A number of faculty and graduate students from U-M Linguistics participated in the 93rd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA 2019), held January 3-6 in New York City. 

Faculty members participating in professional capacities included the following:

Following is a list of research and poster presentations given by U-M faculty and graduate students.

Fostering a Culture of Inclusion in Linguistics

Collegiate Postdoctoral Fellow Savi Namboodiripad presented “A survey of linguists and language researchers: Harassment, bias, and what we can do about it” during an invited plenary panel on Fostering a Culture of Inclusion in Linguistics. The research was conducted by Namboodiripad and coauthors Dr. Corrine Occhino (Rochester Institute of Technology), and Dr. Lynn Hou (UC Santa Barbara), with assistance from Dr. Hayley Heaton, Marjorie Herbert, Dominique Canning and Dominique Bouavichith, and Anne Charity Hudley of UC Santa Barbara. The study was supported by a grant from the National Center for Institutional Diversity.

As part of the study, the authors conducted a survey of 1,415 linguists and language researchers, asking how individuals' social identities have affected their experiences of harassment and bias. The survey will be open until the end of the month. Results and other resources are available on the following website: linguistsurvey.com.

Read the research abstract. Watch a YouTube video of the research presentation.

North American Research Network

Graduate student Kelly Wright attended LSA 2019 in her official capacity as a founding member of the LSA's newest Sister Society, NARNiHS, The North American Research Network in Historical Sociolinguistics. The first annual meeting of the NARNiHS group featured twelve presentations and six posters, with researchers representing seven countries. As part of her service, Kelly served as chair in a session entitled "Pathways of Change.”

Graduate student Carrie Ann Morgan presented a poster as part of the NARNiHS annual meeting, titled “Inflammatory infinitives and light dialects: enregistering Central Albanian.”

Research Presentations and Other Conference Activities

  • Graduate student Alan Ke presented "Inalienable Relational Nouns and Logophors," coauthored by Acrisio Pires.

  • With collaborators, Savi Namboodiripad organized a session called “Crosslinguistic Variation in Island Phenomena,” and presented about Malayalam in that session.

  • Professor Marlyse Baptista served as chair for a session on Pragmatics. She also participated in a panel granting a Lifetime Achievement Award to Professor William Samarin (University of Toronto). In addition, Marlyse presented, with Emanuel de Pina (University of Lisbon), “Negation in Cape Verdean Creole: a parametric account.”

  • Graduate student Joy Peltier presented “Exploring the determiner system of Kwéyòl Donmnik through speakers’ use of cospeech gestures.”

  • Graduate student Wilkinson Daniel Wong Gonzales presented “Variation in Philippine Hybrid Hokkien nominal affixation.” With collaborators, he presented “Issit Issit is only a tag question? The grammaticalization and pragmatization of issit in colloquial Singapore English” and “Ethnic and gender variation in the CMC use of Colloquial Singapore English discourse particles.”

  • Graduate student Jiseung Kim presented “Individual differences in the production of prosodic boundaries in American English.”

Plenary Poster Session

Assistant Professor Natasha Abner, with collaborators Rebecca Lotwich (Montclair State University), Yasmin Hussein (Montana State University), Laura Lakusta (Montclair State University): "From speech to gesture: where do we see source-goal asymmetries?"

Graduate student Dominique A. Canning: "Performing identity: linguistic analysis of Black gay male speech in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt"

Graduate student Justin Craft: "Artificial grammar learning reveals differences in L1 categorical and gradient constraint effects"

Graduate student Wilkinson Daniel Wong Gonzales (with collaborators): “Vowel system or vowel systems? Variation in Philippine Hybrid Hokkien monophthongs”

Associate Professor Ezra Keshet: "Partial Updates to Simplify Plural Dynamic Logic"

Graduate student Joy Peltier: "Expression of referents in Kwéyòl Donmnik (KD): the role of pragmatics in KD nominal structure”

Graduate student Kate Sherwood: "Focus marking in Southern Bobo Madaré"

 

Photos: Justin Craft (homepage) and Joy Peltier (above) present posters.