Welcome Maria Copot

We’re excited to be hosting Maria Copot for a three month visit to OSU Linguistics! Maria is a PhD student from the Laboratoire de linguistique formelle at Université de Paris, working in the area of quantitative and experimental morphology. She’s here to develop collaborations, share her research, and learn about the research happening locally. Welcome, Maria!

Inflectional Defectiveness

Inflectional DefectivenessAndrea Sims‘s new book, Inflectional Defectiveness, has just been published by Cambridge University Press. Such a pretty blue cover… And if you are interested in what is between the covers, here is a description of the content:

Paradigmatic gaps (‘missing’ inflected forms) have traditionally been considered to be the random detritus of a language’s history and marginal exceptions to the normal functioning of its inflectional system. Arguing that this is a misperception, Inflectional Defectiveness demonstrates that paradigmatic gaps are in fact normal and expected products of inflectional structure. Sims offers an accessible exploration of how and why inflectional defectiveness arises, why it persists, and how it is learned. The book presents a theory of morphology which is rooted in the implicative structure of the paradigm. This systematic exploration of the topic also addresses questions of inflection class organization, the morphology-syntax interface, the structure of the lexicon, and the nature of productivity. A novel synthesis of established research and new empirical data, this work is significant for researchers and graduate students in all fields of linguistics.

Linguist by day, tourist by night

Why visit St. Petersburg?  There is, of course, the tremendous amount of history, art, architecture, food, etc. to enjoy in such a beautiful city, but there’s also something else that is quite invaluable: lots of native Russian speakers!

Working in the Cognitive Studies Lab at St. Petersburg State University

Working in the Cognitive Studies Lab at St. Petersburg State University

In September Jeff Parker spent just over two weeks in St. Petersburg running experiments about the inflectional complexity of Russian nouns for his dissertation. He ran visual lexical decision tasks, masked priming visual lexical decisions tasks, word naming tasks and a word game (for Ryan Perkins’s project on palatalization). He was hosted by wonderful colleagues in the Cognitive Studies Lab at St. Petersburg State University; many thanks to Natalia Slioussar! The lab was located in the Bobrinsky Palace, just one street from the Neva river.  There was some worry about whether two weeks would be enough time, but with 45 participants and over 100 tasks completed by the end of the stay, the trip was definitely a success.

Touring St. Petersburg, Russia

Touring St. Petersburg, Russia

Given that the trip was almost exactly 10 years since Jeff had been in Russia last, it was nice that his wife Amy was able to come for part of the trip. Running experiments by day and touring Russia by night — the ideal life of a Slavic linguist.

After returning home, Jeff had just a few days to prepare preliminary results for a poster at AIMM3 in Amherst, MA.

Check out the poster: Processing inflectional complexity (Parker 2015, poster at AIMM3).