Student grant and fellowship awards

Morphology group members have been racking up grants and fellowships this month!

Noah Diewald was awarded a Jacobs Research Fund grant and also a grant from the Lewis and Clark Fund for Exploration and Field Research for his dissertation work on Wao Terero (Ecuador) classifiers systems. He also received a Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship from the University of Wisconsin for study of Kichwa (Ecuador).

Connor Rouillier was awarded a Summer Graduate Research Award from the Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences at OSU. He will be mentored by Nikole Patson on his project Delimiting the Boundary between Object File Representation and Ensemble Representation of Plural Objects and Its Interaction with Morphological Form, part of his larger project on individuation as a morphosemantic properties of dialectal Arabic nouns and verbs.

Kyle Maycock defends B.A. thesis

Congratulations to Kyle Maycock, who successfully defended his B.A. thesis, A Formal Analysis of Inflectional Marking in the Albanian Noun Phrase! It is exciting stuff that he hopes to present at the upcoming American International Morphology Meeting.

Thesis abstract: The Albanian noun phrase marks four morphosyntactic properties: number, gender, case, and definiteness. Every lexical word in the phrase mark number and gender, but only the first lexical word in the phrase—either a noun or an adjective—marks case and definiteness. Number and gender are straightforwardly morphological, but the placement of case and definiteness is dependent upon the syntax. In this way, this exponent is a clitic. The Albanian clitic is especially informative about the morphology-syntax interface because of its “special” (Zwicky 1977) placement after the first lexical word, or second position (2P), and its cumulative exponence. There are many models of 2P clitic placement that treat 2P clitics as phrasal affixes, notably Halpern (1995) and Anderson (2005), but the Albanian clitic’s cumulative exponence poses a problem for these models due to its noncanonical nature. In this thesis, I develop an analysis of the clitic using Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Pollard and Sag 1994) that accounts for the clitic as edge inflection, rather than treating it as phrasal affixation. The clitic’s cumulative exponence results in two paradigms for lexemes depending on their location within the phrase; when the word is in first position, it marks a larger set of properties than when it is in subsequent positions. This poses a problem to morphology, as it suggests morphology is privy to syntactic placement. In this thesis, I develop an analysis using Paradigm Function Morphology that allows morphology to remain blind to phrasal position.

Grace LeFevre defends B.A. thesis

Congratulations to Grace LeFevre, who successfully defended her honors B.A. thesis, Quantifying Paradigm Shape in Spanish Verbs! The thesis was co-advised by Micha Elsner and Andrea Sims. A paper based on the thesis has already been published in the 4th Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics.

Abstract: This thesis computationally models “paradigm shape,” a type of morphological structure that I define by the implicative relations holding among the forms in an inflectional system. Since implicative structure binds the forms in an inflectional system together (Wurzel, 1989), paradigm shape reflects the predictable ways that allomorphs occur in parallel paradigm cells across inflection classes in some languages. Maiden (2005)’s analysis of how certain Romance verbs changed over time in order to conform to existing paradigm shapes highlights the significance of this structure as a historical and cognitive organizing principle. However, paradigm shape has not been computationally formalized in a gradient or replicable way. Using information-theoretic entropy as defined by Shannon (1948), I develop a method to quantify paradigm shape and I apply it to Spanish verbs as a test case. The method bridges the gap between formal work on the organization of the stem space (e.g. Maiden, 2005; Boye and Cabredo Hofherr, 2006) and computational work on quantifying predictability in inflectional systems (e.g. Ackerman and Malouf, 2013; Stump and Finkel, 2015). In doing so, it jointly models the distributions of stems and affixes to compute sets of values that characterize the shapes of Spanish verb classes. Comparison of these values across classes captures partial parallelism between them, enabling identification of both allomorphic and distributional class structures (Baerman et al., 2017). These results with Spanish verbs highlight that my method provides a computational means of capturing multiple aspects of inflection class structure in a way that is replicable and extendable to other languages. Potential directions for future work include testing the limits of the method’s usefulness on known morphologically difficult systems and applying the method to other Romance languages at various stages of historical development.

Martha awarded small grant

Martha Johnson has been awarded an Arts and Humanities Graduate Research Small Grant for fieldwork in Tanzania this summer. Martha will be doing elicitation for her First Qualifying Paper, on the topic of optional multiple exponence of subject agreeement in Kihehe verb constructions. Cool stuff!

Michelle awarded Undergrad Research Scholarship

Congratulations to Michelle McKenzie, who has been awarded an Undergraduate Research Scholarship from OSU for her B.A. thesis project “Effects of relative frequency on morphological processing in Russian and English”.

Michelle also has received a Schwartz Award from the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, to subsidize the cost of studying abroad in Russia this summer.

Great job, Michelle!

Alum accepts new position

Congratulations to lab alum Rob Reynolds (M.A. Slavic Linguistics, 2011), who has accepted a tenure-track position as Assistant Research Professor of Digital Humanities at Brigham Young University. Well done, Rob!

After completing his M.A. at OSU, Rob went on to a Ph.D. in computational linguistics and language learning technologies at the University of Tromsoe. He has been a visiting scholar at BYU this academic year.

Jeff Parker accepts faculty position

Jeff ParkerCongratulations to Jeff Parker, who has accepted a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Brigham Young University. BYU is Jeff’s undergraduate alma mater, so the position takes him back to his roots. He expects to finish the PhD in Spring 2016, and he, Amy, and their kids are looking forward to moving to Provo, Utah over the summer.

Terrific news, Jeff!

Lauren Ressue earns Ph.D.

Andrea Sims and Lauren Ressue

Andrea Sims and Lauren Ressue

The Slavic Linguistics Lab has produced its first Ph.D.! Lauren Ressue  defended her dissertation, Reciprocity in Russian: an investigation of the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic interfaces in April. Andrea Sims (Slavic) and Judith Tonhauser (Linguistics) co-chaired the dissertation committee. Lauren was officially hooded at Ohio State’s spring graduation ceremony.

Abstract of Lauren’s dissertation

Congratulations, Dr. Ressue!