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)

• 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: Prolegomena to a theory of word accent
• Abstract: Based on much earlier work, I lay out a unified theory of word prominence which covers both languages in which the location of word accent is mainly phonologically-driven as well as languages in which morphological structure plays a decisive role. In my talk, I will first focus on phonologically-driven accent and then turn to the matter of morphologically-driven accent.  My approach to phonologically-driven accent separates the location of (primary) word accent from rhythmic structure. In my previous work on word prominence (going back to van der Hulst 1984), I have rejected the standard metrical model and replaced it by an approach that represents rhythm as ‘secondary’, i.e., as being assigned after word accents have been determined (at the lexical level). Rhythm arises at a post-grammatical, prosodic level, as part of phonetic implementation. In this talk, I will not discuss the assignment of rhythm in detail (but see van der Hulst 2014 for an extensive account) and focus instead on how I account for the diversity of word phonologically-driven accent systems. It will be important to distinguish between the notion word accent and the notion syllabic accent and moraic accent. As in my previous work, I separate the issue of locating accent from specifying its phonetic realization, taking the term ‘stress’ to refer to the realization of accent in so-called stress-accent languages, like English and Dutch. This will lead me to a digression by discussing tonal realizations of accent in so-called pitch-accent languages. I then turn to languages in which morphological structure plays a decisive role in the locating word accent. I will illustrate this role with some interesting stress patterns of synthetic and regular compounds in Dutch. My unified approach incorporates the idea that there are different hierarchical organizations at the word level. I will assume that morphologically-driven accent refers to a ‘metrically-interpreted morphological structure, while phonologically-driven accent refers to a restructuring of this level, due to the behavior of so-called cohering affixes, which I call the phonotactic level. After all is said and done, a phonetic-prosodic structure emerges which accounts for all allophonic processes, including rhythm.

 

Spring 2023 Schedule 

23 Jan: Cory Shain, Postdoctoral Researcher (MIT) (Lucy Ellis)

     Title: Uncovering the algorithmic foundations of language learning and processing

30 Jan: Aleksandre Maskharashvili, Visiting Assistant Professor (Ohio State University) (Lucy Ellis)

     Title: Discourse Relations: Their Role and Use in Natural Language Generation

2 Feb: No talk

6 Feb: Spencer Caplan, Postdoctoral Researcher (University of Texas at Austin) (Lucy Ellis)

     Title: The Immediacy of Linguistic Computation

9 Feb, Thursday: Forrest Davis, Postdoctoral Researcher (MIT) (Lucy Ellis)

     Title: What neural models tell us about linguistics knowledge: insights from cross-linguistic investigations

13 Feb: TBA

20 Feb: Ryan Shosted, Professor (UIUC) (Lucy Ellis)

     Title: Deseret Texts as a Guide to Early Utah English

27 Feb: Brennan Dell, Graduate Student (UIUC) (Lucy Ellis)

     Title: Fine-grained Error Analysis in Machine Translation

6 Mar: Rodrigo Delgado, Assistant Professor (UIUC, Spanish and Portuguese) (Lucy Ellis)

     Title: The mesa: a phonetic analysis of English/Spanish code-switched determiner phrases

13 Mar: NO TALK (Spring Break)

20 Mar: Numa Markee, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics (UIUC) (Lucy Ellis)

     Title: How detailed do conversation analytic transcripts really need to be?

27 Mar: Christopher M. Stewart, Computational Linguist (Google), Research Associate (University of Memphis, Institute for Intelligent Systems) (Co-sponsored by the Department of French and Italian) (Lucy Ellis)

     Title: From French Linguistics to Speech Science to Data Science to Google: Getting from Here to There

3 Apr: Jennifer Cabrelli, Associate Professor (UIC, Hispanic and Italian Studies) (Lucy Ellis)

     Title: Examining the effects of third language (L3) acquisition on existing languages to inform the constitution of first language (L1) versus second language (L2) systems

10 Apr: Masaya Yoshida, Associate Professor (Northwestern University) (Lucy Ellis)

     Title: There is something missing in NP and Moving in DP

17 Apr: Sarah Clark, Graduate Student (UIUC) (Lucy Ellis)

     Title: The Veteran Dialect: Discourses of Identity in the Liminal Space between Institutions and Ideologies

24 Apr: Rurik Tywoniw, English Placement Test Coordinator (UIUC) (Lucy Ellis)

     Title: Evaluating writing in the age of AI: what’s left to assess?

26 Apr, Wednesday: Jonathan Dunn, Senior Lecturer, Linguistics and English Language (University of Canterbury) (Zoom)

     Title: Emerging Structure and Global Variation in Computational Construction Grammar

1 May: Cristina Garbacea, PhD Candidate in CS (University of Michigan) (Zoom)

    Title: Text Simplification: Methods and Evaluation

4 May, Thursday at 3pm: Michael Wilson, Postdoctoral Research Associate (Yale) (Zoom)

    Title: Syntactic productivity in people and large language models

8 May: Omid Abdar, Graduate Student (UIUC) (Zoom)

    Title: Granular Text Classification for Biomedical Natural Language Processing

 

 

Fall 2022 Schedule 

5 Sep: NO TALK (Labor Day) 

12 Sep: TBA 

19 Sep: Gorrety Nafula Wawire, Grad student at UIUC (LCLB G24 and on Zoom)
Title: Discursive Scaling of Solidarity through Difference

26 Sep: TBA 

3 Oct: Dan Fogerty, Associate Professor at UIUC (Lucy Ellis)
Title: The (mis)perception of speech in adverse conditions: stimulus and listener factors

10 Oct: Emily A. Hanink, Assistant Professor (Indiana University) (Lucy Ellis)
Title: A vs. A’ dependencies: Parallels between relativization and nominalization

17 Oct: TBA 

24 Oct: Aylin Coşkun Kunduz, Grad student at UIUC (Lucy Ellis)
Title: The role of input in the acquisition of evidentiality by Turkish heritage language children in the United States 

31 Oct: Jennifer Zhang, Grad student at UIUC (Lucy Ellis)
Title: Bilingual perception of onset f0 as a cue to the voicing distinction in Spanish & English

7 Nov: TBA

14 Nov: TBA

21 Nov: NO TALK (Fall Break) 

28 Nov: TBA 

5 Dec: TBA 

12 Dec: NO TALK (Finals Week) 

 

 

Spring 2022

24 Jan: No Talk

31 Jan: *Peter De Costa, Associate Professor at Michigan State University (Lucy Ellis + Zoom)
Title: When Language Teacher Emotions and Language Policies Intersect in Neoliberal Times

3 Feb, Thursday: *Andrew Moody, Associate Professor at the University of Macau (Zoom)
Title: Norms and Performance: The projection of authority and authenticity within media Englishes

10 Feb, Thursday: *Anna Mendoza, Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong (Zoom)
Title: Teachers’ awareness and management of the social, cultural, and political indexicalities of translanguaging

18 Feb, Friday: *Farzad Karimzad, Assistant Professor at Salisbury University (Lucy Ellis + Zoom)
Title: Chronotopization and Meaning-making: A Sociolinguistic Theory of Context, Complexity, and Coherence

21 Feb: No Talk

28 Feb: Helen Gent, Grad student at UIUC (Zoom)
Title: Deep Learning for Prosody-Based Irony Classification in Spontaneous Speech

7 Mar: James H. Yang, Professor at the National Yunlin University Science and Technology, Taiwan (Lucy Ellis)
Title: Teaching and assessment of ICC for ELF: A lingual-cultural pedagogy

14 Mar: No Talk - Spring Break

21 Mar: Yan Sun, Grad student at UIUC (Lucy Ellis + zoom)
Title: Effects of anticipatory tonal variations on spoken-word recognition and lexical activation

28 Mar: Mai Mohamed, Grad student at UIUC (Lucy Ellis)
Title: Writing Direction and Mental Representations of Time in Arabic and English Bilinguals

4 Apr: No Talk

11 Apr: Andrew G. Armstrong, Grad student at UIUC (Lucy Ellis)
Title: The Impact of Literacy on the Production of Verbal Passives in School-age Spanish Heritage Speakers and L1 Spanish Adults

18 Apr: Aniello De Santo, Assistant Professor at the University of Utah
Title: The Devil is in the Details (of the Linking Theory)

25 Apr: Wafa Abdulla, Grad student at UIUC
Title: 'Chicken nugget' effect and scaling English(es) in Bahraini Youth

2 May: Hayley Park, Grad student at UIUC (Zoom)
Title: Pitfalls and possibilities: What NLP systems are missing out on

9 May: No Talk - Finals Week

* - sociolinguistics/TESL candidate job talk

 

Fall 2021

13 September: Cassandra Jacobs, Assistant Professor at the University of Buffalo
Title: Understanding the contributions of linguistic style and sequence probabilities to lexical choice

20 September: Zeljko Boskovic, Professor at the University of Connecticut
Title: On the contextuality of the EPP, the Comp-trace effect, and multiple wh- and subject positions

4 October: Chase Adams, Grad student at UIUC (Lucy Ellis)
Title: Paralinguistic segmental featurization – scoping in on the ADReSS Challenge

18 October: Marco Aurelio Silva Fonseca, Grad student at UIUC (Zoom)
Title: Using LSTM RNNs to assess Japanese phonological rules using monolingual and bilingual networks

25 October: Melissa Troyer, Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow, UIUC (Zoom)
Title: Nuances of knowing: Using a fictional world to study how the brain makes meaning during word-by-word reading

1 November: Dr. James Yang, Sociolinguistics Professor at National Yunlin University Science and Technology, Taiwan (Lucy Ellis)
Title: Sociolinguistic fieldwork research experience sharing

8 November: Andrew Murphy, Instructor in Syntax at the University of Chicago (Zoom)
Title: Discontinuous noun phrases in Iquito (joint work with Brianna Wilson, UChicago)

15 November: Jill Burstein, Principal Assessment Scientist, Duolingo (Zoom)
Title: Natural Language Processing in Assessment

6 Dec: Taraneh Sanei, Grad student at UIUC (Lucy Ellis)
Title: Multisemioticity and the Performance and Evaluation of (Migrant-)Iranianness Online: a Chronotopic-scalar Approach

 

Spring 2021

Fall 2020

21 September: Yimei Xiang, Assistant Professor at Rutgers University - "Higher-order readings of wh-questions"

28 September: Stephanie Shih, Assistant Professor at USC Dornsife - "Gradience for lexically-conditioned phonology"

5 October: Noriyasu Li, Language Engineer at Amazon - "Alexa, what do linguists do at Amazon?"

12 October: Marko Simonović, Research Fellow at the University of Graz, and Petra Mišmaš, Research Fellow at the University of Nova Gorica - "Slovenian Verbs, Structure, Stress and Allomorphy"

28 October (Wednesday): Ljiljana Progovac, Professor at Wayne State University - "Evolution of syntax: Genes and grammar caught in the act of sexual selection"

2 November: Chris Heffner, Assistant Professor at Buffalo - "Phonetic Plasticity: Rate, Accent, and Learning"

9 November: Matthew Barros, Lecturer in Linguistics at Washington University

16 November: Vicki Carstens, Professor at the University of Connecticut

30 November: Diego Arispe-Bazan, from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania

7 December: Lyn Tieu, Senior Research Fellow at Western Sydney University

 

Spring 2020

Jan. 27th: Matthew Rispoli, Assoc. Prof. Department of Speech and Hearing Science, UIUC

Title: The Development of Predication

Feb. 24th: Karlos Arregi, Assoc. Prof. Department of Linguistics, U. Chicago.

Title: When head chains split: Do-support crosslinguistically

March 9th: Mien-Jen Wu, Graduate student, UIUC - (Open House)

Title: Acquisition of Inverse Scope by L1-Mandarin L2-English Learners

March 16th: Spring Break - No talk

March 23rd: TBD

March 30th: Diego Arispe-Bazan, Post-Doc Fellow, Northwestern University

April 6th: SLATE lecture

April 13th: TBD

April 20th: Stephanie Landblom, Graduate student,  UIUC

April 27th: Matthew Barros, Lecturer in the Linguistics Program, Washington University, St. Louis.

May 4th: Hans Henrich Hock, Professor Emeritus, Department of Linguistics, UIUC

 

Fall 2019

• Apr 29th, 2019 - Sarah Johnson, Phd Candidate, UIUC on Spontaneous nasalization: an articulatory investigation of glottal consonants in Thai
• Apr 22nd, 2019 - Lauren Clemens, Assistant Professor, U. Albany on Prosodic indeterminacy: a syntax-prosody mismatch in Rutooro’s relative clauses
• Apr 15th, 2019 - Sea Hee (Sarah) Choi, Graduate Students, UIUC on The count/mass distinction in native and non-native grammar
• Mar 11th, 2019 - James Yoon, Professor UIUC on Lexical and syntactic nominalizations in Korean
• Feb 25th, 2019 - Damir Ćavar, Associate Professor, Indiana University on Semantic Information Extraction and Generation of Dynamic Knowledge Graphs
• Feb 19th, 2019 - Emily Chen, Phd Student, UIUC on Bootstrapping a Neural Morphological Analyzer for St. Lawrence Island Yupik Nouns from a Finite-State Transducer
• Dec 3rd, 2018 - Patrick James Drackley (UIUC) on Spelling authority: what French language policy can tell us about standard language ideologies and national linguistic identity
• Nov 26th, 2018 - Myeong Hyeon Kim (UIUC) on Processing of canonical and scrambled word orders in native and non-native Korean
• Nov 12th, 2018 -  Marissa Barlaz (UIUC) on Modeling the relationship between articulation and acoustics in phonemic and phonetic nasalization
• Nov 5th, 2018 - Elias Shakkour (UIUC) on Cognitive pressure and non-targetlike performance: an analysis of speech errors in simultaneous interpreting from English into German
• Oct 29th, 2018 - Xun Yan (UIUC) on In quest of learner profiles in L2 writing classrooms: The development and validation of a profile-based rating scale for a post-admission ESL writing placement test
• Oct 22nd, 2018 - Jennifer Cramer (University of Kentucky) on Perceptual Dialectology, Borders, and Kentucky’s Place in the Southern Dialect Landscape
• Oct 15th, 2018 - Jeffrey Green (UIUC) on PROcessing reference: Constraints on the interpretation of adjunct control
• Sept 10, 2018 - Jessica Montag (UIUC) on Why people say what they say
  More information on this event can be found here.
• Apr 02, 2018 - Bill Bryce (UIUC) on Psycholinguistically-motivated partial supervision for grammar induction
  More information on this event can be found here.
• Mar 12, 2018 - Suyeon Im (UIUC) on Exemplar encoding of intonation in syllables, words and phrases.
  More information on this event can be found here.
• Mar 05, 2018 - Ha Ra Kim (UIUC) on Peer Feedback in an Integrated, Process-Oriented ESL Writing Placement Test
  This past calendar item can be viewed here.
• Feb 26, 2018 - Dunja Veselinović (NYU) on Must be pragmatic: Child over-adherence to modal inferences (joint work with Ailis Cournane).
  This past calendar item can be viewed here.
• Feb 19, 2018 - Dr Anne Pycha (U Wisconsin) on When do listeners mis-perceive co-articulatory variation? Experimental evidence for the role of temporal dynamics.
  This past calendar item can be viewed here.
• Feb 08, 2018 - Dr Hadas Kotek (NYU) on A selective ban on syntactic scope-taking
  This past calendar item can be viewed here.
• Feb 05, 2018 - Dr Martina Martinović (U Florida) on Wh-movement, pseudoclefts, and sluicing in Wolof
  This past calendar item can be viewed here.
• Feb 01, 2018 - Dr Jason Overfelt (U Minnesota) on Currency in a semantic economy
  This past calendar item can be viewed here.
• Jan 18, 2018 - Dr Aida Talić on (Non)Uniformity of the Adjectival and the Nominal Domain
  This past calendar item can be viewed here.
• Nov 27, 2017 - Dr Fred Genesee on Lessons from a Half Century of Research on Dual Language Teaching and Learning.
  This past calendar item can be viewed here.
• Nov 13, 2017 - Dr Jeffrey Punske on Representations in Dissimilation Phenomena.
  This past calendar item can be viewed here.
• Oct 30, 2017 - Dr Elise Kramer on Net-Savvy Cats and Newbie Dogs: Textual Materiality and the Embodiment of Computer-Mediated “Voices”
  This past calendar item can be viewed here.
• Oct 16, 2017 - Dr Klaus von Heusinger on Inferrable and partitive indefinites in topic position.
  This past calendar item can be viewed here.
• Oct 02, 2017 - Dr Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez on Language Contact Leading to Complexification or Simplification; Evidences from Basque.
  This past calendar item can be viewed here.
• Sep 25, 2017 - Dr Roy Lyster on Language-Focused Instruction in Content-Based Classrooms.
  This past calendar item can be viewed here.
• Sep 18, 2017 - Dr Aida Talić on Spelling out enclitics in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian and giving their tone a voice.
  This past calendar item can be viewed here.
• Sep 11, 2017 - Dr Eleanor Chodroff on Structured variation in sibilant fricatives: Implications for phonetic theory and generalized perceptual adaptation.
  This past calendar item can be viewed here.