BU Linguistics

November 2016

Fall 2016 Colloquia

Wehavehadalivelycolloquiumseriesthisfall,includingthefollowingpresentations:

September22:QianHu*,MITRECorporation:“Speechtechnology&applications”

October4:RajendMesthrie,UniversityofCapeTown:“Race,classandgenderinderacialisingSouthAfricanEnglish:thesociophoneticsofschwatoday”

November16:AmyRoseDeal,UCBerkeley:“Countabilitydistinctionsandsemanticvariation:towardsuniversalsofmassandcount”

* Qian Hu received her PhD in AppliedLinguisticsatBUin1993.SheisnowChiefScientist of Speech Technologies andSenior Principal Artificial IntelligenceScientist at the MITRE Corporation. Herresearch areas range from speech andnatural language processing technolo-gies—including automatic speech recog-nition, speaker and language identifica-tion, audio and prosodic feature extrac-tion,audio-specificquery language,multi-media information retrieval and multi-modal medical data capture and repre-sentation, and combinations of speechtechnology and artificial intelligence andapplications—to voice biometrics forauthenticationonmobiledevices.

Linguistics Program Administration CarolNeidle,ProgramDirector

PaulHagstrom,DirectorofUndergraduateStudies

DannyErker,DirectorofGraduateStudies(Fall)

NeilMyler,DirectorofGraduateStudies(Spring)

Honors and awards Prof.CharlesChangreceivedtheprestigiousPeterPaulCareerDevelopmentProfessorship,awardedto“talentedjunioreducatorsemergingasfutureleaderswithintheirrespectivefields.”

Prof. Juliet Floyd wasawardedaMellonSawyerSeminarGrantforfaculty development(withJamesE. Katz and Russell Pow-ell) to pursue researchinto the philosophy ofemerging computationaltechnologies and theways theyare transform-ing social, ethical, andphilosophical aspects ofeverydaylife.

Program News This has been an exciting year.Previously housed within theDepartment of Romance Studies,Linguistics officially became anautonomousprogramJ.

New degree programs Ourgraduateprogramsaretransitioningfrom“AppliedLinguistics”to“Linguistics.”WearelaunchinganewMAinLinguistics;seehttp://ling.bu.edu/grad/MAfordetails.

ThisnowmakesitpossibletoofferadualdegreeBA/MAinLinguistics,andwehavefivestudentswhoenteredthatprogramasofSeptember2016.

WearealsolaunchinganewintercollegiatejointmajorwithSargentCollegeinLinguistics&Speech,LanguageandHearingSciences.

Revised curriculum MostofourLinguisticscourseshavebeenredesignedsothatweofferseparatecoursenumbers(andrequirementsandexpectations)forundergraduatesandgraduatestudents,evenwhentheymeettogether.

Forinformationaboutthecoursesweoffer,seehttp://ling.bu.edu/courses/.

Website:http://ling.bu.edu Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/BULinguistics/

BULINGUISTICS

SPEECHPROSODY2016

TwoBUgraduates,MelissaBaese-Berk(BA2004)andTuuliMorrill(BA2002),bothnowLinguisticsprofessors,presenttheirjointwork.

Prof.Barneswelcomingparticipants

BUCLD2016

Speech Prosody – May 2016 This past spring BU hosted SpeechProsody 2016, “the only recurringinternational conference focused onprosody as an organizing principle forthe social, psychological, linguistic,and technological aspects of spokenlanguage.” The conference attractedapproximately 350 participants fromLinguistics, Computer Science,Electrical Engineering, Speech andHearing Science, Psychology, andrelated disciplines; in all, there were691 authors from 44 countries of 262oral and poster presentations (with atotal conference budget of over $200K). Four excellent keynote addressescovered the neurological basis forprosody, processing of prosodicinformation, individual andcrosslinguistic differences in prosodyanditsacquisition,disordersrelatedtoprosody, and integration of essentialprosodic information in thedevelopment of systems forgenerating personalized voices forindividualswhohavelosttheabilitytospeakforthemselves.Prof. Jon Barnes headed the organ-izing committee; Dr. Alejna Brugos, arecent BU PhD recipient (who hadreceived NSF support for herdissertation research on prosody)wasalso a co-organizer.Barnes obtainedNSF funding to experiment withtechnologies for remote participationin international conferences, includingmobiletelepresencerobots.

BUCLD – November 4-6, 2016 The 41st annual BU Conference onLanguage Development (BUCLD) wasa resounding success. We welcomed543 attendees formore than 180 oraland poster presentations. MariaPolinsky (U. of Maryland) presentedFriday’s keynote address, “Cascadingconsequences of syntactic reor-ganization: Ellipsis in heritage lan-guages,” and Angela Friederici (Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitiveand Brain Sciences) gave Saturday’splenary address, “Neural basis of lan-guage development.” There was alunchtime symposium on Saturday,“Beyond brilliant babies and rapidlearning in lexical development: Thelong and short of language ac-quisition,”andaclosingsymposiumonSunday,“Howlanguagelearnersshapelanguages.” In addition, Colin Phillips(U. of Maryland) presented a profes-sional developmentworkshop: “Build-ingyourprofileinadigitalworld.”Wearegratefulforthehardworkofco-organizers Maria LaMendola andJenniferScott;committeechairsAnneBertolini, Megan Brown, LaurenGerrish, Kayleigh Jeannette, MaxKaplan, Nia Lazarus, and Pengfei Li;and faculty advisors SudhaArunachalam, Charles Chang, andPaulHagstrom.We are already looking forward toBUCLD 42 (tentatively scheduled forNovember3–5,2017)!

Aviewofthepostersession,fromabove Robotfacilitatingremotepartici-pation,thankstoNSFfunding

Conferences in the last year

Facultyadvisorsplusco-organizerLaMendola

RegistrationdeskattheGeorgeShermanUnion

https://www.bu.edu/bucld/

http://sites.bu.edu/speechprosody2016/

Postersession

BULINGUISTICS

UROPGRANTRECIPIENTS–SPRING2016

Sarah Lawson "LanguageContactandTransferBetweenAndeanSpanishandBolivianQuechua:RegionalandSocialPerspectives"(withProf.Myler)

James Sbordone "PhoneticdescriptionofSoutheasternPomo,anendangeredlanguageofCalifornia"(withProf.Chang)

Dallas Walter "Koreanfricatives:Diachronicchangesinphoneticenhance-mentstrategies"(withProf.Chang)

CongratulationstoProf.NeilMyleronhisnewbook,publishedbyMITPress:BuildingandInterpretingPossessionSentences

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/building-and-interpreting-possession-sentences

“Examining and synthesizing ideas from the literature anddrawing ondata from many languages (including some understudied Quechuadialects), Myler presents a novel way to understand the apparentirregularity of possession sentences while preserving explanations ofgeneral cross-linguistic regularities, offering a unified approach to thesyntax and semantics of possession sentences that can also beintegratedintoageneraltheoryofargumentstructure.”

Amongtheimpressiveendorsements:

“Engagingly written and carefully argued, this book touches on fundamental issues and constitutes a benchmark not only on the topic of possession, but far more broadly on the questions of how attested cross-linguistic variation should be modeled, and how such variation may be constrained.”

—Jonathan Bobaljik, Professor of Linguistics, University of Connecticut

“Combining original fieldwork on Quechua with a cutting-edge command of argument structure, Myler has produced an innovative account of possession that highlights and resolves an intriguing contradiction in its crosslinguistic character. His balance of clean theory and powerful typology will have scholars returning to this work for years to come.”

—Daniel Harbour, Professor of the Cognitive Science of Language, Queen Mary University of London; author of Impossible Persons

ResearchHighlight

BULINGUISTICS

CALLINGALLALUMNI!

Wewouldlovetohearfromyou!Pleasefilloutoursurvey,ifyouhaven’tyetdonethat(http://www.bu.edu/linguistics/UG/alum-survey.html);andsendnewsforourAlumniNotespage:http://ling.bu.edu/people/alumni

LinguisticshelditsfirstautonomousCommencementceremonylastMay.JoiningustocelebrateourgraduatingclasswasCommencementSpeakerProf.BruceHayesfromUCLA,whodeliveredamostentertainingaddress.

Commencement 2016