| Linguistics
Notes
The department newsletter of the Department of Linguistics at UCLA Volume 12 (2011-12, prepared sAugust 2012)
Contents of this issue
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Natasha Abner has accepted a post-doctoral position in Susan Goldin-Meadow's lab in the Department of Psychology, University of Chicago. She will be working (among other things) on the role of age and linguistic input in the language development of deaf children not exposed to sign language who develop home sign systems, deaf adults who continue to use home sign as their primary means of communication, and deaf individuals exposed to Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) by their peers and previous generations of NSL signers.
Heather Burnett has started a two year SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Linguistics and Translation at the University of Montreal.
Isabelle Charnavel has accepted a tenure track faculty position at Harvard University.
Denis Paperno has been awarded a two year postdoctoral fellowship in computational linguistics Marco Baroni's group at the Language, Interaction, and Computation Laboratory at the University of Trento.
Michael Tseng (M.A. 2011) is an Analytical Linguist at Google, Inc. in Santa Monica, CA.
Brook Lillehaugen (Ph.D. 2006) has begun a tenure-track Assistant Professor position at Haverford College in the Tri-College Department of Linguistics.
Jason Kandybowicz (Ph.D. 2006) has accepted a tenure track position at the University of Kansas.
Ivano Caponigro (Ph.D. 2003) was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure at UC San Diego.
Jeff Heinz (Ph.D. 2007) was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure at the University of Delaware.
Jason Riggle (Ph.D. 2004) was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure at the University of Chicago.
Nancy Ward won a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement grant from the National Science Foundation.
Ed Stabler led a "Summer 2012 Computational Linguistics" projects group for some of our undergrads (and recently former undergrads) -- Erik Arrieta, Victor Chou, Paige Fox, Timothy Ho, Eric Nam. Minimalist grammar parsers were implemented in a variety of programming languages, together with some of the first components of probabilistic learners for grammars used by these parsers. What better thing to do with those hot summer afternoons! Parts of this work are getting posted on the public site github (link
https://github.com/epstabler/mgtdb/wiki), and other parts will continue with independent study projects this fall.Hilda Koopman is now director of the Syntactic Structures of the World's Languages project
During the past year Prof. Hilda Koopman took over the The Syntactic Structure of the World's Languages (SSWL) database project from Chris Collins (NYU).
SSWL (Syntactic Structure of the World's Languages), at http://sswl.railsplayground.net/ , is a open-ended database of syntactic, morphological and semantic properties. Each language is characterized by a set of property-value pairs (e.g., Object Verb: Yes), and examples that illustrate these property value pairs. A rich variety of search functions are available, as well as mapping and the creation of similarity trees. The database is open-ended in the sense that (a) new language experts may sign up to add new languages (after being approved), and (b) new properties may be added.
The database is meant to be a tool for the entire linguistic community, including formal linguists, typologists, computational linguists, and descriptive fieldworkers. Properties are written so that they can be applied by language experts from a wide variety of backgrounds.
Many linguists from the UCLA community (alumnus, colleagues, current students, undergraduate students) are involved in the project. If you are interested in becoming a language expert, just log onto the SSWL site, and sign up. If you are interested in creating a new set of properties, please contact Hilda. If you are interested in supporting the project otherwise, or are interested in giving feedback, or are looking for ways to support this project, please consider doing so. At present the project is run entirely by volunteers (the database architect, programmers, designers, software developers, linguists, undergraduates, graduate students). We hope to assure some funding in the near future, but there is much room for expansion and subprojects within this longterm project.
The current prototype can be found on http://sswl.railsplayground.net/ ; the next generation (same database different code) will be hosted on http://www.terraling.com/ once a new user interface is completed.
New course offerings in our department
Our department now offfers an American Sign Language class, taught by Benjamin Lewis, and a course on Language Documentation class, taught by Laura McPherson. Both received coverage in the UCLA Daily Bruin: ASL, documentation.
New eye-tracking facility in Phonetics Lab
The Phonetics Laboratory has acquired a new research capability in the form of an SR Eyelink eyetracker. This instrument operates by means of an infrared scan of the experimental subject's eye; no apparatus touches the subject at all. As such, it is excellent for acquisition studies with children and infants. Eye-tracking data have become important in linguistics: they allow very fine temporal resolution and the responses gathered are spontaneous rather than the result of conscious reflection.
The work of obtaining the eyetracker and setting it up has been the responsibility of Patricia Keating, Megha Sundara, and Henry Tehrani. Financial support from Acting Humanities Dean David Schaberg made it possible to complete the funding package.
