The 2026 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) was held in New Orleans, Louisiana, from January 8–11, 2026. As always, U-M Linguistics was very well represented, with presentations given by our graduate students, faculty, and alumni. We list all of their presentations below. Explore the full program online here.

  • “Phrasal Systematicity in Spontaneous Silent Gesture: Observations from Turkish Gesturers”
    Presenters: Demet Kayabaşı (U-M graduate student) and Natasha Abner (U-M faculty)
  • “Launching Teaching Resources and Innovations for Linguistics Library (TRILL): A workshop for prospective Presenters”
    Presenters: Michal Temkin Martinez, Kazuko Hiramatsu, Lynsey Wolter, Christina Bjorndahl, Reed Blaylock (U-M BA, 2011), Evan Bradley, Ann Burger, Kristin Denham, Jessi Grieser (U-M faculty), Wesley Y. Leonard
  • “Language and Meaning in the Balance: Linguists Respond to the Sociopolitics of Contemporary Discourse”
    Presenters: Lal Zimman, Tracey Weldon, Robert Henderson, Kelly Wright (U-M PhD, 2022), Wesley Y. Leonard, Scott Kiesling, John Baugh
  • “Amplifiers in Southern British English at the intersection of gender and sexuality”
    Presenters: Bradley Mackay (U-M postdoc), Erik Schleef (U-M PhD, 2005), Esme Richardson-Owen
  • “The Relationship between Attitudes and Experience on the Pronunciations of Hispanic Names”
    Presenter: Isaias Ceballos (U-M graduate student)
  • “Speech + Beatboxing = Beatrhyming”
    Presenter: Reed Blaylock (U-M BA, 2011)
  • “The Agreement System of Oloma Noun Phrase”
    Presenter: Olawale Joshua Akingbade (U-M graduate student)
  • “Reflection on Dynamic yet Extinct Language ‘Infrastructures’”
    Presenter: Barbra A. Meek (U-M faculty)
  • “Pragmatic Optionality in U.S. English-German Heritage Speakers”
    Presenter: June Harkrider (U-M BA, 2025)
  • “De re/de dicto ambiguity in English Raising-to-Object: reconstruction without a trace”
    Presenter: Aliakesei Akimenka (U-M graduate student)
  • “Meaning, (Mis)Understanding and (Un)Intelligibility in Language: Implications for Conflict and Peacebuilding”
    Presenters: Alicia Bedford Wassink (U-M PhD, 1999), Molly Babel, Suyuan Liu, Lisa Green, Chris Kennedy, Kevin B. McGowan (U-M PhD, 2011), Erin Wilkinson
  • “Morphosyntactic Variation and Diminutive Morphology in Chicontepec Huasteca Nahuatl”
    Presenter: Cecilia Solís-Barroso (U-M graduate student)
  • “Tricky nominal plurals in Mixtec languages: a story of contact-induced structural innovation”
    Presenters: Guillem Belmar and Eric W. Campbell (U-M BA, 2005)
  • “Indexical and agreement shifting in Kazakh”
    Presenters: Troy G. Messick (U-M BA, 2011), Merlin Balkash
  • “Lexically conditioned sign lowering in American Sign Language”
    Presenters: Reed Blaylock (U-M BA, 2011), Naomi Caselli, Zed Sehyr
  • “Microvariation in the Interpretation of English Negative Sentences”
    Presenters: Francis Blanchette, Jessi Grieser (U-M faculty), Cynthia Lukayanenko, Paul E. Reed, Brittany Lee-Bay
  • “The debut of (JBLAC) The Journal of Black Language and Culture”
    Presenters: Anne Harper Charity-Hudley, Aris Clemons, Jamaal Muwwakkil, Mia Harris, LJ Randolph, Sharese King, Hankerson Shenika, Ramon Stephens, Joy P. G. Peltier (U-M PhD, 2022)
  • “Pragmatic Markers in Dominica Creole: Linguistic and Sociocultural Insights from Bradford, UK Fieldwork”
    Presenter: Joy P. G. Peltier (U-M PhD, 2022)
  • “Is my ‘bilingual’ your ‘bilingual’? Researchers’ definitions and operationalizations of multilingual terminology”
    Presenters: Kelly Kendro (U-M BA, 2019) and Scott Jarvis
  • “Feature Mapping In The Orchard”
    Presenter: Justin T. Craft (U-M PhD, 2023)
  • “Social Justice in the Linguistics Classroom”
    Presenters: Miranda McCarvel, Reed Blaylock (U-M BA, 2011), James Berry, Evan Bradley, Emily Graham, Lisa Morgan Johnson, Kahdeira Monét Martin, Ebi Poweigha, Md. Abusalah Sakender, Allison Taylor-Adams, Jill Hallett, Melissa Baese-Berk, Rosane Natalina Meneghetti, Sarah Hercula
  • “Pronoun and Anaphor (non)complementarity in PPs: A view from coordinated reciprocals”
    Presenter: Troy G. Messick (U-M BA, 2011)
  • “Comparing Comparatives: Two Structures in Indonesian”
    Presenters: Catherine Rose Fortin (U-M PhD, 2007), Auden Cornell, Ezra Jonas Praitis Hill
  • “Assessing the Degree of Mutual Intelligibility Between Eastern and Western Armenian”
    Presenter: Annika Topelian (U-M BA, 2020)
  • “How listeners do and don’t adjust for cross-dialectal differences: Socioethnic variation in the Afrikaans vowel system”
    Presenters: Andries W. Coetzee (U-M faculty), Bradley Mackay (U-M postdoc), Martin Mössmer (U-M graduate student)