University of Sydney for his project with James Curran, Closing the loop: Combinatory Categorial Grammar parsing and generation of natural language.
graduate student presentations and publications Jefferson Barlew presented “Anchored to what? An anaphoric approach to frames of reference” at the Berkeley Linguistics Society’s 39th Annual Meeting. He also presented “When behind is in front of: the meanings of Mushunguli directional expressions” at the 44th Annual Conference on African Linguistics at Georgetown University. Rachel Burdin, David Howcroft, Cindy Johnson, Tsz-Him Tsui, and Rory Turnbull presented “What information theory can contribute to our understanding of paradigmatic change: the emergence of the mixed adjective declension in New High German” at the 10th annual Martin Luther King Day Symposium at Ohio State. They also presented “The development of adjective morphosyntax in High German: Using information theory to quantify claims about language change” at GLAC 19 at SUNY Buffalo. Katie Carmichael presented “R-lessness in Greate(r) New O(r) leans” at the 2013 meeting of the American Dialect Society in Boston. She also presented “Place-linked Expectations and Listener Awareness of Regional Dialects: An Experimental Approach,” as part of an organized session on awareness and control in sociolinguistic research at the 2013 Linguistic Society of America Meeting. Katie Carmichael, Abby Walker, Shontael Wanjema and Jane Mitch, along with faculty member Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, presented “Performing gender: A sociophonetic analysis of a gender mimicry task” at the 2013 Linguistic Society of America Meeting in Boston. They also presented,“New methods in corpus development: Integrating teaching and research through in-course modules.” Cindy Johnson presented “Agreement issues in Indo-European: Multiple nouns, multiple adjectives, and Albanian nyje particles,” at the 10th Annual Martin Luther King Day Symposium, Ohio State. She also presented “Ergativity in English Deverbal Derivational Morphology” at the 2013 LSA Annual Meeting, Boston, and “Multiple Antecedent Agreement: A comparative study of Greek and Latin” at the 24th Annual West Coast Indo-European Conference at UCLA. She also was invited to speak at LingLunch at Indiana University in Bloomington, on “Ergativity in English Deverbal Derivational Morphology.”
Rachel Klippenstein presented a poster titled “Phonetically and syntactically-based reanalysis in the development of verbal better” at the 2013 LSA Annual Meeting in Boston. She also presented “The meaning of Old English mynsterman” at the 10th annual Martin Luther King Day Symposium at Ohio State. Marivic Lesho, along with Eeva Sippola, presented “The sociolinguistic situation of the Manila Bay Chabacano-speaking communities” at Language Documentation and Conservation 7. She also presented “Social attitudes toward mid vowel raising in Cavite Chabacano” at the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics meeting in Boston. Scott Martin, along with Ohio State faculty member Mike White and Kapil Thadani (Columbia University) published “A joint phrasal and dependency model for paraphrase alignment” in Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2012). Patrick Reidy, along with faculty member Mary Beckman presented “The effect of spectral estimator on common spectral measures for sibilant fricatives.” at InterSpeech 2012 in Portland. Marten van Schijndel, along with faculty member William Schuler, published “An Analysis of Frequency- and Recency-Based Processing Costs” in Proceedings of 2013 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT’13) Atlanta, GA, 2013. They also published “Accurate Unbounded Dependency Recovery using Generalized Categorial Grammars” with Luan Nguyen in Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2012), Mumbai, India. Additionally, with Andy Exley, they published “ConnectionistInspired Incremental PCFG Parsing” in Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL’12), Montreal, Canada, 2012. Chris Worth published “A Hypothetical Proof Account of Chamorro Wh-Agreement” in Local Modelling of Non-Local Dependencies (2012), ed. Artemis Alexiadou, Tibor Kiss, Gereon Müller, De Gruyter.
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Faculty Publications Mary Beckman
peter culicover
Kong, E. J., Beckman, M. E., & Edwards, J. (2012). Voice onset time is necessary but not always sufficient to describe acquisition of voiced stops: The cases of Greek and Japanese. Journal of Phonetics, 40(6): 725-744.
Culicover, Peter W. and Ray Jackendoff. “A domain-general approach to ellipsis interpretation.” Submitted to Language. In press, to appear 2012.
Munson, B., Edwards, J., & Beckman, M. E. (2012). Phonological representations in language acquisition: Climbing the ladder of abstraction. In A. C. Cohn, C. Fougeron, M. K. Huffman, eds., Handbook of laboratory phonology, pp. 288-209. Oxford University Press.
A Variationist Solution to Apparent Copying Across Related Languages. In Copies vs. Cognates in Bound Morphology, ed. by Lars Johanson & Martine Robbeets, Ch. 7. Brill Publishers (2012).
Reidy, Patrick, & Beckman, Mary (2012). The effect of spectral estimator on common spectral measures for sibilant fricatives. InterSpeech2012, 9-13 September 2012, Portland.
Kathryn Campbell-Kibler 2012. “Contestation and Enregisterment in Ohio’s Imagined Dialects.” Journal of English Linguistics. 40(3): 281-305. 2012. “The Implicit Association Test and sociolinguistic meaning.” Lingua. 122(7):753-763.
Cynthia Clopper Clopper, C. G., Rohrbeck, K. L., & Wagner, L. (2013). Perception of talker age by young adults with high-functioning autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 43, 134-146. Clopper, C. G. (2012). Effects of dialect variation on the semantic predictability benefit. Language and Cognitive Processes, 27, 1002-1020. Clopper, C. G., Rohrbeck, K. L., & Wagner, L. (2012). Perception of dialect variation by young adults with high-functioning autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 42, 740-754. Clopper, C. G. (2012). Clustering and classification methods. In A. C. Cohn, C. Fougeron, & M. K. Huffman (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Laboratory Phonology (pp. 678-691). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clopper, C. G. (2013). Modeling multi-level factors using linear mixed effects. Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics. Turnbull, R., & Clopper, C. G. (2013). Effects of semantic predictability and dialect variation on vowel production in clear and plain lab speech. Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics
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Brian Joseph
The Etymology of the Albanian stër- Prefix. In Festschrift for Rexhep Ismajli (2012). Editorial Introduction to Anthropocentric Case Theory: How Are Humans Coded in the Discourse? by Zuzana Topolinska (Kenneth E. Naylor Memorial Lecture Series, No. 6), pp. iv-xii (2013). Editorial Introduction to The Structure of the Deseterac – The Metre of Serbian Epic Poetry, by Ilse Lehiste (Kenneth E. Naylor Memorial Lecture Series, No. 7), pp. iv-xii (2013). Editorial Introduction to From Phonological Analysis at my Desk to Linguistic Activism with Slovene in the Austrian Alps, by Tom Priestly (Kenneth E. Naylor Memorial Lecture Series, No. 8), pp. iv-xii (2013).
craige Roberts “Information Structure: Toward an integrated theory of formal pragmatics”. Semantics and Pragmatics 5.6:1-69. (Invited as a classic unpublished paper.) “Information Structure: Afterword” with bibliography of related work. Semantics and Pragmatics 5.7:1-19.
William Schuler Marten van Schijndel and William Schuler. An Analysis of Frequency- and Recency-Based Processing Costs. Proceedings of 2013 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT’13) Atlanta, GA, 2013 Luan Nguyen, Marten van Schijndel, and William Schuler. Accurate Unbounded Dependency Recovery using Generalized Categorial Grammars. Proceedings of the 24th In- ternational Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2012), Mumbai, India, 2012. Marten van Schijndel, Andy Exley, and William Schuler. Connectionist-Inspired Incremental PCFG Parsing. Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL’12), Montreal, Canada, 2012.
Faculty Publications Shari Speer Ito, K., Bibyk, S., Wagner, L., & Speer, S.R. (To appear). Interpretation of contrastive pitch accent in 6- to 11-year old English speaking children (and adults). Journal of Child Language. Weiner, S., Speer, S.R. & Shank, C.A.S. (2012). Effects of frequency, repetition and prosodic location on ambiguous Mandarin word production. Proceedings of the International Conference on Speech Prosody, Shanghai, China. Weiner, S., Speer, S.R. & Shank, C.A.S. (2012). Timed lexical activation of ambiguous Mandarin homophones. Proceedings of the 24th North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL-24).
Judith Tonhauser 2013 “Towards a taxonomy of projective content,” Judith Tonhauser, David Beaver, Craige Roberts and Mandy Simons, Language 89.1. 2013 “The prosody of focus in Paraguayan Guaraní”, Cynthia G. Clopper and Judith Tonhauser, International Journal of American Linguistics 79.2, 219-251. 2013 “Semantics of inflection,” Paul Kiparsky and Judith Tonhauser, in Maienborn, C., K. von Heusinger and P. Portner (eds.) Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning, Vol. 3, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp.2070-2097. 2012 “Contrastive topics in Paraguayan Guaraní discourse,” Judith Tonhauser, Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT)
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XXII, Ithaca, NY: CLC Publications, pp.268-285. 2012 “Diagnosing (not-)at-issue content,” Judith Tonhauser, Proceedings of Semantics of Under-represented Languages of the Americas VI, Amherst, MA: GLSA Publications.
Michael White Kapil Thadani, Scott Martin, and Michael White. 2012. A joint phrasal and dependency model for paraphrase alignment. In Proc. of COLING-2012. Michael White and Rajakrishnan Rajkumar. 2012. Minimal dependency length in realization ranking. In Proc. of EMNLP-12. Michael White. 2012. Shared Task Proposal: Syntactic Paraphrase Ranking. In Proc. of the 7th International Conference on Natural Language Generation (INLG-12). Dennis N. Mehay and Michael White. 2012. Shallow and Deep Paraphrasing for Improved Machine Translation Parameter Optimization. In Proc. of the AMTA 2012 Workshop on Monolingual Machine Translation (MONOMT 2012).
Don Winford 2012. “Creole Languages.” In Robert Binnick (ed). The Oxford Handbook of Tense and Aspect, pp. 428-457. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2012. “Pidgins and creoles in the history of English.” In Terttu Nevalainen and Elizabeth Closs Traugott (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of the History of English, pp. 592-601. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
OhioSpeaks members discuss pedagogy at the OhioSpeaks Project Workshop in February
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Alumni updates Gregory Stump (’81) was the keynote speaker at the first
Sara Garnes (’74) taught English at Wuhan University in
meeting of the American International Morphology Meeting at the University of Massachusetts in September. He also has a new book with Raphael A. Finkel (Morphological Typology: From Word to Paradigm) due out this spring from Cambridge University press. Right now, he is spending six weeks in Paris presenting his current research in a series of lectures at the invitation of the Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle at the Université Paris.
Wuhan, China, in July 2012, on a program sponsored by Ohio State University and Wuhan: WUSIEP (Wuhan University Summer Intensive English Program). The program is being offered again this year; those interested should contact Sara at <garnes.1@osu. edu> for more information.
John Nerbonne (’83) was elected president of ALLC: The Rex Wallace (’84) and Anthony Tuck (UMass Amherst, Department of Classics) currently are working on a museum exhibition project entitled “First Words: The Archaeology of Language at Poggio Civitate.” The focus is epigraphy and literacy at Poggio Civitate (Murlo), a pre-urban settlement in Tuscany some 25 km south of Siena. The exhibition is set to open at the Museo Civico di Murlo in mid-June.
European Association for Digital Humanities, 2012-1015. In November, he was honored by an Alexander von Humboldt Research award, which he plans to use to deepen collaboration with colleagues in Freiburg working on quantitative analyses of variation.
Janice Fon (’02) welcomed her new son, Yu-Ching Lukas Ping, in January.
Georgios Tserdanelis (’05) has accepted a new position as an IVR Senior Programmer at eLoyalty.
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past news and events See the Department Calendar (http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/calendar/) for upcoming events and information. Visit us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/lingosu
In September, students and faculty learned about linguistics faculty research at the Faculty Five Minutes of Fame.
In October, UnderLings Matt Hamann, Kate Schudel, Zhi Li, Nichole Ashley and Rosaria Tirone carved pumpkins together.
In February, the OhioSpeaks Project hosted a workshop with the support of the Buckeye Language Network.
In November, graduate student Michael Phelan and his wife Jen welcomed their first son Calvin.
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On October 4, Ohio State celebrated the kick off of the public phase of a $2.5 billion fundraising campaign. The But for Ohio State campaign is Ohio Stateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s largest-ever fundraising effort. More than 400,000 alumni and friends have contributed to the campaign so far and nearly 350 alumni and friends are currently involved in the campaign as volunteers. As Ohioâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s land-grant institution, Ohio State is the doorway to the American dream for hundreds of thousands of students and alumni. By investing in Ohio State through the But for Ohio State campaign, you, our alumni and friends, represent the possibility that exists when people believe in an enduring mission. With your help, there is no predicting the magnitude of our impact on peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lives. Please consider supporting the campaign and the College of Arts and Sciences with a gift to the Ohio State Fund for the Arts and Sciences or contribute directly to the Department of Linguistics: Linguistics Discretionary Fund A fund for enriching research, teaching and other opportunities for members of the linguistics community (faculty, students, alumni). Donations to this fund will be used to support visiting scholars; invite speakers; support activities that recognize excellence in teaching; research and service; host conferences/ workshops at Ohio State and elsewhere; and other such activities. Distinguished Linguistics Professorship Fund A fund to provide compensation and academic support for a faculty member in the Department of Linguistics. The fund becomes endowed when it reaches $25,000.00. The endowment fund will be invested by the university with the income used to provide support for, in this case, a faculty position in linguistics. Visit giveto.osu.edu for more information.
linguistics.osu.edu department of linguistics 222 Oxley Hall 1712 Neil Avenue Columbus, OH 43210