news from The college of arTs and sciences

department of linguistics

2013

2

Right now, visitors to Columbus’s Center of Science and Industry have the

opportunity to see Ohio State faculty and student language scientists in action.

As part of COSI’s Labs in Life exhibit, the Buckeye Language Network (BLN)

is operating a laboratory pod in the museum. At the pod, COSI guests can

watch experiments in progress, learn about linguistics, and even take part in an

experiment.

This is an exciting opportunity to increase the visibility of language research of

many kinds, while giving researchers access to a much more diverse subject

pool than typical university subject pools allow. Already several research projects

have been conducted in the pod, including acquisition, parsing and eye-tracking

experiments, dialect studies, and even a study on the genetics of specific language

impairment.

Also, Ohio State students use the pod as a chance to learn. Undergraduates in the

Science Education Outreach course (Linguistics/Psychology/Teaching & Learning

5700) make use of the pod as a class project workspace. Students develop

linguistics demonstrations for museum guests. They also take demonstrations into

little kidspace® for the museum’s younger patrons.

In addition to outreach students and faculty-student research teams, the pod is

staffed by linguistics graduate student Michael Phelan, undergraduate student Katie

Bauer, and systems specialist Ping Bai. “Working in the pod is a great opportunity

to get the public interested in linguistics research,” Michael says. “Most people

we talk to don’t know that language science exists, but at the BLN Language Pod

they get the chance to not only learn about this research, but see it happen and

participate in it themselves.”

For more information,

visit the pod online at http://www.facebook.com/BLNLanguagePod

spotlight on the

Buckeye language network laB at cosi

Researchers test the eye-tracking apparatus at the Buckeye Language Network laboratory at COSI

We are happy to announce that the Linguistics Faculty Support

Fund has grown large enough to be established as an official

endowed fund by the Ohio State University Board of Trustees.

Endowment gifts are invested in perpetuity, with distribution from

the invested contributions used to fund important programs or

activities. The Linguistics Faculty Support Fund was started in

November of 2012 with gifts from Professors Ilse Lehiste and

Peter Culicover, and since then has benefited from the generosity

of many others. The fund was created to support an endowed

professorship in linguistics. Until the fund’s principal amount

becomes large enough to meet that goal, the accrued income can

be used to support the department’s faculty research mission—or

be re-invested in the endowment fund.

We express our sincere thanks to everyone who has made it

possible to establish the fund. If you are interested in donating

to the Linguistics Faculty Support Fund, visit giveto.osu.edu and

search for Fund #644214 (also called the Distinguished Linguistics

Professorship Fund).

the linguistics faculty support fund

Michael Phelan shows off some experimental stimuli at the Buckeye Language Network at COSI

3linguistics.osu.edu

spotlight

welcome new faculty

has joined our computational linguistics faculty. Marie received

her PhD in linguistics from Stanford in December 2012. Prior

to her doctoral studies, she received a Fulbright scholarship

to visit the Stanford NLP research group for two years, where

she worked with Christopher D. Manning. She has a master’s

degree in classical languages, and a master’s degree in

computer science, both from the Université catholique de

Louvain (Belgium). Her research focuses on developing

computational linguistic methods that capture what is conveyed

by language beyond the literal meaning of the words. She

recently worked on “veridicality:” how people interpret events

they read about in the news — do they think such events really

happened, did not happen, or are just a possibility? She also

has done research on grounding meanings from Web data,

showing how such meanings can drive pragmatic inference.

Her other interests include work on recognizing textual

inference and on contradiction detection.

rebecca morley has been hired as a new faculty member in phonology. In

addition to undergraduate degrees in physics and Japanese, she

has a PhD in cognitive science from Johns Hopkins University

(2008). Since that time, she has worked at Ohio State as a

postdoctoral researcher and as a visiting assistant professor.

Becca is interested in the question of possible and impossible

phonological systems and determining which aspects of linguistic

universals can be attributed to learning mechanisms, speech

transmission, or grammatical competence. She officially joins the

faculty in the upcoming Autumn Semester.

marie-catherine de marneffe

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Congratulating

outstanding students and faculty

Researcher amanda miller was nominated for an Outstanding

Research Mentor award from the Undergraduate Research Office.

The nomination recognizes Amanda’s generous contributions to

the education and personal growth of undergraduate researchers.

Graduate student rachel Burdin and MA student Jeff parker

were awarded fellowships to attend the 2013 Summer Linguistic

Institute.

Graduate student cindy Johnson received a 2012-2013 Arts and

Humanities Graduate Research Small Grant to present her paper,

“Multiple Antecedent Agreement: A Comparative Study of Greek

and Latin” at the annual meeting of the Indo-European Conference

in Los Angeles, California..

Graduate student Jane mitsch won an NSF Doctoral Dissertation

Research Improvement Grant for her dissertation project: Linguistic

and Political borders in the Senegambia region. The project is

funded jointly by the NSF programs in Linguistics and in Cultural

Anthropology.

Faculty member Judith tonhauser received a Research

Enhancement Grant from the College of Arts and Sciences, division

of arts and humanities, for her proposed work, “Content and

context in the study of meaning variation.”

tonhauser also won the Frederick Burkhardt Residential

Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars from the American

Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). The award allows her to be

in residence at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral

Sciences at Stanford University during 2013-14.

Graduate student marty van schijndel and faculty member william

schuler, along with Luan Nguyen (University of Minnesota), won

the Best Paper Award at COLING 2012, in Mumbai, India for

their paper “Accurate Unbounded Dependency Recovery using

Generalized Categorial Grammars.”

Congratulations to faculty member Brian Joseph, elected fellow of

the Center for Hellenic Studies at Harvard for the academic year

2013-2014.

Graduate student Jefferson Barlew received a 2012-2013 Arts

and Humanities Graduate Research Small Grant to present his

paper, “Anchored to What? An Anaphoric Approach to Frames of

Reference” at the meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society in

Berkeley, CA, in February.

Faculty members Judith tonhauser and cynthia clopper each

received an Arts and Humanities Grant-in-Aid to attend the German

Linguistics Society meeting in Potsdam, Germany, in March. Their

paper is titled, “Variation in the Prosody of Contrastive Focus in

Head- and Edge-Marking Languages.”

Faculty member mike white was given the International Research

Collaboration Award by the University of Sydney for his project

with James Curran, Closing the loop: Combinatory Categorial

Grammar parsing and generation of natural language.

2012-13 members of the UnderLings, the undergraduate Linguistics club

5linguistics.osu.edu

Jefferson Barlew presented “Anchored to what? An anaphoric

approach to frames of reference” at the Berkeley Linguistics

Society’s 39th Annual Meeting. He also presented “When behind is

in front of: the meanings of Mushunguli directional expressions” at

the 44th Annual Conference on African Linguistics at Georgetown

University.

rachel Burdin, david howcroft, cindy Johnson, tsz-him tsui, and

rory turnbull presented “What information theory can contribute

to our understanding of paradigmatic change: the emergence of

the mixed adjective declension in New High German” at the 10th

annual Martin Luther King Day Symposium at Ohio State. They

also presented “The development of adjective morphosyntax in

High German: Using information theory to quantify claims about

language change” at GLAC 19 at SUNY Buffalo.

katie carmichael presented “R-lessness in Greate(r) New O(r)

leans” at the 2013 meeting of the American Dialect Society in

Boston. She also presented “Place-linked Expectations and

Listener Awareness of Regional Dialects: An Experimental

Approach,” as part of an organized session on awareness and

control in sociolinguistic research at the 2013 Linguistic Society of

America Meeting.

katie carmichael, abby walker, shontael wanjema and Jane

mitch, along with faculty member Kathryn Campbell-Kibler,

presented “Performing gender: A sociophonetic analysis of a

gender mimicry task” at the 2013 Linguistic Society of America

Meeting in Boston. They also presented,“New methods in corpus

development: Integrating teaching and research through in-course

modules.”

cindy Johnson presented “Agreement issues in Indo-European:

Multiple nouns, multiple adjectives, and Albanian nyje particles,”

at the 10th Annual Martin Luther King Day Symposium, Ohio State.

She also presented “Ergativity in English Deverbal Derivational

Morphology” at the 2013 LSA Annual Meeting, Boston, and

“Multiple Antecedent Agreement: A comparative study of

Greek and Latin” at the 24th Annual West Coast Indo-European

Conference at UCLA. She also was invited to speak at LingLunch

at Indiana University in Bloomington, on “Ergativity in English

Deverbal Derivational Morphology.”

rachel klippenstein presented a poster titled “Phonetically and

syntactically-based reanalysis in the development of verbal better”

at the 2013 LSA Annual Meeting in Boston. She also presented

“The meaning of Old English mynsterman” at the 10th annual

Martin Luther King Day Symposium at Ohio State.

marivic lesho, along with eeva sippola, presented “The

sociolinguistic situation of the Manila Bay Chabacano-speaking

communities” at Language Documentation and Conservation 7.

She also presented “Social attitudes toward mid vowel raising in

Cavite Chabacano” at the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics

meeting in Boston.

scott martin, along with Ohio State faculty member mike white

and kapil thadani (Columbia University) published “A joint phrasal

and dependency model for paraphrase alignment” in Proceedings

of the 24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

(COLING 2012).

patrick reidy, along with faculty member mary Beckman

presented “The effect of spectral estimator on common spectral

measures for sibilant fricatives.” at InterSpeech 2012 in Portland.

marten van schijndel, along with faculty member william schuler,

published “An Analysis of Frequency- and Recency-Based

Processing Costs” in Proceedings of 2013 Conference of the

North American Chapter of the Association for Computational

Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT’13)

Atlanta, GA, 2013. They also published “Accurate Unbounded

Dependency Recovery using Generalized Categorial Grammars”

with Luan Nguyen in Proceedings of the 24th International

Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2012), Mumbai,

India. Additionally, with Andy Exley, they published “Connectionist-

Inspired Incremental PCFG Parsing” in Proceedings of the 3rd

Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics

(CMCL’12), Montreal, Canada, 2012.

chris worth published “A Hypothetical Proof Account of Chamorro

Wh-Agreement” in Local Modelling of Non-Local Dependencies

(2012), ed. Artemis Alexiadou, Tibor Kiss, Gereon Müller, De

Gruyter.

graduate student presentations and puBlications

6

faculty puBlications

mary Beckman

Kong, E. J., Beckman, M. E., & Edwards, J. (2012). Voice onset

time is necessary but not always sufficient to describe acquisition

of voiced stops: The cases of Greek and Japanese. Journal of

Phonetics, 40(6): 725-744.

Munson, B., Edwards, J., & Beckman, M. E. (2012). Phonological

representations in language acquisition: Climbing the ladder

of abstraction. In A. C. Cohn, C. Fougeron, M. K. Huffman, eds.,

Handbook of laboratory phonology, pp. 288-209. Oxford

University Press.

Reidy, Patrick, & Beckman, Mary (2012). The effect of spectral

estimator on common spectral measures for sibilant fricatives.

InterSpeech2012, 9-13 September 2012, Portland.

kathryn campBell-kiBler

2012. “Contestation and Enregisterment in Ohio’s Imagined

Dialects.” Journal of English Linguistics. 40(3): 281-305.

2012. “The Implicit Association Test and sociolinguistic meaning.”

Lingua. 122(7):753-763.

cynthia clopper

Clopper, C. G., Rohrbeck, K. L., & Wagner, L. (2013). Perception of

talker age by young adults with high-functioning autism. Journal

of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 43, 134-146.

Clopper, C. G. (2012). Effects of dialect variation on the semantic

predictability benefit. Language and Cognitive Processes, 27,

1002-1020.

Clopper, C. G., Rohrbeck, K. L., & Wagner, L. (2012). Perception

of dialect variation by young adults with high-functioning autism.

Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 42, 740-754.

Clopper, C. G. (2012). Clustering and classification methods. In

A. C. Cohn, C. Fougeron, & M. K. Huffman (Eds.), The Oxford

Handbook of Laboratory Phonology (pp. 678-691). Oxford:

Oxford University Press.

Clopper, C. G. (2013). Modeling multi-level factors using linear

mixed effects. Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics.

Turnbull, R., & Clopper, C. G. (2013). Effects of semantic

predictability and dialect variation on vowel production in clear

and plain lab speech. Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics

peter culicoverCulicover, Peter W. and Ray Jackendoff. “A domain-general

approach to ellipsis interpretation.” Submitted to Language. In

press, to appear 2012.

Brian Joseph

A Variationist Solution to Apparent Copying Across Related

Languages. In Copies vs. Cognates in Bound Morphology, ed. by

Lars Johanson & Martine Robbeets, Ch. 7. Brill Publishers (2012).

The Etymology of the Albanian stër- Prefix. In Festschrift for

Rexhep Ismajli (2012). Editorial Introduction to Anthropocentric

Case Theory: How Are Humans Coded in the Discourse? by

Zuzana Topolinska (Kenneth E. Naylor Memorial Lecture Series,

No. 6), pp. iv-xii (2013).

Editorial Introduction to The Structure of the Deseterac – The

Metre of Serbian Epic Poetry, by Ilse Lehiste (Kenneth E. Naylor

Memorial Lecture Series, No. 7), pp. iv-xii (2013).

Editorial Introduction to From Phonological Analysis at my Desk

to Linguistic Activism with Slovene in the Austrian Alps, by Tom

Priestly (Kenneth E. Naylor Memorial Lecture Series, No. 8), pp.

iv-xii (2013).

craige roBerts

“Information Structure: Toward an integrated theory of formal

pragmatics”. Semantics and Pragmatics 5.6:1-69. (Invited as a

classic unpublished paper.)

“Information Structure: Afterword” with bibliography of related

work. Semantics and Pragmatics 5.7:1-19.

william schuler

Marten van Schijndel and William Schuler. An Analysis of

Frequency- and Recency-Based Processing Costs. Proceedings

of 2013 Conference of the North American Chapter of the

Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language

Technologies (NAACL-HLT’13) Atlanta, GA, 2013

Luan Nguyen, Marten van Schijndel, and William Schuler.

Accurate Unbounded Dependency Recovery using Generalized

Categorial Grammars. Proceedings of the 24th In- ternational

Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2012),

Mumbai, India, 2012.

Marten van Schijndel, Andy Exley, and William Schuler.

Connectionist-Inspired Incremental PCFG Parsing. Proceedings

of the 3rd Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational

Linguistics (CMCL’12), Montreal, Canada, 2012.

7

faculty puBlications {Continued}

linguistics.osu.edu

shari speerIto, K., Bibyk, S., Wagner, L., & Speer, S.R. (To appear).

Interpretation of contrastive pitch accent in 6- to 11-year old English

speaking children (and adults). Journal of Child Language.

Weiner, S., Speer, S.R. & Shank, C.A.S. (2012). Effects of frequency,

repetition and prosodic location on ambiguous Mandarin word

production. Proceedings of the International Conference on

Speech Prosody, Shanghai, China.

Weiner, S., Speer, S.R. & Shank, C.A.S. (2012). Timed lexical

activation of ambiguous Mandarin homophones. Proceedings

of the 24th North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics

(NACCL-24).

Judith tonhauser 2013 “Towards a taxonomy of projective content,” Judith Tonhauser,

David Beaver, Craige Roberts and Mandy Simons, Language 89.1.

2013 “The prosody of focus in Paraguayan Guaraní”, Cynthia G.

Clopper and Judith Tonhauser, International Journal of American

Linguistics 79.2, 219-251.

2013 “Semantics of inflection,” Paul Kiparsky and Judith Tonhauser,

in Maienborn, C., K. von Heusinger and P. Portner (eds.) Semantics:

An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning, Vol. 3,

Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp.2070-2097.

2012 “Contrastive topics in Paraguayan Guaraní discourse,” Judith

Tonhauser, Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT)

XXII, Ithaca, NY: CLC Publications, pp.268-285.

2012 “Diagnosing (not-)at-issue content,” Judith Tonhauser,

Proceedings of Semantics of Under-represented Languages of

the Americas VI, Amherst, MA: GLSA Publications.

michael white

Kapil Thadani, Scott Martin, and Michael White. 2012. A joint

phrasal and dependency model for paraphrase alignment. In

Proc. of COLING-2012.

Michael White and Rajakrishnan Rajkumar. 2012. Minimal

dependency length in realization ranking. In Proc. of EMNLP-12.

Michael White. 2012. Shared Task Proposal: Syntactic Paraphrase

Ranking. In Proc. of the 7th International Conference on Natural

Language Generation (INLG-12).

Dennis N. Mehay and Michael White. 2012. Shallow and Deep

Paraphrasing for Improved Machine Translation Parameter

Optimization. In Proc. of the AMTA 2012 Workshop on

Monolingual Machine Translation (MONOMT 2012).

don winford2012. “Creole Languages.” In Robert Binnick (ed). The Oxford

Handbook of Tense and Aspect, pp. 428-457. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

2012. “Pidgins and creoles in the history of English.” In Terttu

Nevalainen and Elizabeth Closs Traugott (eds.) The Oxford

Handbook of the History of English, pp. 592-601. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

OhioSpeaks members discuss pedagogy at the OhioSpeaks Project Workshop in February

8

gregory stump (’81) was the keynote speaker at the first

meeting of the American International Morphology Meeting at

the University of Massachusetts in September. He also has a new

book with Raphael A. Finkel (Morphological Typology: From Word

to Paradigm) due out this spring from Cambridge University press.

Right now, he is spending six weeks in Paris presenting his current

research in a series of lectures at the invitation of the Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle at the Université Paris.

rex wallace (’84) and Anthony Tuck (UMass Amherst,

Department of Classics) currently are working on a museum

exhibition project entitled “First Words: The Archaeology of

Language at Poggio Civitate.” The focus is epigraphy and literacy

at Poggio Civitate (Murlo), a pre-urban settlement in Tuscany some

25 km south of Siena. The exhibition is set to open at the Museo Civico di Murlo in mid-June.

georgios tserdanelis (’05) has accepted a new position

as an IVR Senior Programmer at eLoyalty.

sara garnes (’74) taught English at Wuhan University in

Wuhan, China, in July 2012, on a program sponsored by Ohio

State University and Wuhan: WUSIEP (Wuhan University Summer

Intensive English Program). The program is being offered again

this year; those interested should contact Sara at <garnes.1@osu.edu> for more information.

John nerBonne (’83) was elected president of ALLC: The

European Association for Digital Humanities, 2012-1015. In

November, he was honored by an Alexander von Humboldt

Research award, which he plans to use to deepen collaboration

with colleagues in Freiburg working on quantitative analyses of variation.

Janice fon (’02) welcomed her new son, Yu-Ching Lukas Ping,

in January.

alumni updates

9

past news and events

see the department Calendar (http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/calendar/) for upcoming events and information.

visit us on faceBook at www.facebook.com/lingosu

In October, UnderLings matt hamann, kate schudel, Zhi li,

nichole ashley and rosaria tirone carved pumpkins together.

In November, graduate student michael phelan and his wife Jen

welcomed their first son calvin.

In February, the OhioSpeaks Project hosted a workshop with the

support of the Buckeye Language Network.

In September, students and faculty learned about linguistics

faculty research at the Faculty Five Minutes of Fame.

linguistics.osu.edu

222 Oxley Hall 1712 Neil Avenue Columbus, OH 43210

deparTmenT of linguistics

linguistics.osu.edu

on october 4, ohio state celebrated the kick off of the public phase of a $2.5

billion fundraising campaign. the But for ohio state campaign is ohio state’s

largest-ever fundraising effort. more than 400,000 alumni and friends have

contributed to the campaign so far and nearly 350 alumni and friends are

currently involved in the campaign as volunteers.

as ohio’s land-grant institution, ohio state is the doorway to the american dream

for hundreds of thousands of students and alumni. By investing in ohio state

through the But for ohio state campaign, you, our alumni and friends, represent

the possibility that exists when people believe in an enduring mission. with your

help, there is no predicting the magnitude of our impact on people’s lives.

please consider supporting the campaign and the college of arts and sciences

with a gift to the ohio state fund for the arts and sciences or contribute directly

to the department of linguistics:

linguistics discretionary fund

a fund for enriching research, teaching and other opportunities for members

of the linguistics community (faculty, students, alumni). donations to this fund

will be used to support visiting scholars; invite speakers; support activities

that recognize excellence in teaching; research and service; host conferences/

workshops at ohio state and elsewhere; and other such activities.

distinguished linguistics professorship fund

a fund to provide compensation and academic support for a faculty member

in the department of linguistics. the fund becomes endowed when it reaches

$25,000.00. the endowment fund will be invested by the university with the

income used to provide support for, in this case,

a faculty position in linguistics.

visit giveto.osu.edu for more information.