Faculty Meeting
2122 Campbell HallColloquium Talk – Ryan Bennett: Anticipatory nasalization in A’ingae
Anticipatory nasalization in A’ingae: Language-specific phonetics, not incomplete neutralization (Joint work with Scott AnderBois, Shen Aguinda, and Hugo Lucitante) Cross-linguistically, vowels often undergo contextual nasalization in and sequences. In English, vowel nasalization in appears partial rather than categorical. Cohn (1990, 1993) influentially argued that vowels in contexts in English are phonologically unspecified for...
Colloquium Talk – Sarah Phillips: No escape from morphemes in the bilingual mind
LOCATION CHANGE - Campbell Hall 2122A and Zoom: https://ucla.zoom.us/s/91305505603 In the bilingualism literature, most agree that the bilingual lexicon contains elements from both languages that can be activated non-selectively during processing (Kroll et al., 2013). Popular models of the bilingual lexicon often take an emergentist approach, such as Dijkstra & Van Heuven’s (2002) BIA+...
Faculty Meeting
Campbell 2122A/BColloquium Talk – Bronwyn Bjorkman: The puzzle of (apparently) phonologically motivated empty morphs
2122 Campbell HallEmpty morphs are stable units of form that occur without any associated meaning or function, the inverse of zero morphs. Some empty morphs seem to occur for phonological, rather than morphological, reasons. In Ndebele, for example, subminimal words can be augmented either by prefixing yi- or suffixing -na (Sibanda 2004: 113)—the former is plausibly...
Colloquium Talk – Emily Bender: Synthetic text extruding machines: A linguist-eye view on their narrow range of applicability
Since the release of ChatGPT but also other large language models (Claude, Bard, LLaMA etc), the internet has been awash in synthetic text, with suggested applications including robo-lawyers, robo-therapists, and robo-journalists. All of these applications present unacceptable risks because language models are nothing more than ungrounded text synthesis machines. In this talk, I demystify...