News

Congrats to Dr. Masoud Jasbi for receiving a College of Letters and Science Teaching Award! Click the link below to learn more about Dr. Jasbi's teaching philosophy:

https://lettersandsciencemag.ucdavis.edu/news-noteworthy/college-honors-three-faculty-prized-teachers

Abstract: Language is a complex system. Each individual speaker’s behavior reflects myriad social and cognitive processes. Jointly all these speakers’ behaviors give rise to the patterns of language use which can be observed in corpora. This system is also adaptive: a speaker’s behavior is based on their past interactions. And these interrelated patterns of experience affect how the language changes over time. In this talk, I will discuss some new work on the relationship between adaptation at the individual speaker level and diachronic change at the language level.

Congrats to Melissa Gomes (Linguistics PhD student, advisor: Aranovich) for receiving a Public Scholars for the Future Fellowship for the 2024-2025 academic year! The "program prepares the next generation of public scholars to integrate community-centered theories, methods and techniques into their disciplinary field of study, research design and methods".

Click the link below to learn more about Melissa's project on Konkani, her family's heritage language:

Abstract: Born of a political will to standardize regional pronunciation and to contend with the many non-European languages of overseas Empires, the “universal alphabets” that emerged across Europe in the mid-nineteenth century sought to devise a single set of symbols capable of transcribing all possible sounds of human speech. How does one even envision such sounds? What models emerge to enable their anticipation? This chapter tells the story of the prominent and persistent model that presents vocalic sound in the image of a color triangle.

Abstract: This presentation will address the lack of ideophones in the current linguistic descriptions of Mocho’, a highly endangered Mayan language spoken in Chiapas, Mexico. Most Mayan languages have a lexical class known as “affective” words (Kaufman 1971). This class can belong to a root class and/or a derived type of predicate (Polian 2017).

Abstract: In this talk, I present work exploring the storage of prefixes, and the processing of prefixed words.  Although much theoretical work has addressed complex words and the role affixes play in the construction of meaning (cf. Taft & Forster, 1975; Schreuder & Baayen, 1995; Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 2007), nearly all of this discussion is couched in arguments about compositionality and semantic opacity.

Abstract: The compositional semantics of a sentence like (1a) is relatively uncontroversial, but no consensus about that of a sentence like (1b) has yet been achieved.

 (1) a. The red dot is bigger than the blue dot.

    b. The red dots are bigger than the blue dots.

Congratulations to Dr. Kristen Kennedy Terry (UC Santa Cruz) and Dr. Bob Bayley (UC Davis) for publishing "Social Network Analysis in Second Language Research: Theory and Methods"! Click the link below for more information.

Link: https://www.routledge.com/Social-Network-Analysis-in-Second-Language-Research-Theory-and-Methods/KennedyTerry-Bayley/p/book/9781032005027

Congratulations to Dr. Georgia Zellou for becoming a UC Davis Chancellor's Fellow! "Chancellor’s Fellow" is a title given to early career academics doing exemplary work. Recipients carry the title for five years and are awarded $25,000 in unrestricted philanthropic support for research or other scholarly work.

Congrats to Sophia Minnillo (Linguistics PhD student, advisor: Sánchez-Gutiérrez) for receiving the Graduate Student Award from the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL)! This competitive, merit-based award supports the attendance of AAAL graduate student members at the annual conference, which will take place this March in Houston, Texas.

Click the link below to learn more about the award:

https://www.aaal.org/graduate-student-award

Congratulations to Dr. Bob Bayley (UC Davis) and Dr. Erica J. Benson (University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire) for publishing "Needed Research in North American Dialects"! Click the link below for more information.

Link: https://www.dukeupress.edu/needed-research-in-north-american-dialects

Event Logistics: 3pm in Kerr 273 on November 27th

Speaker Biographies: Dr. Iryna Karamysheva is an Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at the Lviv Polytechnic National University in Ukraine, as well as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at UC Davis Linguistics department.

Congrats to Jeremy Rud (Linguistics PhD student, advisor: Ramanathan) for receiving the Elizabeth Pine Dayton Award! This competitive travel award enables qualified graduate students interested in pursuing topics in sociolinguistics to attend the Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting in January 2024. 

Abstract: Variation between null and overt subject pronouns, or subject pronoun expression (SPE) (e.g. yo/Ø canto; wo xiang) has been widely studied, attracting the attention of linguists working from multiple perspectives. However, despite decades of research, many questions remain unanswered. For example, which constraints are common across all languages, and which are features of particular languages? Why do rates of SPE differ so widely across languages and even between varieties of the same language?

Abstract: Interpretability is the new frontier in AI research. Understanding how generative models learn and how they resemble or differ from humans can bring insights for diverse fields such as neuroscience and decoding animal communication. In this talk, I present several techniques for introspecting deep neural networks. I also propose a model called ciwaGAN that features several aspects of human language acquisition that other models lack (embodiment, communicative intent, production-perception loop).