Word from the Director
Carolina Working Papers in Linguistics | Professional Development Workshops | Colloquium Series |
New Requirements for Ph.D. Students | Welcome New Students | SLARG | HLRG
Faculty Research | Student Research | Faculty Profile: Eric Holt

Check out our previous issues in Babble Archives

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Word from the Director
Greetings and happy holidays. This has been a very busy semester, for me, for our program, and (I'm sure) for each of you. There have been many high points and some low ones.
We suffered the loss, this Fall, of Si Belasco, who passed away on November 10, 1999. For those of you who did not know him (or who did not know him well), Si was one of our Program's treasures. He came here in 1978, after retiring from Penn State, and proceeded to devote the next 20 years of his life to the Linguistics and French programs here at USC. Si's energy and enthusiasm were boundless, and an inspiration for any of us who sometimes feel tired (but who are not yet eighty years old). We miss him greatly. A webpage in his memory will soon be established on the Linguistics Program website, and a memorial collection of research papers is being planned.

On a positive note, we have a wonderful, and populous, first year group of graduate students this year, and from all reports they are already making us proud of them. Our continuing graduate students continue to impress (check out the Student Research column) with a number of excellent conference presentations this semester. We have had an excellent Colloquium Series this Fall and have more good things lined up for the Spring (thanks to Profs. Bhatt and Holt). The Historical Linguistics Research Group continues to be active, and the SLA Reading Group has been revived. Our website continues to develop this year (thank you, David Rulai Li), and is one of the reasons that our program has been so successful in its recruiting of new students.

In the realm of changes and things to come, the first issue of Carolina Working Papers in Linguistics (a web-based journal) is due to come out in January 2000. Also, the program has adopted some new Ph.D. requirements, which you can read about below, and has finalized three-year revision of its exam policies and procedures (much of which is already in place). The exam guide will soon be posted on the web for students to refer to. There are, currently, two searches in progress for Linguistics positions in French and English. The first is to replace Christie Moritz (who left at the end of last year), and the second is to replace Michael Montgomery (who retired last year, but who is very much still active in the program as a professor emeritus). Finally, the Program is gearing up for a review by the Commission on Higher Education, which will involve a visit by a team of outside reviewers in April 2000. Linguistics is being reviewed along with one other program (Comparative Literature) and three departments (French & Classics; German, Slavic, & East Asian; and Spanish, Italian, & Portuguese). A program self-study has been completed and submitted to the university administration, and we are looking forward this Spring to the opportunity to demonstrate just how fine a graduate program we have here.
— Stan Dubinsky

Back to Top

Welcome New Students

Philippe Albert. Enrolled in M.A. program. Interested in historical linguistics.
Larry Bagwell. Enrolled in Certificate program.
Alina Ciscel, from Mondova. Enrolled in M.A. program. Interested in TEFL/SLA.
Julio Colon. Enrolled in Ph.D. program. Interested in historical linguistics and sociolinguistics.
Loralee Donath, from Miami, FL. Enrolled in M.A. program. Interested in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and second language acquisition.
Hunter Godsey, from Macon Georgia. Enrolled in Ph.D. program. Interested in second language acquisition and language transfer about Spanish and Portuguese or other Romance languages.
Kyoung-Ho Kang, from Pusan, South Korea. Enrolled in Ph.D. program. Interested in interface between phonetics and phonology, second language acquisition and speech and hearing science.
Won-yoo Kim, from Korea. Enrolled in Ph.D. program. Interested in philosophy of language.
Kate Laporte. Enrolled in Ph.D. program, interested in the history of languages, Germanic linguistics.
Rulai Li, from China. Enrolled in Ph.D. program. Interested in syntax, interface between syntax and semantics, and computational linguistics.
Changyong Liao, from China. Enrolled in M.A. program. Interested in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis.
Heather Myers. Enrolled in Certificate program.
Birgul Sisler. Enrolled in Certificate program.
Rebecca Strickler. Enrolled in M.A. program. Interested in TEFL.
Mila Tasseva, from Bulgaria. Enrolled in Ph.D. program. Interested in second language acquisition, computational linguistics, sociolinguistics and theory of translation.
Roxie Gail Taylor. Enrolled in Certificate program.
Dulce Tienda. Enrolled in Ph.D. program. Interested in sociolinguistics, second language acquisition.
Leticia Trower, from Charlotte, NC. Enrolled in M.A. program. Interested in historical linguistics, syntax.
( If you need to contact them, go to the students page )

Back to Top

Changes in Ph.D. Requirements

This Fall, the Linguistics Program has approved and submitted to the Graduate School, two major changes in the Ph.D. program. The first change involves the addition of three additional LING elective courses to the 7 core courses and the two 4-course specializations. The new requirement reads as follows: "An additional 9 credits, approved by the program, in elective LING courses. Students having a B.A. or M.A. in Linguistics or Applied Linguistics may be exempt from this requirement." As indicated here, this requirement primarily applies to students who do not have either an M.A. or a Ph.D. in the field of Linguistics, and is thus intended to make sure that all doctoral students graduate with sufficient course work in the field of Linguistics. It will add approximately one semester's worth of courses to the degree, and will apply to anyone admitted to the Ph.D. program beginning in Spring 2000.

The second change involves procedures for taking the Ph.D. qualifying examination. Whereas, in the past, students simply announced their intention to take the exam when it was appropriate for them to do so, the Program will now require that students apply to take the exam, as the new requirement states: "Students wishing to take the Ph.D. qualifying exam apply to do so two months prior to the examination date. (normally, the end of their third semester in the program). Their application will be reviewed by the faculty and permission to take the exam will be granted or declined." The reasons for this change are as follows: Acknowledging that examinations are sometimes incomplete indicators of a student's capacity to successfully pursue a research agenda and write a dissertation, the Program feels that it is essential to bring other factors to bear in evaluating a student before they are admitted to candidacy. In order to bring some measure of standardization to this process, students will apply to take the qualifying examination. The applications will be handled by the program's admissions committee, which will consider such factors as: the student's GPA, their progress in a program of study, a statement describing their intended specializations and general research goals, etc. Beginning in Fall 2000, this application process will be required of all students taking the exam.

Both of these changes are contingent upon final approval by the Graduate Council..
— Stan Dubinsky

Back to Top

Colloquium Series
The Fall semester saw an active colloquium series once again, with several invited guests presenting, and several departments and programs co-sponsoring events with Linguistics. The Fall 1999 colloquia were as follows:
Dorothy Disterheft (English Dept., USC) "Linguistic teleology: A dead end" Sponsored by the Linguistics Progam.
Walt Wolfram (North Carolina State University) "Reconstructing the History of African American English: New Data on an Old Theme"(handout). Co-sponsored by African-American Studies, Department of English, Lingusitics Program, and Institute of Southern Studies.

Marlyse Baptista (University of Georgia) "Typology of Tense Markers and Clausal Architectures in Creole Languages" (handout). Co-sponsored by the Lingusitics Program and Anthropology.

Barbara Kryk-Kastovsky (University of Vienna) "Pragmatic interpretation of discourse" Sponsored by the Linguistics Program.

Matthew J. Traxler (Dept.of Psychology, USC ) "Likelihood and competition in syntactic parsing: Multiple simultaneous constraint dissatisfaction." Sponsored by the Linguistics Progam.

Alfonso Morales-Front (Georgetown University) "The role of universal parameters and lexical learning in the acquisition of stress by second language learners of Spanish" Co-sponsored by Department of Spanish, Italian, & Portuguese and the Linguistics Program.

Back to Top

Historical Linguistics Research Group
During the past fall semester HLRG continued its series of Friday presentations at the home of Program faculty and students. This semester we were pleased to have a guest speaker from Austria. One talk coincided with a Linguistics Program colloquium. The meetings are organized by Kurt Goblirsch in conjunction with Don Cooper, Dorothy Disterheft, and Eric Holt. A potluck dinner usually precedes the talk. The following is a list of meetings from Fall 1999.

Dorothy Disterheft, Linguistics and English, USC. "Linguistic teleology: A dead end".
Kurt Goblirsch, Linguistics and German, USC. "The peculiarity of Icelandic consonants".

Dieter Kastovsky, University of Vienna. "Inflectional classes, morphological restructuring and the dissolution of Old English grammatical gender".

Catherine Smith, Spanish, Italian & Portuguese, USC. "On the history and evolution of signed languages in the Hispanic world".

Christmas party, At the home of Leticia Trower.

— Kurt Goblirsch
Back to Top

Carolina Working Papers in Linguistics
The Carolina Working Papers in Linguistics is scheduled for publication in January 2000. It should be on-line within the first two weeks of Spring semester. Four papers will be highlighted in the first issue. The authors are Larry LaFond and Rachel Hayes from USC and Hans Boas and Julia St. John from UNC-Chapel Hill. A hard copy of the issue will be available for interested students and faculty. A new call for papers will be announced soon. So far there have been nine submissions for the Fall issue. Information ? on CWPL is available on the Linguistics Program website.
— Angie Green
Back to Top

SLA Reading Group
In the Fall semester, 1999, the Second Language Acquisition Reading Group (SLARG) was revived after a couple years of haitus. The group meets monthly to discuss readings about recent research in SLA. This past semester SLARG met three times, discussing SLA findings in vocabulary acquisition, attention and memory, and interlanguage pragmatics. Meetings have been informal, organized either as a pot-luck or as an informal discussion at a local deli. SLARG normally attracts from ten to fifteen participants including two presenters for each meeting. Anyone even mildly interested in language acquisition should feel free to join us as we continue to meet and discuss in the new SLARG millennium.
— Matt Ciscel
Back to Top

Professional Development Workshops
The professional development workshop series continued this month with a workshop on the publishing process presented by Carol Myers-Scotton. The topics covered included choosing a journal, preparing a manuscript, and the review process. There are workshops planned for next semester on job interviews, conference presentations, and tailoring coursework towards a dissertation.
— Theresa McGarry
Back to Top

Faculty Research
Anne Bezuidenhout

"Literal meaning and what is said". paper delivered at conference on Pragmatics and Negotiation (PRAGMA99), Tel Aviv University, Israel, June 13-16, 1999.
"Processing Possessives: A Case Study of the Interaction of Lexical and World Knowledge in Language Understanding". Research in progress. Sponsored by College of Liberal Arts Scholarship Support.

Stanley Dubinsky

"Sentential subjects as complex NPs: New reasons for an old account of subjacency". Papers from the 34th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS 34). Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society, pp. 83-94.(with W. Davis)
"Functional structure and a parametrized account of subject properties". Eastern Conference on Linguistics (ESCOL), University of Connecticut. November 1999.(with W. Davis)
"Syntactic variation in the functional attributes of subject position". Western Conference on Linguistics (WECOL), University of Texas at El Paso. October 1999.(with W. Davis)
"The syntax of non-NP subjects in an exploration of subject properties". Presentation at The Role of Grammatical Functions in Transformational Grammar (1999 LSA Linguistic Institute Workshop), University of Illinois. July 1999. (with W. Davis)

Kurt Goblirsch

"The types of gemination in West Germanic. new insights in Germanic Linguistics I." Ed. Irmengard Rauch and Gerald F. Carr. Berkeley Insights in Linguistics and Semiotics 33. New York: Lang, 1999. 57-75.
"The correlation of voice in Germanic". North-Western European Language Evolution 35 (1999): 115-40.
"The mechanism of consonant shifts in Germanic". Yazyk I rechevaya deyatel 'nost' (Language and Speech). Journal of the Linguistic Society of St. Petersburg 2 (1999). Forthcoming.

D. Eric Holt

"Language Behavior: Acquisition and Evolutionary History." (Language and Development, 6.) By R. Narasimhan. New Delhi, Thousand Oaks, CA & London: Sage Publications. Language (v. 75.4, 1999).
"Linguistic Structure and Linguistic Change: Explanation from Language Processing." By Thomas Berg. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press. 1998. Language (v. 75.4, 1999).
"Comparative Optimality-Theoretic dialectology: Singular/plural nasal alternations in Galician, Mirandese (Leonese) and Spanish", Paper rpesented at the Third Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, Georgetown University, October 8-11, 1999.
"The moraic status of consonants from Latin to Hispano-Romance: The case of obstruents." In Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach and Fernando Martínez-Gil, eds., Advances in Hispanic Linguistics: Papers from the Second Hispanic Linguistics
Symposium. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. 166-181. 1999.
Michael Montgomery
"A superlative complex in Appalachian English". SECOL Review 23 J-14
"'He bes took up with a Yankee girl and moved up North'": The verb bes in the Carolina and its history. American Speech 75. 240-81.
"Sierralesne settler English: Another exported vaniety of African-American English". English World-Wide 20. 1-34.
"Parting the veil: Discerning speech patterns of the colonial perspectives on the American Backcountry". Shenandoah, VA.
"Ulster-Scot-American poets in their Historical and social contexts". Ulster American heritage Symposium, Cullowhee, NC.
"Yorkshire English two centuries ago". Methods in Dialectology, St.John's Newfoundland.
"On the trail of nonstandard grammar: An electronic corpus of Southern U.S. Antebellum Overseers' Letters". NWAVE, Toronto.
"The regional diversity of 19th-century African American English". Southern Historical Association, Fort Worth, TX.
Carol Myers-Scotton
Focus Speaker, International Symposium on Language Policy. Bar-Ilan University, Israel. November, 1999.
Plenary Speaker, International Symposium on Bilingualism. Newcastle, England. April, 1999.
"The data wars: Grammaticality judgments vs. ‘the real thing'." NVWAVE (New Ways of Analyzing Variation), annual meeting, Toronto October, 1999. (With Janice L. Jake).
"A target language in creoles? No, two targets." SECOL (South Eastern Conference on Linguistics) spring meeting. Norfolk VA. April, 1999.
"Putting it all together: the Matrix Language and more." In Language encounters across time and space ed. by Bernt Brendemoen, Elizabeth Lanza and Else Ryen, 13-28. Oslo: Novus Press. 1999a.
"Chichewa and ‘Do' constructions in codeswitching". In African Mosaic, edited by Rosalie Finlayson, 406-17. Pretoria: University of South Africa Press. With Janice L. Jake.
Kropp Dakubu. Korle meets the sea: a sociolinguistic history of Accra. Review in Language 75. 158-60. 1999
Helena Halmari. Government and codes switching: explaining American Finnish. Review in International Journal of Bilingualism 3. 94-7. 1999.
Clinton D.W. Robinson. Language use and rural development: an African perspective. Review in Language in Society 27. 568-71, 1998.
Bruce L. Pearson
Bruce L. Pearson spent a week in November working with Sherri Clemmons, director of the language program for the Wyandotte Tribe of Oklahoma. He is continuing his work on editing and translating Wyandotte texts collected in the early 20th century and working with the tribe to develop language teaching materials as members of the community study their linguistic heritage.

Back to Top

Student Research
Rick Hallett:
"Simplified input and its effect on vocabulary acquisition in ESL" at the Second Language Research Forum (SLRF) in St. Paul, Minnesota on September 24, 1999.
Chang-Kyum Kim:
"The Elimination of Semantic Redundancy in Korean". The Linguistic Association of the Southwest (LASSO), University of Texas at San Antonio, Texas (UTSA). Oct. 1-3, 1999.
"Phonological Constraints and Transfer in L2 Learners".Western Conference on Linguistics, El Paso, Texas. Oct. 28- 30, 1999.
Larry LaFond:
"Competition, conflict, and optimality in L2 acquisition" Paper presented at the Second Language Research Forum (SLRF) in Minneapolis, Minnesota. September 26, 1999
Elena Schmitt:
"Historical Prefixation: The Case Of Out-, Over-, and Super". Presented at the 14th International Conference on Historical Linguistics in Vancouver, Canada. 1999.
"The Lost Word: Language attrition in immigrant children from Russia". Presented at Boston University Conference on Language Development in Boston, Mass. 1999.
Back to Top

Faculty Profile: D. Eric Holt
Although I always liked grammar in school, I first became interested in "linguistics" at Occidental College, where I studied Spanish culture and civilization. As was required of all language majors, I took Introduction to Language with Betchen Barber, an archaeologist who used linguistics as a tool in her investigations in deciphering various texts for their archaeological value. She was energetic, passionate and extremely knowledgeable, particularly about historical linguistics. I was hooked! There was no major in Linguistics at Oxy, but I did manage to cobble together a minor, taking classes in cognitive anthropology, historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and even a course in Basque the year I studied in Spain. No Spanish linguistics, not just yet.
After I graduated, I didn't go directly to grad school, but instead wanted to follow up on my interest in Spanish and in teaching. I worked in a literacy and reading skills clinic, taught language arts in Spanish to in a bilingual elementary school, tutored high school students, taught small groups of adults privately, and in the second semester taught high school Spanish. As you will have guessed given my presence at USC, I much preferred working with the older students, and when I had the chance to go study at Georgetown University, I took it. While there I was able to combine my previous interests, Spanish and linguistics.

Believe it or not, much of my M.S. coursework was in theoretical syntax (I finished just as Minimalism was emerging, fortunately), but in the end I decided that I wanted to return to what had most fascinated me from the very beginning: phonology and historical change. In my dissertation I was able to synthesize all of these interests, and the result was a theoretical treatment of various sound changes from Latin to Spanish and Portuguese. These are areas that are still of much interest to me, and I have expanded the scope of my research more recently to include both modern and diachronic aspects of Spanish and Portuguese, as well as of dialects of Galician, Mirandese and Asturian, all spoken in Northwestern Spain.

Although linguistics is fascinating in its own right, here at USC I have particularly enjoyed the opportunity to teach undergraduate and graduate courses that will help train future teachers, a practical and worthwhile application of linguistics that I find very rewarding. And although not all of it makes its way into language classrooms, I am pleased that even if in an indirect way I help improve language instruction and general knowledge about language structure more broadly. Just like my first linguistics teacher, I'd like to think that I use linguistics as a tool, and that I help train others to use it as a tool in their own professional and academic lives too.