COVID-19 Notice

Due to the circumstances, CULC15 will be occurring online via Zoom. Please see the registration page for more information.

15th Annual Cornell Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium (CULC15)

Cornell University's undergraduate linguistics association, The UnderLings, presents its fifteenth annual undergraduate research colloquium. By facilitating communication and discussion between researchers, the conference aims to promote undergraduate research at all levels throughout the linguistics community. The Colloquium will take place from Friday, April 30th to Sunday, May 2nd, 2021 online via Zoom.

Internal Keynote Speaker: Molly Diesing

Molly Diesing is Professor of Linguistics at Cornell University. Her areas of research interest include syntax and semantics, and interactions between those two subfields. She has a fondness for the Germanic languages, particularly German, Yiddish, and Scandinavian. This areal interest has not prevented her from exploring connections to other languages, such as second position phenomena in South Slavic, in work co-authored with Draga Zec. Recent publications include “On the symmetry of Yiddish V2 and some of its consequences for extraction” (with Beatrice Santorini) Journal of Germanic Linguistics 34.2 (2021), The scope of verb second in Yiddish, in Biberauer, Wolfe and Woods (eds.) Rethinking Verb Second (OUP, 2020, also with Beatrice Santorini), and Getting in the first word: prosody and predicate initial sentences in Serbian, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 2(1), 24, (2017, with Draga Zec). Diesing’s nonlinguistic interests are many and varied, including chamber music (she is an avid cellist), instrument making (more than three dozen violins, violas, and cellos so far), hiking (the Green Mountains are favorites) and gardening (the quest for the perfect tomato is never-ending).

External Keynote Speaker: Alec Marantz

Alec Marantz is a Professor of Linguistics and Psychology at NYU. His research focuses on the mental representations of language and the neural implementation of these representations during language comprehension. His theoretical work includes investigations of the inter-relationship between verbal argument structure and morphology, as well as the general theory of morphology within generative grammar. He is best known for his work developing the theory of Distributed Morphology with Morris Halle, as well as for his experimental research exploiting Magnetoencephalography to explore the brain bases of linguistic representations. He was the recipient of the Sam Williamson award for Outstanding Contribution to the Field of Biomagnetic Research (Biomag 2008), and was appointed the Keenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at MIT, and Silver Professor of Linguistics and Psychology at NYU.


Call for Abstracts

Submissions are encouraged from all subfields of linguistics, including but not limited to phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics. Students pursuing a B.A., B.S., or equivalent degree are invited to submit an abstract for a talk of no more than twenty minutes in length or for a poster presentation at our poster session. Please indicate in your submission whether you would like to be considered for a poster, a talk, or both. Work may represent completed research or research in progress.

Abstracts should be submitted to culc (at) cornell (dot) edu by March 12, 2021.

Abstracts must be no more than two pages long, including data and references, on letter-size paper with 1 inch margins on all sides and at least 12 point font. Abstracts should have a clear title and should be anonymous in PDF format.

Important Dates

Abstract Submission deadline: Friday, March 12, 2021 (11:59pm EST)

Notification of decisions: Friday, April 2, 2021 (or sooner)

Conference date: Friday, April 30 - Sunday, May 2, 2021