Quite a few members of our department were in Chicago this past weekend at the annual meeting of the LSA. Apart from Irene, David, Kai, and Jessica conducting many interviews of candidates for our open position, and apart from our own students interviewing for jobs, the following members of the department (and recent graduates) gave talks:
- Adam Albright: From clusters to words: grammatical models of nonce-word acceptability
- Tamina Stephenson: Epistemic modals and PRO
- Jessica Coon: Interrogative possessors and the problem with pied-piping in Chol Mayan
- Michael Kenstowicz: A phonetic study of Kinande ATR harmony
- Edward Flemming: Asymmetries between assimilation and epenthesis
- Martina Gracanin-Yuksek (Middle East Technical University): All auxiliary clitics in Croatian occupy the same syntactic position
Jessica Coon also gave a talk on “The source of split ergativity in Chol Mayan” at the concurrent meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA).
And, subprime was voted as the word of the year by the American Dialect Society. Among the winners in other categories: the prefix and combining form green- (as in greenwashing) won for both “most useful” and “most likely to succeed,” Googlegänger won for “most creative,” toe-tapper won for “most outrageous,” and human terrain team won for “most euphemistic.”