On the AZ watch at Stanford linguistics

The Stanford linguistics AZ community — adjunct faculty Annie Zaenen and Arnold M. Zwicky, graduate student Anissa Zaitsu — is pleased to announce the PhD dissertation oral presentation of one of its little band: The Landscape of Polarity-Sensitivity in African American English: Meaning and Structure by Anissa Rei Zaitsu: PhD dissertation oral presentation (Monday, June 8, 2026, 1:00-2:15pm). Committee: Vera Gribanova (co-chair), Cleo Condoravdi (co-chair), Boris Harizanov, Nandi Sims, and Gabriella Safran (Slavic Languages and Literatures, university chair). ARZ’s abstract: How do speakers recover abstract logical meanings from linguistic form when those meanings are not transparently encoded on the surface? This dissertation approaches this question through the study of Negative Concord, a widespread phenomenon in which multiple negative forms correspond to a single interpreted negation. [AMZ: for example, I ain’t see nobody ‘I didn’t see anybody’, with main negative ain’t and…