Mellon CNY Humanities Corridor presents linguistics workshop at SU April 23-24

The interface between syntax and phonology, syntax and morphology, and syntax and semantics is the subject of an upcoming linguistics workshop at Syracuse University.

Activities begin Friday, April 23, from 8 a.m.-noon in Room 107 of the Hall of Languages and from 1:30-6:30 p.m. in Kittredge Auditorium of H.B. Crouse Hall. Events continue on Saturday, April 24, from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. in Room 207 of the Hall of Languages. The workshop is free and open to the public. For more information, call the SU Humanities Center at (315) 443-7192.

The workshop is sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Central New York Humanities Corridor, an interdisciplinary partnership involving SU, Cornell University and the University of Rochester. The Mellon CNY Humanities Corridor is administered by the SU Humanities Center, a University-wide center housed in The College of Arts and Sciences.

“Linguistics scholarship has been a hallmark of the Mellon CNY Humanities Corridor since its inception in 2005,” says Gregg Lambert, Dean’s Professor for the Humanities and director of both the SU Humanities Center and Mellon CNY Humanities Corridor. “This workshop affirms our commitment to academic excellence by uniting up-and-coming researchers with world-renowned scholars.”

SU organizer Jaklin Kornfilt, professor of languages, literature and linguistics, says the workshop focuses on syntax, morphology and phonology. “The study of the interface among various components of the linguistic system has been at the center of generative linguistics for a long time,” she says, referring to linguist Noam Chomsky’s line of thought that grammar “generates” an infinite number of well-formed utterances and their structural descriptions by using finite means. “With recent advances in theoretical approaches to the study of languages, interfaces among linguistic components have seen a major revival.”

The workshop includes several sessions, each chaired by a faculty member of the Mellon CNY Humanities Corridor. Invited speakers include:
• Molly Diesing, professor of linguistics at Cornell;
• David Embick, associate professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania;
• Christine Gunlogson, assistant professor of linguistics at Rochester;
• Heidi Harley, associate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona;
• Jason Kandybowicz, assistant professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College;
• Joyce McDonough, associate professor and chair of linguistics at Rochester;
• Mats Rooth, professor of linguistics and director of the Computational Linguistics Lab at Cornell;
• Bridget Samuels, postdoctoral research assistant in linguistics and cognitive neuroscience at the University of Maryland, College Park;
• Elisabeth Selkirk, professor emerita of linguistics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst;
• Michael Wagner, associate professor and Canada Research Chair in Speech and Language Processing at McGill University;
• Martina Wiltschko, associate professor of linguistics at the University of British Columbia; and
• Draga Zec, professor of linguistics and director of the Phonetics Laboratory at Cornell.

The linguistics workshop is one of seven groups and projects approved for the Mellon CNY Humanities Corridor’s no-cost extension, supporting activities through the end of the 2010 calendar year. All three participating institutions are interested in re-applying for another Mellon grant.

In addition to the Mellon CNY Humanities Corridor, the SU Humanities Center is home to the Syracuse Symposium, the Faculty Works lecture series, the College’s new Humanities in the Digital Age Excellence Initiative, The Jeanette K. Watson Distinguished Visiting Professorship in the Humanities and other campus community initiatives.