News & Updates
2010-2011:Collaborative research by Daphne Theijssen, Joan Bresnan, and Marilyn Ford was presented by Daphne Theijssen as a poster "In a land far, far away... The dative alternation in British, American and Australian English" at QITL 4 on March 28--31, 2011 in Berlin.
John Rickford and Robin Melnick presented their joint work on "Processing Constraints and Socio-Variation Interact in Creole Question Formation" as a poster at the CUNY 2011 Conference on Human Sentence Processing, held at Stanford on March 24--26, 2011. Tom Wasow was Director of the Conference, John Rickford gave an invited talk "Now you see them, now you don't: Insights from the Relatives in English Vernaculars", Victor Kuperman co-authored a presentation "On the nature of syntactic categories: a corpus study of "kind of" in American English" with Whitney Tabor and Anuenue Kukona, and Sali Tagliamonte presented the poster "From mother to child to speech community: Probability matching in language acquisition and change". Spoken Syntax Lab alumnus Hal Tily presented "The evolution of English grammar towards minimal inter-word dependency lengths" at the same conference.
Jason Grafmiller and Stephanie Shih presented their joint work "Weighing in on end weight" as a paper at the LSA's 85th annual meeting on January 6-9, 2011. Their abstract won the first runner-up award among student abstracts and was ranked second among all abstracts accepted.
On November 12, 2010 the Spoken Syntax Lab hosted a Workshop "The Development of Syntactic Alternations" at CSLI's Cordura Hall in Cordura 100. View the program.
Joan Bresnan (PI) will direct a three and one-half year project "The Development of Syntactic Alternations" under the support of an NSF grant awarded to Stanford from September 15, 2010 to February 28, 2014. Focusing on the English dative and genitive alternations, the project will investigate how the implicit knowledge of linguistic probabilities develops in the individual and in historically diverging groups of speakers. Marilyn Ford, Jen Hay, Anette Rosenbach, Benedikt Szmrecsányi, and Sali Tagliamonte are collaborators. A current NSF project of which Joan is PI, "The Dynamics of Probabilistic Grammar," reaches completion on November 30, 2010.
In January of 2010 Jen Hay became the Director of the New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain, and Behavior, of which the Spoken Syntax Lab is a Partner. Joan Bresnan, Tom Wasow, and Marilyn Ford will be delegates to the inaugural workshop of the NZILBB on December 8--10, 2010.
We welcome Fulbright scholar Daphne Theijssen visiting from Raboud University Nijmegen for Fall 2010.
Marilyn Ford is visiting the Lab from September 18 to October 9, 2010 during her sabbatical leave from Griffith University. Marilyn will be collaborating with Joan Bresnan on cross-variety experiments on the English dative and genitive alternations.
Benedikt Szmrecsányi and Christoph Wolk are visiting the Lab from November 6 to 13, 2010. They will collaborate with Joan Bresnan on their work on genitive and dative variation in Late Modern English and participate in the November 12 Workshop.
Victor Kuperman is visiting the Lab from November 11 to 15, 2010. He will collaborate with Joan Bresnan on their duration study of incremental production of English datives and participate in the November 12 Workshop.
Petra Hendriks is visiting the Lab in November 9 to 14, 2010 to participate in the November 12 Workshop.
Florian Jaeger is on sabbatical leave at Stanford and will participate in the November 12 Workshop.