The 20th Cornell Undergraduate Linguistics Conference (CULC20)
Program Schedule - Final Schedule
All times are in Eastern Daylight Time (UTC-4).
April 25, Saturday
| Welcome & External Keynote Presentation - 106 Morrill Hall |
| 9:45am - 10:00am | Check-in & Welcome |
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| 10:00am-11:00am | Invited Speaker: Prof. Jesse Lundquist (Princeton University) |
| Are Accents and Segments like Apples and Oranges? | |
Since the inception of Indo-European linguistics in the early 1800s, scholars have puzzled over how to reconstruct the prosodic system of the proto-language as well as viable diachronic pathways for accentual change.
The present paper asks why the suprasegmental reconstruction remains so recalcitrant and where we might make strides forward. I revisit earlier and overlooked analyses of accentual change in Sanskrit grammarians, in linguists of the nineteenth century (especially Franz Bopp and Ferdinand de Saussure), will explore data from the histories of English and of Ancient Greek and finally will promote a model of diachronic prosody informed by a dual-route approach to exponence.
Accentual change is distinct from the changes of segmental phonology and requires different tools. Despite real obstacles in the reconstruction, in this paper I present an optimistic view of Proto-Indo-European: attention to traditional philology, joined with advances in morphophonology, can lead to a better-informed understanding of Proto-Indo-European accentuation and a richer profile of diachronic prosody down to the descendent languages.
| Talk Session #1 |
| 11:10am-11:40am | Xiaoou (Olivia) Liu (University College London): The syntax of Mandarin purposive lái-clauses: An adjunction approach |
| 11:40am-12:10pm | Áxìs Zhaozhuo Zhang (NYU & Middlebury College): Vowel Epenthesis and Syllabification in Ujimqin Mongoliani |
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| 1:10pm-2:40pm, Poster Session 1 |
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| Rebecca Gillette (Iowa State University): An Analysis of Rhotic Consonants in Regional German Dialects and Language |
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| Xiaoyi Zeng (Emory University): Testing PBV through Verb Selectivity |
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| Maritza Barragán Orozco (University of Washington): Racial Bias in Automatic Speech Recognition Against Chicano English and Spanglishi |
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| Joseph Tabasko (Binghamton University): A lexical Analysis of Ontarian French: The Impact of Language Restriction |
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| Ngoc (Alice) Diep (Tulane University): Portuguese, French, Medieval Latin, and Ancient Greek and the Colonial Remarks in The Tone and Vowel Diacritics of Modern Vietnamese Script |
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| Talk Session #2 |
| 2:40pm-3:10pm | David Garsten (Yale University): Appl’s got gravity: head movement, have-raising, and the evolution of (have) go |
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| 3:10pm-3:40pm | Manxin Lan (Cornell University): Nuosu Yi Reduplicated Polar Questions: A Polarity Phrase Analysis |
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April 26, Sunday
| Talk Session #3 |
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| 10:00am-10:30am | Sicong Gu (University College London): High-absolutive syntax in Mandarin (dis)appearance clause |
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| 10:30am-11:00am |
Gareth Junjie Yang (Middlebury College): Coda split, then spread: Mandarin moraic gemination at the root-affix boundary |
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11:00am-11:30am |
Jackie Xu (Cornell University): Phonological and Phonetic Effects on Schwa Reduction in Quebec French |
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| Talk Session #4 |
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| 12:30pm-1:00pm | Fanqin Meng (The Ohio State University): A Corpus-Driven Analysis of US Immigration Attitudes in CNN and FOX Media Discourse |
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| 1:00pm-1:30pm | Lucas Li (Cornell University): Topic TBD |
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| 1:30pm-1:40pm BREAK |
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| Internal Keynote Presentation - 106 Morrill Hall |
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| 1:40pm-2:40pm Invited Speaker: Professor Samuel Tilsen (Cornell University): |
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Metaphors We Theorize By
Mainstream theories in syntax and phonology make use of conceptual metaphors in which cognitive representations are viewed as structures of connected objects and temporal order is viewed as spatial arrangement. Theoretical work in the dynamical systems paradigm challenges this perspective, instead viewing linguistic cognition as a macroscopic state space trajectory tthat emerges from constraints on the microscopic dynamics of the nervous system.
Dr. Tilsen's talk will contrast these two perspectives in relation to their empirical adequacy, neurological compatibility, and analytical parsimony.
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