Stanford linguists at the annual LSA 2020 meeting -- first of the decade!

As always, we started the year strong with representation at the annual Linguistic Society of America (LSA) meeting. This year's LSA meeting took place last week in New Orleans from January 2-5. We had plenty of presentations, including:

  • "Crosslinguistic word orders enable an efficient tradeoff of memory and surprisal" by Michael Hahn and colleague Richard Futrell (University of California, Irvine)
  • "Modeling behavior in Truth Value Judgment Task experiments" by Brandon Waldon and Judith Degen
  • "The role of voice in establishing control: Evidence from a syntactically ergative language" by Ksenia Ershova
  • "Investigating the phonetics-phonology interface with field data: Assessing phonological specification through acoustic trajectories by Christian Brickhouse and Kate Lindsey (Ph.D. '19)
  • "TRAM/TRAP and country-orientation among Latinx speakers in California by Rob Podesva, Christian Brickhouse, Lewis Esposito, Chantal Gratton, Sabrina Grimberg, and Zion Mengesha
  • "Communication-based evaluation for natural language generation" by Benjamin Newman, Reuben Cohn-Gordon, and Chris Potts
  • "Dependent case in syntactically ergative languages: Evidence from Inuit and West Circassian" by Michelle Yuan (University of California, San Diego) and Ksenia Ershova
  • "DialectGram: Automatic detection of dialectal variation at multiple geographic resolutions" by Hang Jiang, Haoshen Hong, Yuxing Chen, and Vivek Kulkarni
  • "Equiprobable mappings in weighted constraint grammars" by Arto Anttila, Scott Borgeson, and CNRS colleague Giorgio Magri 

Multiple Stanford alumni also presented:

  • "Verbs describing routines facilitate object omission" by Lelia Glass (Ph.D. '18)
  • "Reassessing the role of processing in preposition stranding" by Robin Melnick (Ph.D. '17) and Pomona College colleagues Evan Chuu, Daniela Hinojosa Sada, Meghan Joyce, Baiyu Li, and Franco Liu
  • "BLiMP: A Benchmark of Linguistic Minimal Pairs for English" by Sam Bowman (Ph.D. '16) and New York University colleagues Alex Warstadt, Alicia Parrish, Haokun Liu, Anhad Mohananey, Wei Peng, and Sheng-Fu Wang
  • "Distinction without distance: Racialized vocalic differences in an integrated Chicago community" by Annette D'Onofrio (Ph.D. '16) and Northwestern University colleagues Jaime Benheim and Shawn Foster
  • "Socially motivated movement toward a supra-regional vowel system in Metro Detroit: Evidence from style-shifting among Jewish women" by Eric Acton (Ph.D. '14) and Eastern Michigan University colleagues Anna Mae Bower, Rachael Crain, Veronica Grondona, Janet Leppala and Shelby Taylor
  • "The authentic alien: Production and evaluation of sociolinguistic variation in Klingon" by Rebecca Starr (Ph.D. '12), Rebekka Puderbaugh (University of Edinburgh), and Roey Gafter (Ph.D. '14)
  • "The stability of segmental properties across genre and corpus types in low-resource languages" by Uriel Cohen Priva (Ph.D. '11) and Brown University colleagues Shiying Yang and Emily Strand
  • "American English vowels do not reduce to schwa: A corpus study" by Uriel Cohen Priva (Ph.D. '11)
  • "Increased intensity is mediated by reduced duration in variable consonant lenition" by Uriel Cohen Priva (Ph.D. '11) and a Brown University colleague Emily Gleason 
  • "The multimodal construction of affective stance in Chinese ASMR performances" by Rebecca Starr (Ph.D. '12) and National University of Singapore colleagues Christian Go and Tianxiao Wang

Of note, Chris Potts was an invited speaker, providing a talk entitled "Pragmatic Reasoning in Large-Scale NLP Systems."

And finally, during the LSA's annual report of the secretary-treasurer, Penny Eckert was thanked for her time in the Executive Committee before she officially rotates off after their January meeting.