news from The college of arts and sciences
department of linguistics
Fall 2013
spotlight on
Ohio Speaks
Yuhan Lin, Stephany Lu, Alec Buchner, Abby Walker, Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, Shontael Wanjema, and Katie Carmichael at last year’s Ohio Speaks workshop
Ohio Speaks is a group primarily based in the Department of Linguistics that designs pedagogical content for courses in linguistics, Spanish and Portuguese, and Slavic, along with freshman composition courses.
The modules begin with students digitally recording themselves. Various aspects of these recordings are tagged by Ohio Speaks linguists that include pitch, duration, and information about vowel formants.
These modules are designed to teach students something about speech in the context of their courses, but also potentially provide useful data for linguistics researchers.
Then, the tagged recordings are returned to the students, and Ohio Speaks gives a presentation to the class that relates the information in the recordings to the class content; for example, a course on language and gender might correlate the data to gender.
The project began as an idea in Professor Kathryn CampbellKibler’s Sociolinguistic Field Methods course three years ago, and they have been developing content and collecting data for two years. Ohio Speaks includes two paid graduate assistants, seven participating graduate students from linguistics and Spanish, and three undergraduate interns. Part of the funding for Ohio Speaks comes from TIE (Targeted Investment for Excellence) funds and from a Coca Cola Critical Difference for Women Research Grant.
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The students are offered the choice to whether or not to give permission for their recordings to be used by researchers. This has the potential to create a large body of speech data from university students that continues over time. Going forward, Ohio Speaks will use funds from the TIE to work on creating a website that will allow students to record themselves through the web interface. Graduate student Chris Worth is the primary programmer working on the project. This will help Ohio Speaks reach a broader set of courses with greater ease.
Department of Linguistics Program Review We are undergoing an external program review this year. This is an opportunity for us to gather data on the department that will be helpful to us and to university administrators in making sure that we can grow and continue our tradition of excellence into the future. The department completed a self-study as the initial phase of the program review. The following is a summary of some of our findings: • We are home to 16 faculty members, 45 graduate students, and approximately 150 undergraduate majors and 50 minors. • Three faculty members have been hired in the last two yearsMarie-Catherine de Marneffe and Micha Elsner, in computational linguistics; and Becca Morley, in phonology. • We are highly ranked by various measures of excellence— the most recent of which is the QS ranking (http://www.topuniversities. com/university-rankings/university-subject-rankings/2013/
linguistics), which ranks us 17th internationally and 7th among U.S. programs. According to data provided by Academic Analytics, we are one of the country’s top departments in attracting grant dollars. • Our faculty is ranked above the 70th percentile related to comparable departments in publishing of books, articles and conference proceedings. • Our undergraduate program continues to grow— up from about 100 students just five years ago— with the minor remaining relatively steady. • We provide excellent advising and support for undergraduates from UnderLings (the undergraduate linguistics club), Julie McGory (the undergraduate program coordinator) and the Linguistics Undergraduate Curriculum Committee.
data provided by Academic Analytics, LLC
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continued • We also reinforce our undergraduate curriculum by ensuring that our Graduate Teaching Associates are well-trained and supported in the classroom, an effort overseen by our TA Coordinator, Hope Dawson. • We also collected a set of useful descriptors of our graduate program, including time-to-degree and placement rates.
track positions, and another 30 percent are in permanent jobs either in industry, as researchers, or in administrative positions. • Our students also publish and present regularly, and successfully compete for awards both within the university (including university-wide awards, such as the Graduate Associate Teaching Award and the Presidential Fellowship) and outside the university (such as the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship).
• Our placement rates are very good— of the PhD graduates that we tracked over 12 years—more than 40 percent are in tenure-
Welcome Back—Craige Roberts and Mike White Faculty members Craige Roberts and Mike White have just returned from sabbatical. Roberts was a fellow at the National Humanities Center where she worked on Reference in Context, a book contracted for Oxford University Press. White was at the University of Sydney, where he was honored with the International Research Collaboration Award for his project, “Closing the loop: Combinatory Categorial Grammar parsing and generation of natural language,” with James Curran.
Welcome, 2013 Graduate Students
Zack Jones, Zack De, Stephanie Antetomaso, and Keeta Jones
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Next Page: Left, Luca Taira Gasparini-Ito Right, Elizabeth McCullough, Bridget Smith and Dahee Kim pose with their advisors, Brian Joseph, Mary Beckman and Cynthia Clopper
In Recognition Congratulations to graduate student Marty van Schijndel, awarded a Graduate Research Fellowship by the National Science Foundation for his proposal to conduct research using insights from psycholinguistic eye-tracking data to develop a co-referenceresolving sequence-based parser. van Schijndel also received a G. Micheal Riley International Travel Award to present papers at two conferences in Sofia, Bulgaria. Graduate student Murat Yasavul won an Arts and Humanities Small Grant to present his paper, “Two kinds of focus in K’iche,” at Semantics and Linguistic Theory in Santa Cruz, CA. Graduate student Rachel Burdin was awarded The George and Emily Severinghaus Beck Fund Scholarship for Study at Vilnius Yiddish Institute by the Melton Center for Jewish Studies. She took courses at the institute in Lithuania this summer. Burdin also received second prize in the Roth Essay Graduate Contest by the Melton Center for Jewish Studies for her essay, “Yiddish influences on variation in Jewish English intonation.” The prize carries a scholarship award. Graduate student Lara Downing received an honorable mention from the National Science Foundation for her graduate fellowship proposal describing research integrating sociolinguistics with perceptual dialectology. Faculty member Peter Culicover was awarded an Arts and Humanities Grant for travel to Berlin to speak on the subject of Simpler Syntax at the Progress in Linguistics workshop. Faculty member Craige Roberts received $3,000 in the Spring Research Enhancement Grant competition in the division of Arts and Humanities. The award will support work on the project, “Modeling perspectival expressions across semantic domains.” Congratulations to researcher Kiwako Ito, who welcomed her second child, Luca Taira Gasparini-Ito, in June.
Roberts also received an Arts and Humanities Grant-in-Aid for international travel to present her paper, “Salience,” at the International Congress of Linguistics in Geneva, Switzerland, in July. Faculty member Carl Pollard was awarded a Grant-in-Aid for International Travel from the division of Arts and Humanities. He traveled to Dusseldorf, Germany, in August, to teach at the European Summer School for Logic, Language, and Information; and presented a lecture at a conference on Formal Grammar. Congratulations to undergraduates Adam Royer and Rebecca Byrne, each of whom received a Buckeye Language Network (BLN) Undergraduate Research Award for $1,250. The funds support conference and research travel, as well as payments for participants’ research. Faculty member Marie Catherine de Marneffe won the best short paper award at the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) 2013 for her paper, “The life and death of discourse entities: Identifying singleton mentions” with Marta Recasens and Chris Potts. Staff member Julie McGory received a Staff Professional Development Grant from the College of Arts and Sciences to attend a conference on academic assessment in Lexington, KY. Graduate student Marivic Lesho won a Ray Travel Award to present her paper with Eeva Sippola (Aarhus University), “Folk perception of variation among the Chabacano varieties,” at the annual meeting of the Associação de Crioulos de Base Lexical Portuguesa e Espanhola (ACBLPE) in Lisbon, Portugal. Congratulations to faculty member Don Winford, who has been inducted into the 2014 class of LSA Fellows. Fellows are LSA members who have made distinguished contributions to the discipline of linguistics. Congratulations to our summer graduates- Dahee Kim, Scott Martin, Elizabeth McCullough and Bridget Smith.
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Graduate Student Presentations and Publications Shontael Wanjema, Katie Carmichael and Abby Walker, along with faculty member Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, published “Integrating teaching and large-scale research through instructional modules,” in American Speech . 88(2): 223-235. Marten van Schijndel, along with Andy Exley (University of Minnesota), and faculty member William Schuler published, “A Model of Language Processing as Hierarchic Sequential Prediction,” in Topics in Cognitive Science, 5(3): 522-540. 2013. He and William Schuler, along with Luan Nguyen, also published, “An Analysis of Memory-based Processing Costs using Incremental Deep Syntactic Dependency Parsing,” in Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL 2013). Dave Howcroft and Crystal Nakatsu, along with faculty member Michael White, published, “Enhancing the Expression of Contrast in the SPaRKy Restaurant Corpus,” in Proceedings of the 14th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation. Cindy Johnson published, “Multiple Antecedent Agreement: A comparative study of Greek and Latin,” in the Proceedings of the 24th Annual West Coast Indo-European Conference. Cindy Johnson presented, “What’s Elliptic about Elliptic Duals: Evidence from Vedic Sanskrit,” with faculty member Brian Joseph at the 2nd American International Morphology Meeting, University of California, San Diego, CA. They also presented, “Morphology and Syntax … and Semantics … and Pragmatics: Deconstructing ‘Semantic Agreement’” at the 1st International Symposium on Morphology and its Interfaces in Lille, France.
Katie Carmichael presented, “Migration of a dialect: The case of the post-Katrina diaspora in Greater New Orleans,” at Locating Language: A Symposium on the Linguistics of Place, Ohio State University. She also presented “New Orleans English: The r-ful truth” with Nathalie Dajko (Tulane) and Christina Schoux Casey (University of Pittsburgh) at the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics (SECOL) 80th annual meeting in Spartanburg, SC. Additionally, she was invited to speak at the Tulane Linguistics Circle in New Orleans, where she spoke on, “The Chalmatian Nation ‘afta’ Katrina: An examination of R-lessness in Greater New Orleans.” Rachel Burdin, Dave Howcroft, Cindy Johnson, and Rory Turnbull presented, “The development of adjective morphosyntax in High German: Using information theory to quantify intuitive claims about language change,” at the Nineteenth Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference in Buffalo, NY. They also presented, “A methodology for quantifying intuitionistic claims about morphological change” at the 21st International Conference on Historical Linguistics, in Oslo, Norway. Rory Turnbull also presented “Second mention reduction and theory of mind” at the Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences Member Fall Retreat. Marivic Lesho presented, “Endangered language and place: From legitimo Caviteño to national and global citizen,” at Locating Language: A Symposium on the Linguistics of Place, Ohio State University.
Bon Voyage— Judith Tonhauser
Faculty member Judith Tonhauser is leaving for two years to do research at Stanford University and the Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft. She will be funded by the prestigious Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars, awarded by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the Alexander von Humboldt-Forschungsstipendium für erfahrene Wissenschaftler from the Humboldt foundation.
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Faculty Publications Mary Beckman
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Edwards, J., Beckman, M. E., & Munson, B. (2012, in review). Cross-language differences in acquisition.” In M. A. Redford, ed., Handbook of speech production. Wiley-Blackwell. Plummer, Andrew R., Lucie Ménard, Benjamin Munson, & Mary E. Beckman (2013). “Comparing vowel category response surfaces over age-varying maximal vowel spaces within and across language communities.” InterSpeech2013, 25-29 August 2013, Lyon, France. Plummer, Andrew R., Benjamin Munson, Lucie Ménard, & Mary E. Beckman (2013). “Examining the relationship between the interpretation of age and gender across languages.” Proceedings of the 21st International Congress on Acoustics, Acoustical Society of America Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics, 19: 2aSC36.
Marie Catherine de Marneffe
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Spence Green, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe and Christopher D. Manning. 2013. “Parsing models for identifying multiword expressions.” Computational Linguistics 39(1):195-227. Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Christopher D. Manning and Christopher Potts. 2012. “Did it happen? The pragmatic complexity of veridicality assessment.” Computational Linguistics 38(2):301-333. Eve V. Clark and Marie-Catherine de Marneffe. 2012. “Constructing verb paradigms in French: Adult construals and emerging grammatical contrasts.” Morphology 22:89120. Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Scott Grimm, Inbal Arnon, Susannah Kirby and Joan Bresnan. 2012. “A statistical model of grammatical choices in child production of dative sentences.” Language and Cognitive Processes 27(1):25-61 Marta Recasens, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe and Christopher Potts. 2013. “The life and death of discourse entities: Identifying singleton mentions.” Proceedings of the 2013 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Best short paper award.
Micha Elsner
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Micha Elsner, Sharon Goldwater, and Jacob Eisenstein. “Bootstrapping a unified model of lexical and phonetic acquisition.” In Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), July 2012. Micha Elsner. “Character-based kernels for novelistic plot
structure.” In Proceedings of the European Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), April 2012.
Brian Joseph
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“Demystifying ‘Drift’ -- A Variationist Account.” In Shared Grammaticalization, With special focus on the Transeurasian languages, ed. by Lars Johanson, Martine Robbeets, and Herbert Cuyckens, 43-66. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishers (2013).
Rebecca Morley
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“Rapid learning of morphologically conditioned phonetics: vowel nasalization across a boundary.” In A. Yu (ed.), Origins of Sound Change: Approaches to Phonologization (2013). Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 181-198. “The Emergence of Epenthesis: An Incremental Model of Grammar Change.” Language Dynamics and Change 2 (2012), pp 59-97.
Carl Pollard
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Martin, S. and C. Pollard (2012) “A higher-order theory of presupposition.” Studia Logica 100.4:727-751. Plummer, A. and C. Pollard (2012) “Agnostic possible worlds’ semantics.” Logical Aspects of Computational Linguistics, Seventh International Conference (LACL 2012), Nantes, July 2012. Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science 7351:201-212. Pollard, C. and E. Smith (2013) “A unified analysis of the same, phrasal comparatives, and superlatives.” SALT 2012, 307-328.
Craige Roberts
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“Towards a taxonomy of projective content,” with Judith Tonhauser, Mandy Simons & David Beaver. Language 89.1:66-109, 2013.
Shari Speer
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Ito, K., Bibyk, S., Wagner, L., & Speer, S.R. (To appear, online 2012) http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0305000912000554). “Interpretation of contrastive pitch accent in 6- to 11-year old English speaking children (and adults).” Journal of Child Language.
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Faculty Publications William Schuler
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Judith Tonhauser •
Marten van Schijndel, Luan Nguyen, and William Schuler. “An Analysis of Memory-based Processing Costs using Incremental Deep Syntactic Dependency Parsing.” Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL’13), Sofia, Bulgaria, 2013.
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“Towards a taxonomy of projective content,” Judith Tonhauser, David Beaver, Craige Roberts and Mandy Simons, Language 89.1, 66-109. 2013. “The prosody of focus in Paraguayan Guaran´ı’,”Cynthia G. Clopper and Judith Tonhauser, International Journal of American Linguistics 79.2, 219-251. 2013
Alumni updates Dahee Kim (’13) has accepted a lectureship in the Department of English at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea.
Jeonghwa Shin (’12) has accepted a lecturer position at Korea
Eric Ruppe (MA, ’13) has accepted the position of French
University in Seoul, Korea. She will be teaching courses in the theory of second language acquisition and research methods in linguistic studies.
immersion teacher at Meadow Glen Middle School in Lexington, South Carolina.
Ruth Roberts-Kohno (’00) has accepted a position as
Scott Martin (’13) has accepted a position as a research
a full-time faculty member in the TESOL program at American University in Washington, D.C., starting this academic year.
scientist at Nuance Communication’s new natural language understanding lab in Silicon Valley as “semantics person” on a team that will build the next generation of conversational-user interfaces.
Zinny Bond (’71) and Linda Shockey (’73) will present a paper at a phonetics conference in Riga, Latvia, at the beginning of February.
past news and events
Undergraduate Nicole Ashley presents her paper
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Graduate students Chris Worth and Scott Martin were honored at the Graduate School Awards reception in April with the Graduate Associate Teaching Award (GATA) and the Presidential Fellowship, respectively.
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At the end of April, undergraduates in Bob Levine’s Undergraduate Research Seminar, presented papers in a mini symposium.
past news and events •
At the beginning of May, graduate student social chair Dave Howcroft and graduate program coordinator Julia Papke organized a waffle breakfast for the department.
See the Department Calendar (www.ling.ohio-state.edu/calendar) for upcoming events and information.
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At the end of spring semester, the department celebrated with a party for faculty, staff and students at the home of undergraduate coordinator Julie McGory.
Visit us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/lingosu
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SLIYS (Summer Linguistic Institute for Youth Scholars) took place in July. Thanks to Program Director Julie McGory, teachers Jefferson Barlew and Katie Carmichael and social coordinator Dan Miles for making it a success!
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In July, the graduate students hosted a party for the summer PhD graduates.
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In September, faculty presented their research interests for the Faculty Five Minutes of Fame.
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Faculty, staff, grad students and undergrads celebrated the beginning of the 2013-14 academic year with a potluck picnic at Whetstone Park.
Hope Dawson and Christy Johnson enjoy waffles
Jefferson Barlew teaches SLIYS students about linguistic structure
Faculty member Craige Roberts talks about her research
Grad student Jon Dehdari and his daughter enjoy the picnic
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linguistics.osu.edu department of linguistics 222 Oxley Hall 1712 Neil Avenue Columbus, OH 43210