Our speaker will be Emma Wrenn. Her presentation, “The Sound System of Santiago Azajo P’urhepecha”, will also be her undergraduate honors thesis defense   Abstract This is an account of the phonetic structures of Santiago Azajo P’urhepecha, a dialect of the P’urhepecha … Read more

Our speakers will be Ana Kisley and David Mora-Marin who will present their work, “The Copador Writing System of Honduras and El Salvador: Initial Documentation and Decipherment Steps”.

Our speakers will be Erin Humphreys and Brian Hsu, who will be giving a practice talk for their upcoming presentation at the 48th annual Penn Linguistics Conference:”How much overt agreement is needed for polysynthesis? Quantitative evidence from Cherokee.”

Although we will not be having a pre-talk preparation session, Professor Napoli has asked that in advance of the colloquium, attendees familiarize themselves with notion of an optical illusion. Our own Professor Moreton has curated the following list of resources … Read more

Spanish, unlike English, does not have an established pronoun akin to singular ‘they’, that is to say, an already-existing pronoun with a long history of non-binary usage for either known or unknown referents. However, the greater visibility of non-binary people … Read more

Social Presuppositions Paul Portner, Georgetown University The presuppositions of a conversation are the propositions that the participants mutually (if tacitly) agree to treat as true for purposes of the conversation (Stalnaker, 1974).  Linguists usually think of presuppositions as being motivated by the … Read more

Prep for Prof. Portner’s Nov 3 Talk   Social Presuppositions Paul Portner, Georgetown University The presuppositions of a conversation are the propositions that the participants mutually (if tacitly) agree to treat as true for purposes of the conversation (Stalnaker, 1974).  Linguists usually … Read more

We will hear from Rich Stureborg who is currently a CS PhD student at Duke working on vaccine misinformation and high-subjectivity tasks in natural language processing.

We will hear from Elias Stengel-Eskin who is a new postdoc in the CS department (working with Mohit Bansal), focusing on how AI models represent meaning. Abstract: The mapping between language and meaning is not always clear. This is especially true of … Read more