Our department BBQ will be held today, June 11, starting at 4 p.m. in the quad in front of the Social Science building. We’ll have burgers, hot dogs, corn on the cob, and all the usual summer favorites. All you need to bring is your kids and significant others, your frisbee and maybe your croquet set. We especially encourage all graduating BAs to show up along with their families to celebrate the grand occasion. Come celebrate the end of another long and successful academic year!
This Friday, June 5, the Workshop on Philosophy of Language and Semantics, co-sponsored by the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, will be hosting Angelika Kratzer from UMass Amherst. Her talk will be in Cobb 110 from 1-3 p.m. Please join us!
We are pleased to announce that Greg Kobele will join the department as a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor. Greg is a syntactician and a computational linguist trained at UCLA. He has been Assistant Professor at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin since 2007. Greg will hold a joint-appointment in Linguistics and the Computation Institute. Welcome to Chicago, Greg!
Several of our current and former linguistics undergrads will be heading to graduate schools this Fall.
Eric Prendergast, who’s currently on a Fulbright fellowship researching in Macedonia, will be heading to Berkeley, joining fellow Chicago grads Clara Cohen and John Sylak in the Department of Linguistics.
Eric Morley, who has been serving in the Peace Corp in Benin the past couple years, will begin his graduate studies in emotion and speech synthesis at the Oregon Health and Science University.
Patrick Rich, our current BA/MA student, will begin PhD studies in Linguistics at Harvard.
Mitcho Erlewine, who was on a Fulbright fellowship teaching in Taiwan, but is now working for Ubiquity in Japan, will be heading to MIT.
Justin Murphy will be starting his master’s degree in Journalism at Syracuse University in the Fall.
Congratulations to all!
. . . of the Workshop on Language, Cognition and Computation in the Karen Landahl Center (basement of Social Science). May 29 will be the final meeting for the academic year, so don’t miss your chance:
May 22: Michael C. Frank (Brain Cog Sci, MIT) (Abstract below)
What is the relationship between language and thought? Traditional approaches to this question have staked out extreme positions: either that language determines the shape of the thoughts you can entertain, or else that language is only an overlay on top of a more basic “language of thought.” Our work in the domain of numerical cognition supports a middle view: that language is a tool which can help with complex cognitive tasks, supplementing but not altering other basic cognitive capacities. We show that the Pirahã, an Amazonian group with no words for numbers, use the same mechanism for numerical estimation as MIT undergrads who are temporarily prevented from counting via verbal interference. In addition, language may be only one among a range of possible “cognitive technologies” for representing exact number, as suggested by our recent studies of schoolchildren in Gujarat, India who have learned to use a mental representation of an abacus–an exact representation of number that relies on visual rather than linguistic resources–to perform arithmetic calculations.
May 29: Morgan Sonderegger (Computer Science, U. Chicago)
We hope that all those interested have been taking advantage of this prolific weekly workshop featuring both local and non-local invited speakers, and welcome even more to attend this month!
Thanks to lots of hard work, back issues of CLS proceedings are catching up to date. We are very pleased to announce that the Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society have arrived!
Congratulations to the editors, Malcolm Elliott, James Kirby, Osamu Sawada, Eleni Staraki, and Suwon Yoon on an excellent job!