The New Sesquipedalian

Sesquikudos to the following:

Abstracts are invited for a poster session to be held at the start of a two-day symposium on “Racing Language, Languaging Race,” to be held at Stanford University, Thu May 3 to Fri May 4, 2012. For a list of presenters and other information, see the CREAL website. Abstracts should be for posters relating to the conference theme, should be no more than 300 words, and should be submitted by March 23 to CREALconference@stanford.edu

UnderLings, the Cornell University undergraduate linguistics association, requests abstract submissions for the 6th annual Cornell Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium. Abstracts should be submitted to culc2012@gmail.com by March 21st. More information about the Colloquium may be found here.

Come find out what the department’s undergrads discovered over the summer! Seniors Ellie Ash and Josh Falk will present the results of their summer research at 3:30 in the Greenberg Room. See you there!

Ellie Ash: VARIATION IN AAVE IN THE MOVING TO OPPORTUNITY STUDY
In the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) study, urban residents eligible for housing assistance received rent vouchers for low-poverty neighborhoods (i.e. “good” neighborhoods). A control group received no housing assistance. My summer research looked for differences in the use of certain AAVE variables (zero copula and was-leveling) between the experimental and control groups. While we found little evidence to support the hypothesis that AAVE speakers receiving housing vouchers would use non-standard AAVE features less frequently, the data confirms previous findings regarding grammatical factors that condition the realization of the copula. I will also discuss a possible new “don’t count” case for copulas, namely, the case where the subject of the copula contains a finite clause.

Josh Falk: EXPLORING CADENTIAL RHYTHMS IN ENGLISH PROSE
Ancient work on Classical Latin and Greek rhetorical prose suggests the existence of special rhythmic patterns used to mark the ends of sentences, known as cadences. We looked for evidence of cadential rhythms in English prose. Our data consisted of novels and presidential speeches annotated for lexical and phrasal stress using software developed over the summer. With this corpus, we tested (and mostly rejected) ideas from early work on English cadential rhythm, as well as original ideas inspired by this tradition. Finally, we found that the frequency of stress-clash decreases toward the end of the sentence.

The department’s commencement ceremony was last Sunday. Undergrads Kayla Cornale, Aya Inamori, Cybelle Smith, and JW Tsu were awarded degrees, and Alex Jaker received his Ph.D.

Congratulations, doctor and bachelors! The stars of the show can be seen here:

Alum Kayla Carpenter (BA 2010), now at Berkeley, is making headlines! Her efforts to revive the Hupa language have attracted the attention of the press, and you can read all about it here. Way to go!

Looks like we missed some news items last week! First off, in addition to Aya Inamori and Cybelle Smith, Linguistics undergrad Rachel Cristy was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa this year! Sesquipedicongratulations!

Also, we forgot to mention that alum Ashwini Deo was also presenting at SALT.

Nostræ culpæ! However, you can help us avoid these oversights by sending us all the news you ever find out about any topic whatsoever! We’d be especially interested in what you’ll be up to this summer….

Please join us for the first ever JRPfest next Friday, June 3 in the Greenberg room, where six of the linguistics majors will present their Junior Research Projects. The students have been hard at work on these for the last two quarters, and are looking forward to sharing their findings!

Six 15-minute talks will begin at 1:30, and will be followed by a reception/social:

1. Isaac Bleaman: The pragmatics of turn-initial “I mean”

2. Miriam Connor: Pitch and gender in a study of problem solving

3. Stephanie Hironaka: Voices of East Palo Alto youth: Examining narrative and linguistic competence

Very short break (2:15-ish)

4. Ellie Ash: Rhythm in Chinese verb phrases

5. Lydia Santos: Production of grammatical facial expressions from ASL by non-signers and implications for ASL acquisition

6. Josh Falk: Who will rhyme with me? Rhyming practice in American music