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
4
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 <[email protected]> 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.