Spring 2014
OHIO STATE HOSTS THE CUNY CONFERENCE ON HUMAN SENTENCE PROCESSING
In March, Ohio State hosted the 27th annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. The conference was sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the arts and humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences. It was chaired by Shari Speer, linguistics department chair. The organizing committee was composed of faculty and graduate students from linguistics, psychology and English, including courtesy faculty member Laura Wagner (psychology) and linguistics graduate students Abby Walker and Rory Turnbull. The CUNY Human Sentence Processing conference is the premier peer-reviewed event in North America for scientists interested in how humans comprehend and produce language. With attendees from the U.S., UK, Canada, Germany, Japan, Russia and beyond, it is truly an international conference. Over the years, the conference has been remarkably successful as an interdisciplinary forum, drawing researchers from the fields of linguistics, psychology, computer science, neuroscience and philosophy, and this year was no exception.
ALUMNI CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS: Sarah Bibyk Julie Boland Kathleen Curry Hall Anouschka (Bergmann) Foltz Samantha (Gett) Heidenreich Sun-Ah Jun Rick Lewis Elizabeth Smith Shravan Vasishth
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Ohio State alumni, students and faculty were well-represented at the conference in the oral and poster sessions, and many of them served as reviewers on the program committee. About a dozen students volunteered to staff the conference and prepare for it ahead of time. Rory Turnbull—one of the graduate students on the organizing committee—said: “Helping organize CUNY was a very enjoyable and gratifying experience. There were so many things to get right in the run-up to the conference—the post-peer review versions of abstracts must be checked, volunteers must be organized, the venue prepared, the right amount (and kind) of food ordered, the booklet designed and printed, the registrations and accommodations coordinated—and everyone involved put in a great deal of effort to make the conference successful. This effort extended to the attendees, with a consistently high-quality of research presentations, both in the talks and the posters. At the end of the conference I was exhausted, but very glad that everyone had had a good time.”
ALUMNI ON THE PROGRAM COMMITTEE: Allison Blodgett CURRENT CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS: Cynthia Clopper Micha Elsner Nikole Patson-Huffman (Psychology, Mansfield) Kiwako Ito Marie-Catherine de Marneffe Carl Pollard
Adam Royer Marten van Schijndel William Schuler Shari Speer Abby Walker Kodi Weatherholtz CURRENT PROGRAM COMMITTEE: Lauren Squires (English) Rory Turnbull Laura Wagner (Psychology) Seth Wiener (DEALL)
OHIO STATE LINGUISTICS: 50 YEARS In 2017, we will celebrate 50 years as a department. The department has grown in size and distinction in that time; It began with just three founding faculty members (Cathy Callaghan, Charles J. Fillmore and the first department chair, Ilse Lehiste). In 50 years, that number has grown to 16 faculty members, around 45 PhD students and 150+ undergraduate majors. Our graduate program was ranked 15th in the world (of 200) and 4th among U.S. public universities according to the most recent QS World University Rankings for Linguistics. We kicked off the celebration with an informal gathering at the Linguistic Society of America conference this year. We plan to celebrate this momentous occasion appropriately and hope to include as many current and former members of the department as possible.
Mary Beckman and alumni Jeff Holliday and Ben Munson at the Ohio State party at the LSA
For questions or suggestions on the upcoming anniversary celebration, contact Shari Speer (speer.21@osu.edu).
BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT: PROTO UTIAN GRAMMAR AND DICTIONARY WITH NOTES ON YOKUTS Congratulations to Professor Emerita Cathy Callaghan, who recently published her book, Proto Utian Grammar and Dictionary with Notes on Yokuts. The book is the culmination of more than 50 years of scholarship on the Proto Utian family of California Indian languages, and demonstrates how the languages of the Miwok and Costanoan families are related and how they descended from Proto Utian. It is a much-needed reference for: (1) people of Miwok and Costanoan descent who are interested in reviving or revitalizing their languages and cultures; (2) linguists studying Native American languages; (3) anthropologists studying prehistoric cultures, migrations and intercultural contact; (4) historical linguists interested in language change; and (5) linguistic theoreticians and typologists interested in particular features of Utian languages. The project has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation. degruyter.com/view/product/181119
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WELCOME PETER KLECHA Peter Klecha joined the department this year as a visiting scholar in semantics and pragmatics, and will continue with us autumn semester 2014. He did his undergraduate work at Michigan State under Marcin Morzycki, and his doctoral work at the University of Chicago with Chris Kennedy. His research is on natural language semantics, pragmatics and syntax. He works particularly on the interpretation of modal expressions in natural language, like might, should and likely. His dissertation work is on the various ways modal expressions can have scalar behavior, including, but not limited to, gradable modality.
IN RECOGNITION: Faculty member Cynthia Clopper was presented the Outstanding Young Alumni Award by the Indiana University Department of Linguistics. Faculty member Peter Culicover’s book, Grammar & Complexity: Language at the Intersection of Competence and Performance won the book cover contest at the 2013 Arts and Humanities Faculty Recognition Reception. Undergraduate Michael de Matto was awarded a $4500 Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Research Scholarship for his honors BA thesis research proposal, “Seeking universality: Examining the cross-linguistic processing of word structure.” DeMatto also has been awarded an Undergraduate Research Small Grant and an award from the Aida Cannarsa Snow Endowment for Significant Undergraduate Research in the Humanities, each award in the amount of $500. Michael de Matto (along with courtesy faculty member Andrea Sims) presented “Transparency and translingual processing: a comparison of Russian and English” at the 2014 Midwest Slavic Conference here at Ohio State.
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Undergraduate Adam Royer was awarded a $6000 Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Research Scholarship for his research proposal (Advisor: Cynthia Clopper), “Effects of Speaking Style and Regional Dialect on Word-Final Obstruent Devoicing.” Congratulations to graduate student Cynthia Johnson, who was awarded a Presidential Fellowship from the Graduate School to conduct her dissertation research, “A historical and comparative account of semantic and syntactic agreement in Indo-European.” Congratulations are due to Professors Craige Roberts and Judith Tonhauser (with David Beaver and Mandy Simons) whose paper, “Toward a taxonomy of projective content” (Language 89.1, 2013), has been selected to receive the Linguistic Society of America’s Best Paper in Language Award. Graduate student Jefferson Barlew was awarded a 2013-2014 Arts and Humanities Graduate Research Small Grant to defray costs associated with continuing his research on the Bulu Reference project. Congratulations to faculty member Mary Beckman, who won the Anneliese Maier Research Award from the Alexander
von Humbolt Foundation. Award winners are those whose scientific achievements have been internationally recognized and contribute “a sustainable shaping of the humanities and social sciences in Germany through the prospects of long-term collaboration.” The award is valued at 250,000 EUR. Congratulations to our autumn PhD graduates: Marivic Lesho (“The Sociophonetics and Phonology of the Cavite Chabacano Vowel System”) and Andrew Plummer (“The Acquisition of Vowel Normalization during Early Infancy: Theory and Computational Framework”). Andy Plummer has taken a post-doctoral position on a project with Professor Eric Fosler-Lussier of computer science and engineering. Congratulations to Brice Russ, who successfully defended his MA thesis, “Examining Regional Variation Through Online Geotagged Corpora.” Faculty member Cynthia Clopper and courtesy faculty member Laura Wagner (psychology) have been awarded a grant from Ohio State’s Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences for their proposal, “A Large-Scale Cross-Sectional Investigation of Dialect Acquisition” in the amount of $120,000 ($60k per year for two years). Recent graduate Liz McCullough has taken a postdoctoral position on the project. Undergraduate Emily Clem (advisor Becca Morley) was awarded an Undergraduate Research Small Grant in the amount of $500 for her research project, “Lexical and Grammatical Tone.” Congratulations to linguistics major Adam Royer, who has been accepted into the graduate program in linguistics at the University of California-Los Angeles, his top choice.
Faculty member Bob Levine has been elected to serve on the University Senate and the Faculty Council as an alternate representing the election district of the College of Arts and Sciences. He will serve a two-year term, AU2014 - SP2016. Graduate student Rachel Burdin won a Melton Center Travel Grant to help defray the costs of her trip to Paris for the 10th Congress of the European Association for Jewish Studies (EAJS). Upcoming PhD graduates Abby Walker and Katie Carmichael have taken positions as tenure-track assistant professors of English at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) in Blacksburg, Virginia. Graduate student Rory Turnbull was chosen to receive the 2014 G. Micheal Riley International Travel Award to defray costs associated with presenting his work at the 7th International Conference on Speech Prosody in Dublin, Ireland; the Manchester (England) Phonology meeting; and in an invited talk at the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences at the University of Edinburgh during May and June. Congratulations to faculty member Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, whose project, “Ohio Speaks: Integrating Research and Pedagogy” has won a $14,000 Grant for Research and Creative Activity in the Arts and Humanities from the the College of Arts and Sciences’ division of arts and humanities. Faculty member Brian Joseph has received funding from the Mershon Center for a workshop on Cultural and Linguistic Resilience and Sustainability next September. Undergraduate James Hibbard has been accepted to both Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania for Masters in Public Administration programs.
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GRAD STUDENT PRESENTATIONS AND PUBLICATIONS KATIE CARMICHAEL Dajko, Nathalie & Katie Carmichael. (2014) “But qui c’est la différence? Discourse Markers in Louisiana French: The case of ‘but’ vs. ‘mais.’ Language in Society. Carmichael, Katie. (2013). “The performance of Cajun English in Boudreaux and Thibodeaux jokes.” American Speech.
RORY TURNBULL Seth Wiener & Rory Turnbull, “Constraints of tones, vowels and consonants on lexical selection in Mandarin Chinese.” Paper presentation at Linguistic Society of America (LSA) 88th Annual Meeting. Minneapolis, MN.
An Update on the Short-a System in Greater New Orleans. American Dialect Society (ADS) Annual Meeting. Minneapolis, MN.
Rory Turnbull, “Effects of individual variation in theory of mind skills on probabilistic phonetic reduction and second mention reduction.” Poster presentation at Linguistic Society of America (LSA) 88th Annual Meeting. Minneapolis, MN.
Where Y’at Since the Storm?: Linguistic Effects of Hurricane Katrina in Greater New Orleans. After the storm: The cultural politics of Hurricane Katrina. Bochum, Germany.
RORY TURNBULL, RACHEL STEINEL BURDIN, DAVID HOWCROFT AND CYNTHIA JOHNSON
KATIE CARMICHAEL, JEFFERSON BARLEW, KODI WEATHERHOLTZ, MIKE PHELAN AND DEBORAH MORTON Katie Carmichael, Jefferson Barley, Kodi Weatherholtz, Mike Phelan, Deborah Morton and Ana Alonso. Bringing linguistic inquiry to high schoolers: A report from SLIYS Summer Program. Poster presentation at Linguistic Society of America (LSA) 88th Annual Meeting. Minneapolis, MN.
Rory Turnbull, Rachel Steindel Burdin, David M Howcroft, & Cynthia A Johnson, “Information theoretic historical morphology: a case study of High German adjectives.” Poster presentation at Linguistic Society of America (LSA) 88th Annual Meeting. Minneapolis, MN.
DAVID MITCHELL, MARIVIC LESHO AND ABBY WALKER Mitchell, David, Marivic Lesho, & Abby Walker. 2014. “Folk perception of African-American English regional variation: Perspectives from African-Americans in Ohio.” Annual meeting of the American Dialect Society, Minneapolis, Minnesota. January 2-5.
MARTEN VAN SCHIJNDEL Marten van Schijndel and Micha Elsner. “Bootstrapping into fillergap: an acquisition story.” Poster presentation at the 27th CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Columbus, OH William Schuler and Marten van Schijndel. “Effects of integration in eye tracking.” Poster presentation at the 27th CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Columbus, OH
CHRIS WORTH Chris Worth. “The Phenogrammar of Coordination.” The Type Theory and Natural Language Semantics workshop in Gothenburg, Sweden. Proceedings published. Linguistic Society of America 88th Annual Meeting
IN MEMORIAM: CHARLES J. FILLMORE (1929 - 2014) We regret to announce the death of one of our founding department members, Charles J. Fillmore. Dr. Fillmore taught at Ohio State between 1961 and 1971. He was “a brilliant linguist, especially in the field of lexical semantics” (as his student, Amy Dahlstrom said), and is credited with the origination of frame semantics and the FrameNet project. He is sorely missed by his colleagues and students.
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FACULTY PUBLICATIONS KATHRYN CAMPBELL-KIBLER
MARIE CATHERINE DE MARNEFFE
Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, “Language Attitude Surveys.” In Data Collection in Sociolinguistics: Methods and Applications. Edited by: Christine Mallinson, Becky Childs and Gerard Van Herk. New York: Routledge. 2013.
Manjuan Duan, Micha Elsner and Marie-Catherine de Marneffe. 2013. “Visual and linguistic predictors for the definiteness of referring expressions.” Proceedings of SEMDIAL 2013.
Shontael Wanjema, Katie Carmichael, Abby Walker and Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, “The OhioSpeaks project: Engaging undergraduates in sociolinguistic research.” American Speech. Vol. 88, no. 2: 223-235. 2013.
CYNTHIA CLOPPER Clopper, C. G., & Tonhauser, J. (2013). The prosody of focus in Paraguayan Guaraní. International Journal of American Linguistics, 79, 219-251. Oder, A. L., Clopper, C. G., & Ferguson, S. H. (2013). Effects of dialect on vowel acoustics and intelligibility. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 43, 23-35. Clopper, C. G. (2013). Experiments. In C. Mallinson, B. Childs, & G. Van Herk (Eds.), Data Collection in Sociolinguistics: Methods and Applications (pp. 151-161). London: Routledge.
PETER CULICOVER Culicover, Peter W. Explaining Syntax: Representations, Structure and Computation. Oxford University Press, Oxford. 2013. Culicover, Peter W. Grammar and Complexity: Language at the Intersection of Competence and Performance. Oxford University Press, Oxford. 2013. Culicover, Peter W. “Problems with English zero relatives.” International Review of Pragmatics 5: 253–270. 2013. Culicover, Peter W. “Linear order effects in computing grammatical dependencies.” Lingua special issue “Information Structure Triggers: Effects on (De)accentuation, Dislocation and Deletion,” edited by Jutta Hartmann and Susanne Winkler. 136:125–144, 2013. Culicover, Peter W. “Simpler Syntax and Explanation.” In Stefan Müller (Ed.): Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Freie Universität Berlin (pp. 263–282). Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. 2013. Hume, Elizabeth and Peter W. Culicover. “Teaching about how language works to diverse populations.” Language and Linguistics Compass. 2013.
Joo-Kyung Kim and Marie-Catherine de Marneffe. 2013. “Deriving adjectival scales from continuous space word representations.” Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2013). Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Miriam Connor, Natalia Silveira, Samuel R. Bowman, Timothy Dozat and Christopher D. Manning. 2013. “More constructions, more genres: Extending Stanford Dependencies.” Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (DEPLING 2013).
MICHA ELSNER Micha Elsner, Sharon Goldwater, Naomi H. Feldman, and Frank Wood. “A Cognitive Model of Early Lexical Acquisition With Phonetic Variability.” In Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), October 2013. Manjuan Duan, Micha Elsner, and Marie-Catherine de Marneffe. “Visual and linguistic predictors for the definiteness of referring expressions.” In Proceedings of the 17th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (SemDial), Amsterdam, 2013.
BRIAN JOSEPH Historical Linguistics (Critical Concepts in Linguistics, 6 volumes), co-edited with Hope C. Dawson. London: Routledge, 2013. “Deixis and Person in the Development of Greek Personal Pronominal Paradigms.” In Deixis and Pronouns in Romance Languages (SLCS 136), ed. by Kirsten Jeppesen Kragh and Jan Lindschouw, 19-32. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishers (2013). “Sound Symbolism, Fire, and Light in the Greek Lexicon.” In Dimiurgia kai Morfi sti Glosa [Creativity and Form in Language], Deltio Epistimonikis Orologias kai Neologismon, Vol 12, ed. by Anastasia Christofidou, 40-54 (2013). Athens: Center of Research in Scientific Terms and Neologisms, Academy of Athens. “On Old and New Connections between Greek and Albanian: Some Grammatical Evidence.” Albano-Hellenica 5 (Papers from the First International Conferenc of Greek-Albanian Studies, Tirana, Albania, March 24-5, 2012), ed. by Aristotel Spiro, pp. 7-21 (2013).
Culicover, Peter W. “Simpler Syntax and explanation.” Workshop on Progress in Linguistics, Berlin, August 27, 2013.
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“The texture of a linguistic environment: new perspectives on the Greek of Southern Albania” (with Christopher Brown). AlbanoHellenica 5 (Papers from the First International Conference of Greek-Albanian Studies, Tirana, Albania, March 24-5, 2012), ed. by Aristotel Spiro (2013). General Introduction (with Hope C. Dawson). In Historical Linguistics (Critical Concepts in Linguistics), co-edited by B. Joseph & H. Dawson. London: Routledge, 2013, pp. 1-19.
ROBERT LEVINE “The modal need VP gap (non)anomaly.” In Beyond ever and any: New Perspectives on Negative Polarity Sensitivity, ed. by Eva Csipak, Regine Eckhardt, Mingya Liu, and Manfred Sailer, pp. 241– 265. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. “Determiner Gapping as higher order discontinuous constituency.” In Formal Grammar, ed. by Glynn Morrill and Mark-Jan Nederhof. Lecture Notes on Computer Science 8036. Heidelberg: Springer/ Foundation for Logic, Language and Information. “Coordination in Hybrid Type-Logical Categorial Grammar.” (with Yusuke Kubota.) Ohio State University Working Papers in Linguistics 60. ed. by Mary E. Beckman, Marivic Lesho, Judith Tonhauser, and Tsz-Him Tsui. Columbus: Ohio State University Department of Linguistics, pp.21–50
REBECCA MORLEY
JUDITH TONHAUSER “Reportative evidentiality in Paraguayan Guaraní”, Judith Tonhauser, Semantics of Underrepresented Languages of the Americas (SULA) VII, Amherst, MA: GLSA Publications.
MICHAEL WHITE David Howcroft, Crystal Nakatsu and Michael White. 2013. “Enhancing Peer- the Expression of Contrast in the SPaRKy Restaurant Corpus.” In Proc. of the 14th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (ENLG-13).
DONALD WINFORD Bettina Migge, James Essegby and Donald Winford (eds.) 2013. “Cross-linguistic Influence in Language Creation: Assessing the Role of the Gbe Languages in the formation of the Surinamese creoles.” Special Issue of LINGUA, Volume 129, May 2013. “On the unity of contact phenomena: the case for imposition. In and out of Africa: Languages in question. A Festschrift for Robert Nicolai, ed. by Carole de Fe’ral. Louvain: Peeters. Winford, Donald & Ingo Plag. Sranan. In: Michaelis, Susanne & Maurer, Philippe & Haspelmath, Martin & Huber, Magnus (eds.), Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures, vol. I: Englishbased and Dutch-based Languages, 15-26. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Morley, Rebecca L., “Implications of an exemplar-theoretic model of phoneme genesis: a velar palatalization case study.” Language and Speech. Vol. 57, no. 1: 3-41. 2014
“Sranan.” In: Kortmann, Bernd and Kerstin Lunkenheimer (eds.), The Electronic World Atlas of Variation in English: Grammar. München/Berlin: Max Planck Digital Library in cooperation with Mouton de Gruyter.
WILLIAM SCHULER
“Sranan.” In: Kortmann, Bernd (ed.), World Atlas of Variation in English: Grammar. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Marten van Schijndel, Andrew Exley, William Schuler. “A Model of Language Processing as Hierarchic Sequential Predictions.” Topics in Cognitive Science, 5(4)522–540, Wiley, 2013.
SHARI SPEER
“Challenging the old; exploring the new: A tribute to Ian Robertson.” In Paula Morgan & Valerie Youssef (eds.). Reassembling the fragments: Voice and Identity in Caribbean Discourse, 11-26. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press.
Speer, S.R., Foltz, A., & Linne, C. (2014). “Implicit contrastive prosody: Individual differences in processing and production.” Lyn Frazier and Edward Gibson (eds.), Explicit and Implicit Prosody in Sentence Processing: Papers in honor of Janet Fodor. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics Series, Springer, Dordrecht.
PAST NEWS AND EVENTS
In December, Shari Speer hosted the department holiday party. At the LSA Conference in January, we hosted a get-together for current and former Ohio State linguists. In January, Brian Joseph organized the 11th annual Martin Luther King Day Linguistic Symposium. The topic this year was “Languages of the Balkans and South Asia.”
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In March, Craige Roberts organized a joint workshop with the philosophy department on the semantics of cardinals. At the CUNY conference in March, current and former Ohio State linguists gathered for a lunch.
See the Department Calendar (www.ling.ohio-state.edu/calendar) for upcoming events and information. VISIT US ON FACEBOOK AT www.facebook.com/lingosu
Grad student Evan Jaffe and Barry Shank provide music at the holiday party
Faculty member Brian Joseph at the Ohio State party at the LSA
Ohio State Linguistics alumni at the CUNY conference
Faculty member Don Winford with LSA president Ellen Kaisse being honored as an LSA Fellow
This year’s linguistics basketball team
Alumna Anouschka Foltz’s two children, Jamie and Sanya
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linguistics.osu.edu DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS 222 Oxley Hall 1712 Neil Avenue Columbus, OH 43210