Linguistics Seminar
Seminars typically take place each Monday from 4-5 PM, either in-person or over Zoom. In-person seminars are normally held in the Lucy Ellis Lounge (LCLB 1080).
Contact Josh Dees for Zoom links and details and if you’d like to be added to the mailing list and receive announcements of new talks every week.
Fall 2023 Schedule
18-Sep: Grad Workshop: Anna Mendoza
- Title: How to Write a Book
25-Sep: No Talk
2-Oct: SLATE talk
9-Oct: LingSS Talk: Gyu-Ho Shin (UIC)
- Talk Title: Computation-informed research in language science: focusing on language acquisition/development
- Talk Abstract: In this talk, I present to what extent and in what ways computational approaches can be informative of pursuing language science research, with emphasis on the area of language acquisition and development. I specifically focus on the acquisition of Korean -- which is an understudied language in the field and is computationally challenging due to language-specific properties -- by monolingual children and adult second/foreign language learners. I share recent findings of my research projects in this line and discuss their possible implications on advancing our understanding of how linguistic knowledge (interfacing with cognitive-psychological factors) emerges, grows, and changes.
16-Oct: No Talk
23-Oct: Grad Workshop: Josh Dees
- Title: Cultivating a Professional Online Presence
30-Oct: No Talk
6-Nov: LingSS Talk: Rebecca Tollan (Delaware)
- Title: Split case marking at the syntax-pragmatics interface: How morphosyntax affects pronoun interpretation (joint work with Lauren Clemens)
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Anaphoric pronouns such as “it” in sentences like “The dog chased the cat, and it bit the rabbit” are linguistically ambiguous and therefore dependent on prior context for interpretation. This talk will examine how the morphosyntactic case forms (nominative, accusative, ergative, absolutive) of noun phrases in a prior clause (e.g., “the dog” and “the cat”) influence a listeners’ choice of antecedent for the ambiguous pronoun. Data is drawn from an earlier experimental study (Tollan & Heller, 2022) of split-ergativity in Niuean (Austronesian), and new data from Copala Triqui (Oto-Manguean), which exhibits Differential Object Marking. Collectively, these results indicate that accusative-marked objects are preferred as referents for pronouns over unmarked ones (in Copala Triqui), but that ergative-marked subjects are in fact dispreferred compared with unmarked (i.e., absolutive) ones (in Niuean). Lastly, a follow-up study on English, which uses “pseudo case marking” to allow manipulating split-subject and split-object marking within a single experimental paradigm, provides support for a generalization that marking increases interpretative saliency of objects, but not of subjects.
13-Nov: No Talk
27-Nov: Grad Workshop: Aylin Coşkun Kunduz
- Title: How to publish a research article
4-Dec: LingSS Talk: Harry van der Hulst (UConn)
- Title: TBA
For a list of seminars held in previous semesters, please see Past Seminars.