MIT was well represented at the 84th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, held in Baltimore, January 7-10, 2010.
The following department members and recent graduates gave talks:
Gillian Gallagher: Systemic markedness and laryngeal cooccurrence restrictions
Maria Giavazzi and Jonah Katz: Interaction of phonology and morphology in Kinande loanword adaptation
Martina Gracanin-Yuksek (Middle East Technical University): Multiple guises of multiple coordinated wh-questions
(with Barbara Citko, University of Washington at Seattle)
Peter Graff: Metathesis as asymmetric perceptual realignment
(with Gregory Scontras, Harvard University)
Morris Halle: Dylan Thomas’s syllabic verse, polymeters, and Bracketed Grid Theory
(with Nigel Fabb, University of Strathclyde)
Jonah Katz: Phonetic similarity in an English hip-hop corpus
Ezra Keshet (University of Michigan): Focus on conditional and quantificational coordination
Giorgio Magri (Jean Nicod Institute): Constraint promotion
Wayne O’Neil: Looking beyond English: Linguistic inquiry for English language learners
Daniel J. Ginsberg, Center for Applied Linguistics, and Maya Honda, Wheelock College)
Omer Preminger: Basque unergatives, case-competition, and ergative as inherent case
Kirill Shklovsky: Syncope as failure to insert a copy vowel: A case of Tseltal (presented at the joint meeting of the Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the America)
In addition:
- Ginsbert, Honda, and O’Neil’s paper was referred to in the LSA’s pre-meeting press release (Linguists to Gather in Baltimore for National Conference), under the heading Research Highlights:
New findings in the area of second language acquisition will be presented at a concurrent session on Jan. 9th at 9:00am, entitled “Language Learning.” The panelists will present research exploring two main areas: the mental processes involved in acquiring a new language and how insights from linguistics can facilitate this acquisition process. The paper by Ginsberg, Honda, and O’Neil, for instance, shows how students learning English as a second language can use techniques similar to what trained linguists use when analyzing a new language.
- The MIT Press reports that Shigeru Miyagawa’s new monograph Why Agree? Why Move? was very popular, and the first to sell out!