This year, Rutgers University hosted the 12th Meeting of the Northeast Conference on Linguistics and Language Acquisition (MACSIM). The conference brought together researchers to discuss topics in linguistics and language acquisition. Rutgers linguistics participants contributed to the event through a talk by current students Ariela Ye and Fahad Almalki on “Speaker commitment in Arabic complementizers: Evidence from ʔinna”, along with four poster presentations showcasing research from the department.
In the first poster session, Siyuan Cao presented her work on “The Mandarin particle dou and its compatibility with different quantifiers” and Ka Hin Ng presented on “Composing scalar sin and exclusive particles in Cantonese.” In the second poster session, Jiayuan Chen presented a poster titled “Negation does not block cross-sentential anaphora, discourse incoherence does,” and Aidan Sharma presented about “Maximal readings of numerals with additive morphemes.” All of the posters in both sessions were work presented by graduate students.
The conference featured a keynote address by Valentine Hacquard of the University of Maryland titled “Modal Force in Acquisition.” The talk examined how children develop an understanding of possibility and necessity in language, highlighting differences in how these concepts are acquired during early childhood.
For more information about the conference, and to read any of the abstracts, visit the website here!