Stony Brook Linguistics

On July 2 2021, Francisco Ordóñez gave a talk as a plenary speaker, titled 'Possession and complex spatial expressions in Romance', at the 30th Colloquium on Generative Grammar.

Richard Larson's new article, titled 'Rethinking cartography', has appeared in the Journal Language, and is available here: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/794874.

Mark Aronoff and Jon Rawski, together with Wendy Sandler, recently published an article titled 'Talk Isn't So Cheap' in Inference.

Prof. John Bailyn has been awarded a new grant by the U.S. Embassy Moscow Public Affairs Section in support of the 2021 virtual sessions of the summer school he has co-directed in St. Petersburg, Russia since 2003 (The NY-St. Petersburg Institute of Linguistics, Cognition and Culture - "NYI"). This summer will be the 20th session of NYI, and the 3rd consecutive virtual session (V-NYI). Among other things, this grant will allow some of our graduate students to participate in V-NYI as TAs.

On May 6, Andrija Petrovic gave a talk entitled ‘Vowel fronting in Serbian noun inflection' at the 57th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS 57). Aspects of this work have also been presented at the 30th annual meeting of Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics (FASL 30, May 13-16), and the 28th Manchester Phonology Meeting (MFM 28, May 26-28).

On June 4, 2021, Jon Rawski will give a talk titled 'Typology Emerges from Computability' as part of the SIGTYP Lecture Series for the ACL Special Interest Group on Typology (SIGTYP). More info can be found here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/sigtyp-lecture-series-jon-ra

On May 20, 2021 we celebrated our new graduates in a virtual commencement ceremony. This year our department had a record number of students graduating; nearly a hundred across five undergraduate and graduate programs. The commencement video can be found here: https://linguistics.stonybrook.edu//Linguistics_commenceme.

Student Spotlight: As recipient of the President’s Award to Distinguished Doctoral Students, Jonathan Rawski (PhD candidate in Linguistics and IACS) will be pre...senting to the community at the Colloquium on Monday. Learn about Jonathan's research on the award profiles here: https://bit.ly/3tsSC1X 5/17/21 Colloquium event details: https://bit.ly/3f5V1dA

Our department will host a workshop on epenthesis and other types of insertion titled 'Epenthesis and Beyond' on September 17-19, 2021. Website: https://www.stonybrook.edu/epenthesis Call for abstracts: https://old.linguistlist.org/issues/32/32-1517.html

On April 30, two of our graduate students gave talks at Phonology in the North East conference (PhoNE 2021). Veronica Miatto gave a talk titled 'ASL phonemic places of articulation on the head', and Scott Nelson gave a talk titled 'What can logic and model theory tell us about phonological feature systems?'

The department offers a suite of courses that help prepare students to apply for admission to Master's programs in Speech Language Pathology and Audiology. This summer we are offering two fully online courses: Summer Session 1: LIN 380 Anatomy and Physiology of Speech (asynchronous) Summer Session 2: LIN 381 Speech and Language Disorders (MW 6:00-9:25 pm)... Course descriptions are available in the Undergraduate Bulletin: https://www.stonybrook.edu//academicprogra/lin/courses.php Enrollment information is available on the Summer Session website: https://www.stonybrook.edu/summer/

The Middle Eastern Languages Summer Institute (MELSI) at Stony Brook University is offering ARB 101 'Intensive Introductory Arabic' (6 credits) and ARB 201 'Intensive Intermediate Arabic' (6 credits) in summer session 1 (5/24-7/3/2021) M/Tu/W/Th 1:30-4:55, and HBW 'Intensive Introductory Hebrew' (6 credits) in summer session 2 (7/5-8/14/2021). For more information see: https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/melsi/index.php.

Joy Janzen recently won funding from the FAHSS (Fine Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences) initiative for a series of workshops and discussion on Language and Social Justice in Higher Education.

On April 21-23, Jeff Heinz taught a minicourse at MIT titled "Learning Constraints over Representations of Your Own Choosing", based on joint work with Dakotah Lambert and Jon Rawski, and gave an invited talk titled "Making Copies" based on joint work with Hossep Dolatian.

Scott Nelson's article titled 'Lexically-guided perceptual learning does generalize to new phonetic contexts' has appeared in the Journal of Phonetics and is available here: https://www.sciencedirect.com//arti/pii/S0095447020301108. The article was co-authored with Karthik Durvasula from Michigan State University.

Stony Brook Linguistics was once again well represented at the 95th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) in a virtual format, on January 7-10, 2021. Poster presentations... Andrei Antonenko: 'Raising, Control, and Subjunctive Clauses: A Unified Analysis' Anna Melnikova: 'Aspect as an indicator for clausal size in BCS Involuntary State Constructions' Veronica Miatto: 'The syllabicity of word-final inserted vocalic elements in Italian' Chikako Takahashi: 'L2 production acuity and L1:L2 category separateness as predictors of L1 phonetic change' Grace Wivell: 'An exploration and analysis of ablaut reduplication in Indonesian' Symposium Richard Larson (Stony Brook University), with Amy L. Plackowski (Hudson High School), Ian Connally (Fort Worth Independent School District), James Nichols (Braintree Public School District), Marjorie Pak (Emory University): Recruiting & Training Teachers for HS Linguistics

Annette Shideler, Elizabeth Scaduto, and Grace B. Wivell's article titled "One District’s Strategy to Curb Summer Slide Among Elementary School Students" recently appeared on the Journal for Leadership and Instruction.

Dr. Sandhya Sundaresan and Dr. Thomas McFadden will be joining our department in the upcoming academic year. Dr. Sundaresan joins us as the Anandavalli and Dr. G. Swaminathan Endowed Research Professor in Tamil and Assistant Professor of Linguistics. Her research focuses on syntax, in particular on Dravidian syntax, and she conducts fieldwork on Tamil varieties (https://www.sndrsn.org). Dr. McFadden also joins us as Associate Professor of Linguistics. His research focuses on syntax, morphology, and historical linguistics, and he works primarily on Germanic languages and Tamil (https://www.thomasmcfadden.org).

The Department of Linguistics, in collaboration with the Institute for Advanced Computational Science (IACS), will virtually host the 2021 North American Computational Linguistics Open (NACLO) on Thursday, January 28, 2021 from 10am to 1pm. IACS will hold one optional practice session virtually on Saturday, January 16th. What is NACLO?... NACLO is a contest in which high-school students solve linguistic puzzles. In solving these puzzles, students learn about the diversity and consistency of language, while exercising logic skills. No prior knowledge of linguistics or second languages is necessary. Professionals in linguistics, computational linguistics and language technologies use dozens of languages to create engaging problems that represent cutting-edge issues in their fields. The competition has attracted top students to study and work in those same fields. It is truly an opportunity for young people to experience a taste of natural-language processing in the 21st century. Click to register for the practice session: https://docs.google.com//1FAIpQLSfSPjfvzPfiV-LWfW/viewform Click to register for NACLO: https://nacloweb.org/register_student.php. For more info, see here: https://nacloweb.org/.