Rutgers Linguistics had a very strong presence at the 2026 LSA Annual Meeting in New Orleans, with faculty, graduate students, and alumni contributing across multiple sessions.
Graduate alum Meg Gotowski presented twice at the conference: first, a poster co-authored with Kate Harrigan (William & Mary) titled “Subcategorizing Adjectives with Multiple Frames,” and second, a talk with Forrest Davis (Colgate University) titled “What is It? Language Models and Expletive Forms.”
Current faculty were also well-represented. Professor Dorothy Ahn and Professor Ryan Walter Smith presented collaborative work on “Double nominative constructions via trope possession,” and Dr. Troy Messick presented a poster titled “Pronoun and Anaphor (non)complementarity in PPs: A view from coordinated reciprocals.”
Another large group of co-authors including Dr. Shannon Bryant, Samantha Fornini, Isabel Holland, Alexandria Kenney, Vachagan Melikian, Mukul Ramesh, and Kristen Syrett (all Rutgers-affiliated!) presented “Now that’s news to remember!” as part of the Five-Minute Linguist session.
For current graduate student work, Jiayuan Chen presented a poster titled “Get anti-uniqueness for free from focus”, Merlin Balkhash was a co-author on a poster with Dr. Troy Messick titled “Indexical and agreement shifting in Kazakh”, and Aidan Sharma and Ariela Ye gave a presentation called “From Converb to Complementizer: On the Syntactic Flexibility of dep in Kazakh.”
Rutgers University was proud to be well-represented at this year’s LSA meeting!