A number of faculty and graduate students from U-M Linguistics participated in the 95th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA 2021), held virtually January 7-10.

LSA 2021 featured a diverse array of online sessions that attracted more than 1,000 linguistics scholars from the U.S. and around the world. The meeting provides a forum for the presentation of cutting-edge research focused on the scientific study of language. 

Below is a summary of departmental participation.

Graduate student Kelly Wright presented her first paper at the LSA annual meeting, entitled “Linguistic Inequities: An Audit Study Of Three American Dialects In The Housing Market,” which was very well received.

Kelly reports that the North American Research Network in Historical Sociolinguistics (NARNiHS), had another banner year with its largest, most diverse contingent yet at its third annual meeting, hosting researchers across ten time zones. NARNiHS is a sister society of the Linguistic Society of America.

Graduate student Jeonghwa Cho presented the poster "Actuality and Counterfactual Implicatures in Korean Possibility and Necessity Modals," co-authored by associate professor Ezra Keshet, in the poster session Semantics/Pragmatics. 

Graduate students Lauretta Cheng and Wil Gonzales helped organize the workshop titled "VariAsian: Contact and Change in Asian North American Speech Communities." 

In the VariAsian workshop, assistant professor Savi Namboodiripad gave a talk called “Globalization and language mixing practices among Minnesota Malayalees.” Savi also participated in a panel on Teaching Ethics Across the Linguistics Curriculum. Professor Namboodiripad’s talk, with Elaine Francis, was titled “Teaching Ethics in Experimental Linguistics.” Read the abstracts. 

Linguistics alum Ariana Bancu and professor Marlyse Baptista presented a poster in the Historical Linguistics session titled “Conjunctions as the locus of language contact, language change, and language maintenance: The case of Transylvanian Saxon.” The presenters included Ariana Bancu (Northeastern Illinois University, University of Michigan Linguistics Alumn; Sara Arndt (Kyoto University), and Marlyse Baptista. See more information.

Graduate student Yourdanis Sedarous presented a paper titled "The Effects of Trigger Words on Offline Acceptability of Code-Switched Sentences." Read the abstract.

Graduate student Aliaksei Akimenka presented a poster titled “A neo-constructivist approach to Exceptional Case Marking constructions” in the session on Argument Structure and Ellipsis.

Graduate student Yushi Sugimoto presented the poster "Subject Islands in a Simplest Merge system," coauthored by graduate student Andrew McInnerney. 

Professor Sally Thomason gave a talk on Jan. 7 at the Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) meeting in a session honoring Ives Goddard. Her talk was titled "The phoneme /h/ in Montana Salish." SSILA is a sister society of the Linguistic Society of America.

In all, over 120 papers and 180 research posters were presented at the LSA 2021 annual meeting. See the full schedule: www.linguisticsociety.org/node/34814/schedule