BLING

… for defending her dissertation proposal, yesterday, Negation in Greek: a diachronic study.

Congratulations to Thomas Wier, who just successfully defended his dissertation, Georgian Morphosyntax and Feature Hierarchies in Natural Language!

In addition to James Kirby, who will be heading to Scotland in December to assume the position of Lecturer in Phonetics at the University of Edinburgh, we would also like to warmly congratulate Suwon Yoon, who has been offered a Visiting Assistant Professorship at Cornell!

James Kirby defended his dissertation, Cue selection and category restructuring in sound change, this afternoon. In a few months he will begin as Lecturer in Phonetics at the University of Edinburgh. Congratulations and best of luck, James! Mind the wee heavies

Here’s an update on some other recent past defenses – some more recent, some more past:

On September 17, Tommy Grano defended his dissertation proposal, ‘Toward a semantically based account of the distribution of control’. Way to go!

Over the summer months, Peter Klecha (“Focus-Related Verb Repetition and Nominalization in Luganda”), Rebekah Baglini (“Aspect, modality, and causative event structure: A new analysis of the English get-causative”), Christina Weaver (“Influences on the production of non-native sequences: Mandarin”) and Carissa Abrego-Collier (“Liquid co-occurrence and coarticulatory influences on /l/ and /r/ perception”) all successfully defended qualifying papers.

Congrats, all :]

Thomas Grano and recent PhD Osamu Sawada have just had their paper “Scale structure, coercion, and the interpretation of measure phrases in Japanese” accepted for publication in Natural Language Semantics. Nice work, gentlemen!

Last month, Rebekah Baglini presented a paper called “The syntax and event structure of the get-causative” at the 4th Meeting of the Arizona Linguistics Circle in Tuscon. In addition, the 2010 iteration of everyone’s favorite acronym, the Semantics Workshop of the MidWest & Prairies (SWAMP), is happening this weekend (Nov. 13) at the University of Michigan, and Rebekah will be giving a talk on “The scalar source of adjectival participles.”

Not to be outdone, fellow third-year grad student Tim Grinsell will also give a talk at SWAMP, entitled “Two types of Russian perfectives.”

Good luck!