BLING

Victor Friedman, on foreign leave from the Slavic department, continues his tour of Europe and the Balkans. In addition to several recent papers, presentations, and invited public lectures through Macedonia, Victor also had the honor of receiving the Krste P. Misirkov Liftetime Achievement Award for contributions to Macedonian Scholarship from the Ramkovski Foundation in Skopje. Amazing!

Meanwhile, Salikoko Mufwene has a good deal of new work to report. Publications include “Some offspring of colonial English are creole” in Vernacular universals vs. contact-induced language change; and “Kituba, Kileta, or Kikongo: What’s in a name?” in Naming Languages in Sub-Saharan Africa: Practices, Names, Categorisations, as well as a number of appearances both as an invited and accepted speaker at a number of conferences and the University of Sao Paolo.

For more complete recent bibliographies of each of these linguists, click here: (more…)

Jackie Bunting’s article on Sranan, “‘Give’ and take: how dative gi contributed to the decline of ditransitive taki,” has just been published in the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages (24: 199-217, 2009).

In addition, over the summer, Jason Riggle, Max Bane, and Morgan Sonderegger had their joint article “The VC Dimension of Constraint Based Grammars” published in Lingua (article currently online, soon to appear in print).

Proof positive of summer productivity at the U. of C. Congratulations!

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!

Alan Yu will be giving a colloquium at SUNY Stony Brook this Friday, May 1. The title of his talk is “Toward a rational account of channel bias.”

While in Macedonia this year on Fulbright-Hays and Guggenheim grants, Slavic linguistics professor Victor Friedman has still managed to faithfully update us on his prolific activities abroad. Here’s what he’s been doing:

Recently published articles:

• “Turkish Presents in Romani Dialects.”  Turcological Letters to Bernt Brendemoen (Festschrift), ed. by É. Csató & al. Oslo: Insitute for Comparative research in Human Culture. 2009. 109-121.
• “On the origin of final -e in the plural of the verbal l-form in Macedonian: Possible Contact Influences.”  Juzhnoslovenski filolog, Vol. 64, 2008, 531-534.
• “Determination and Doubling in Balkan Borderlands,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Vol 28, 2006, 117-130. [published 2009]

Recent talks given:

• “Multilingualsim in Skopje, Republic of Macedonia-Current Perspectives on the Past, Present, and Future,” Institute for Slavic Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin, 9 February 2009.
• “Language Politics and Language Policies in the Western Balkans: Infinitives, Turkisms and Eurology,” Kennedy Institute - Free University of Berlin, 11 February 2009.
• “On Defining the Sprachbund: Areal vs. Typological Linguistics in the Balkans and Europe,” University of Potsdam, 12 February 2009.
• “Bucephalos as Trojan Horse:  Competing Discourses of Autochthony in the Republic of Macedonia,”  Institute for Southeast European Studies, Free University of Berlin, 13 February 2009.
• “Dialectology, Typology, and Areal Linguistics,” Linguistics Department, University of Manchester, 24 February 2009.
• “Makedonski kako slovenski i balkanski jazik [Macedonian as a Slavic and as a Balkan language],” opening lecture for post-graduate students in Macedonian Studies, University Sts. Cyril amd Methodius of Skopje, 28 February 2009.
• “Makedonija i Evropa od lingvistichka gledna tochak (Macedonian:  Macedonia and Europe from the viewpoint of linguistics).” Public lecture sponsored by the Office of the Provost and the Philological Faculty, Sts. Cyril and Methodius, University of Skopje, 13 March 2009.

This summer, Amy Dahlstrom will be speaking on “OBJ Θ without OBJ: A typology of Meskwaki objects” at the 2009 Lexical Functional Grammar Conference. The annual conference will be held at the University of Cambridge in July.

James Kirby will be giving two talks in May. The first, “Linguistic experience in tone perception,” will be given at the 2nd ASA Special Workshop on Speech in Portland on May 23. Six days later, James will be presenting “Tonal similarity and tone perception in Vietnamese” at the 19th Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistic Society in Saigon.

The department’s own Jerry Sadock will be the first interviewee in a series of  videotaped “Lives in Linguistics,” to be taped on April 21 in the Karen Landahl Center at 3:15. Friends are welcome to attend!

We’ll be having two other guests in May: Catherine Chvany, on May 5, and Lila Gleitman on May 11, both part of the Franke Institute for the Humanities. More on that to come.