Morphological Systems Group organizes AIMM5

 

Screenshot of AIMM5 GatherTown spaceScreenshot of AIMM5 poster session in GatherTown

We got to welcome more than 160 morphologists from around the world to OSU (virtually) for the 5th American International Morphology Meeting (AIMM5) last weekend. It was four busy but exciting days of stimulating talks and interesting discussion. (Check out this picture of one of the poster sessions that took place in Gather.Town!) We hope that everyone enjoyed the conference. We certainly did!

It was also an opportunity to show off some of the morphological research happening here at OSU. The program included five presentations from our group:

  • Martha Booker Johnson and Andrea D. Sims, “Using word vectors to investigate semantic transparency cross-linguistically”
  • Kyle Maycock and Andrea D. Sims, “Albanian second-position clitics as edge inflection: Evidence from cumulative exponence in the noun phrase”
  • Connor Rouillier, “The effect of event structure on subject-verb agreement in Najdi Arabic”
  • Noah Diewald, “Wao Terero lexical suffixes: Realization at the lexical semantic-discourse interface”
  • Micha Elsner and Andrea D. Sims, “Analogical modeling of morphology for L1 effects in language contact”

There were also presentations from OSU “friends of the morphology lab” Brian Joseph, Shuan Karim, and John Grinstead (with colleagues).

We look forward to AIMM6, to be held at the University of California, San Diego in 2023!

Balkan and South Slavic Linguistics, Literature and Folklore Conference

OSU-affiliated people at the 2018 Balkan & South Slavic ConferenceYellowstone National ParkThe Biennial Conference on Balkan and South Slavic Linguistics, Literature and Folklore was, as always, a great time. It was full of Balkan food, dancing, nature and wildlife (courtesy of nearby Yellowstone National Park), and even some academic papers. (Andrea presented a talk, “Greek noun stress and the notion ‘head’ in morphology”. Linguistics grad student Rexhina Ndoci also gave a talk titled “Greetings and politeness in Albanian”.) And it was great to catch up with some OSU alums!

Thanks to Elena Petroska and Paul Foster for being great hosts at Montana State University, Billings.

Visit to Universität Leipzig

Christmas Market 2017Thanks to the Institute for Linguistics at the University of Leipzig for an invitation to Andrea to give a colloquium talk in their Interaction of Grammatical Building Blocks colloquium series. It was a great chance to interact with the linguistics community there and talk about the morphology-syntax interface (not to mention attend a really fun department Christmas party). (Pictured here is Andrea’s side trip to Berlin to go to the Christmas markets — a definite ‘bonus’ of the trip!)

Texas Linguistics Society

In September, Andrea Sims gave a keynote talk, “Morphological connectivity in the mental lexicon,” at the 17th Texas Linguistics Society meeting, in Austin, TX.

Check out the slides of the talk: sims-TLS2017-slides.

Thanks to all of the organizers for the invitation and a great conference!

Katja Kibler presents at Midwest Slavic

Congratulations to M.A. student Katja Kibler on presenting her ongoing research at the 2017 Midwest Slavic Conference (April 7-9 at Ohio State). In her presentation, “Lexical Borrowings from Chinese into Russian among Russians Living in China”, Katja explored how the patterns of borrowing and non-borrowing can be explained using a community of practice analysis.

She continues to work on her data (with 100+ hours of audio still to go through) and is looking forward to completing her M.A. paper on this topic by the end of the year!

OSU at the Slavic Linguistics Society meeting

sls2016_osupeopleOhio State was well represented at the most recent Slavic Linguistics Society meeting, held in September at the University of Toronto.

Faculty member Andrea Sims gave a plenary talk titled “Inflectional systems and the dynamic organization of the lexicon”. Several of our awesome current and former students also got in on the action, presenting their research. Shown at left (from left to right): Jeff Parker (Ph.D. 2016, now at Brigham Young University), Kate White (Ph.D. 2015, now at Rice University), Katya Rouzina (Ph.D. in progress), Andrea Sims, and Rob Reynolds (M.A. 2011, now at University of Tromsø). Not shown: Bojan Belić (Ph.D. 2005, now at University of Washington).

It was a great showing for the Slavic linguistics program! And a fun reunion. (But maybe not the best choice to have our picture taken in front of the projection screen…:)

Check out the slides from Andrea’s talk on her academia.edu page.

Chandini White presents at Fall Undergraduate Poster Forum

Congrats to undergraduate Chandini White, who presented her summer research at the Fall Undergraduate Poster Forum! Chandini served as a research intern for Andrea Sims in Summer 2016, on a project that used grammatical descriptions to identify examples of defectiveness (missing grammatical forms of words). A goal was to broaden the range of data on defectiveness, in order to enrich the empirical foundation of theoretical models.

In her poster, “Missing word forms: Interpreting the connection across languages,” Chandini reported on the results of that work. Most interestingly, she found similar patterns of defectiveness in unrelated languages — perhaps suggesting a cross-linguistic tendency in what areas of inflectional systems are susceptible to defectiveness. This was her first research presentation, and it was a great success. Well done, Chandini!

In future work she hopes to look more at defectiveness in Dravidian languages.