The Linguistics Department will be pleased to welcome Hannah Rohde as part of a two-year postdoctoral Mellon fellowship next year. Here’s what Hannah has to say about herself:
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I was born in Nicosia, Cyprus but grew up in the Poconos in Pennsylvania. I studied Linguistics and Computer Science as an undergrad at Brown University and then went to UC San Diego for grad school. For the last two years, I’ve been a postdoc at Northwestern University, learning a bit about eyetracking among other things. My research centers around questions related to discourse processing, specifically how comprehenders generate expectations about where a discourse is going and how those expectations influence other aspects of sentence processing. This work brings together my interests in pragmatics and psycholinguistics and touches on issues that include event structure, causal reasoning, anaphora resolution, syntactic processing, and even sound perception. I’m excited to be moving back to California, though my big debate right now is whether I need to get a car again or whether I can scale San Francisco hills on a little folding commuter bike. Suggestions or topographic maps of San Francisco are welcome! |
I was born in Nicosia, Cyprus but grew up in the Poconos in Pennsylvania. I studied Linguistics and Computer Science as an undergrad at Brown University and then went to UC San Diego for grad school. For the last two years, I’ve been a postdoc at Northwestern University, learning a bit about eyetracking among other things. My research centers around questions related to discourse processing, specifically how comprehenders generate expectations about where a discourse is going and how those expectations influence other aspects of sentence processing. This work brings together my interests in pragmatics and psycholinguistics and touches on issues that include event structure, causal reasoning, anaphora resolution, syntactic processing, and even sound perception. I’m excited to be moving back to California, though my big debate right now is whether I need to get a car again or whether I can scale San Francisco hills on a little folding commuter bike. Suggestions or topographic maps of San Francisco are welcome!
The New York Times ran a story this week about language documentation in the exotic urban jungle of New York City. Linguists involved include Daniel Kaufman at CUNY and Robert Holman at NYU. This is excellent publicity for the field, and interesting to boot; watch the video version here to hear what Garifuna and Mamuju sound like!
Geoffrey Nunberg (School of Information, UC Berkeley) will appear in the Annual Symbolic Systems Distinguished Speaker Lecture this next Monday, 3 May, at 5:15 in 370-370. His topic is “How the Language of Politics is Different” — see you there!
Linguistics and cognitive science have a lot to contribute to understanding the language of public discourse — the language that’s used to legitimate ideologies and mobilize opinion about political and cultural questions. But the interesting — and curious– properties of this language only emerge when we set aside some of the fundamental assumptions that underlie our familiar approaches to meaning. The most important words in this discourse are generally complex, evaluative, and contested. Their histories can actively obtrude on their current meanings, and they often express “broken concepts” that contain internal inconsistencies — features that invest them with singular persuasive power, but that make them different from the words of everyday speech. Above all, we have to understand this language as existing “out there,” external to any individual speaker.
Get ready for the Phonetics and Phonology Workshop this next Monday, 3 May, 7:00pm in the Greenberg Room. They’ll be hosting Jaye Padgett from UCSC who will speak on “Russian Consonant-Vowel Interactions and Derivational Opacity.”
Abstract:
Russian phonology is a rich source of consonant and vowel place interactions. Even when we restrict our attention to surface (secondary) palatalization and /i/ the facts are puzzling enough to motivate a derivational account that appeals to phonological levels (Rubach 2000). I take a fresh look at Rubach’s stratal OT analysis, and argue for an alternative that appeals to morpheme-specific constraints (Pater 2000, 2009, Ito and Mester 1999, Fukazawa 1999). This alternative is preferable to the stratal analysis of Russian in several respects: it is much simpler, it does better empirically, it provides a unified analysis of “i-retraction”, and it is better grounded in independent facts about Russian phonology. The reanalysis shows that the Russian facts involve no derivational opacity at all. In the second part of the talk I consider more generally the status of serial derivations in current phonology, and argue that we should further develop external, experimental sources of evidence, along the lines of Sumner (2003), that can help us evaluate claims about abstractness.
Our reporters recently uncovered that resident globetrotter Rob Munro might have broken the linguistics record for talks per mile per hour, giving two talks in two hemispheres within two days. He spoke on “Natural Language Processing for Social Development” at The Research Centre for Linguistic Typology (RCLT) Seminar Series, Latrobe University, Melbourne, and then made it to San Francisco for a talk at the Meeting of the Association of Clinical Faculty at UCSF about “SMS Emergency Response in Haiti, Aid and Relief for Global Disasters.” Can you beat the record?
[Thanks Rob!]
First-year Isla Flores-Bayer received a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship and was an Honorable Mention for an NSA Fellowship. Congratulations, Isla!
Eye Halve a Spelling Chequer
Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rarely ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect in it’s weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.
-Sauce unknown
