travel

Inflectional Morphology in Belgium!

At the end of April, Andrea Sims taught a one-week intensive Ph.D. course in Inflectional Morphology at Ghent University (Ghent, Belgium). The course focused on the formalist inferential-realizational approach to inflectional theory (its general motivation and theory-specific mechanisms), and comparison of different theoretical analyses of inflectional data.

Equivalent to about half of a semester-long Ph.D. seminar — but in only one week —  the course was certainly challenging for students (and Andrea!). But they really worked hard to deepen their understanding of inflectional theory and made great strides.

Andrea with some of the students (and the Russian nominal system)

The course was arranged by Cindy Johnson, an OSU alum (Ph.D. in Linguistics, 2014). A big thanks to Cindy for the invitation to Ghent, and to all of the students who gamely took the inflectional tour of Albanian, Georgian, Russian (including the analysis sketched on the whiteboard at left), Sahaptin, Swahili, and many other languages.

Andrea u Beogradu

In April, Andrea Sims had the chance to visit the Laboratorija za Eksperimentalnu Psihologiju (Laboratory for Experimental Psychology) at the Univerzitet u Beogradu, in Belgrade, Serbia.

As part of her work there, she piloted an experiment that explores the role of syncretism (inflectional homophony) in resolving syntactic case conflicts in Serbian morphosyntax. This project is a collaboration with Matt Goldrick (Northwestern University). She also gave a research talk, conducted other research, met local psycholinguists and learned about work happening in the lab. And worked on her spoken Serbian, of course.

Despite unseasonably cold weather, it was a great visit to the city. It wasn’t Andrea’s first trip to Belgrade, but it was the first time she was able to explore the city in detail — everything from Davis Cup tennis (Serbia beat Spain!) to the Nikola Tesla museum to walking on Ada Ciganlija and exploring Belgrade’s growing Neo-Balkan food scene.

A big thanks to everyone in the lab, and especially Prof. Aleksandar Kostić, for being such generous hosts. Hvala Vam puno!

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).

International Quantitative Morphology Meeting

Jeff in Kalemegdan Park, Belgrade

Jeff in Kalemegdan Park, Belgrade

Jeff Parker and Andrea Sims just returned from Belgrade, Serbia, where they presented a paper at the First International Quantitative Morphology Meeting. The trip had a rough start, including a 26-hour travel delay that involved each being stranded in a different airport. Nonetheless, they made it to Belgrade in time to see some interesting talks, and got to show off some pretty cool graphs about the implicative structure of Russian and Greek nouns.

Slides from the talk: On the interaction of implicative structure and type frequency in inflectional systems (PDF)