Congratulations to Anastasia Giannakidou and Chris Kennedy on their promotion to Professor. Their promotions are formal recognition of their excellence in scholarship, teaching and service.
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Victor Friedman has received a 2008 Guggenheim fellowship to research a monograph on the similarities of one of the world’s most linguistically diverse and complex areas. For more detail of his project, see the writeup in the latest issue of the Chronicle. Congratulations, Victor!
Jason Merchant presented “PF and LF locality: Evidence from Greek comparatives” at the Maryland Linguistics Mayfest (May 10-11). The theme this year was “Island Perspectives“.
A warm welcome to Karlos Arregi, who will join the Linguistics Department next year as an Assistant Professor. Karlos, who completed his Ph.D. at MIT in 2002, is currently teaching at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His interests include syntax, the syntax-semantics, syntax-phonology interfaces, and morphology. He also specializes in Basque and Romance Linguistics.
Congratulations to Alan Yu on his promotion to Associate Professor with tenure!
In honor of Jerry Sadock’s retirement, the Pragmatics, Grammatical Interfaces, and Jerry Sadock conference will take place on May 2 & 3 on the 2dn floor of Cobb. Please come and join us to celebrate this momentous occasion!
John Goldsmith gave an invited presentation at a workshop entitled “Discovering and representing phonological patterns” at the University of Konstanz (10-12 April). The title of his talk was: “Optimization is the answer. Now, what is the question?”
Alan Yu is giving a series of lectures on phonological typology and sound change at the ACTL (Advanced Core Training in Linguistics) in London during the week of April 21-25.
Salikoko Mufwene has been busy this past winter! He gave keynote addresses at the following recent conferences:
- 2008a. “From genetic creolistics to genetic linguistics: Lessons we should not miss!” 34th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society, February 7-10.
- 2008b. “Emergence or creation? Rethinking the formation of Afro-American vernaculars and musics.” Conference on Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago, February 14-17.
- 2008c. “The English(-speaking) Diaspora: Globalization and diversity.” at Purdue University’s 9th Annual Graduate Interdisciplinary Symposium on “Globalization: Questioning nations, borders, identities & communities,” March 28-29.
He also gave the following public lectures:
- 2008d. “The actuation question and the invisible hand in language evolution.” York University, Glendon College, Toronto, CA, 28 February.
- 2008e. “Colonization, globalization, and the linguistic consequences of the (Indo-)European expansion,” Kalamazoo College, March 10.
Want to be enlightened? Jason Merchant will be at UMass, Amherst for the next three weeks, serving as the visiting “syntax guru”.
Chris Kennedy will be a keynote speaker at the Vagueness and Language Use conference at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He will talk about “Vagueness and Comparison“.
“Adjectives and Adverbs: Syntax, Semantics and Discourse“, a volume that Louise McNally and Chris Kennedy edited for the Oxford University Press, has just came out. The website for everyone who wants to rush out and get a copy is: 
Amy Dahlstrom is an invited speaker at the Meskwaki symposium this Saturday. She will be talking about “The Importance of Language and the Importance of Meskwai”.
The Departments of Anthropology and Linguistics and the Committee on Social Though present:
“The Linguistics of World Poetry”
Paul Friedrich
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
4:30 p.m., Haskell Hall Room 101
The program for this year’s SALT has now been posted. Chris Kenndey will be presenting “What an ‘average’ semantics needs” with Jason Stanley from Rutgers.
Jason Merchant’s theory on “a couple of” was discussed in William Safire’s recent musing on the different usages of “of”. To see why Safire wants to “fall off of” his chair, here’s the full article.
John Goldsmith and Jerry Sadock were elected Fellows of the Linguistics Society of America. The Fellows program was established in 2005 to recognize extraordinary contributions and service to the discipline and the Society. There will be a recognition ceremony for the 2008 Fellows immediately before the Presidential Address at the LSA meeting on Saturday, January 5 at the Palmer House in Chicago. Congratulations, Jerry and John! This is a well-deserved recognition!
Alan Yu’s new book, A Natural History of Infixation, has been published by the Oxford University Press, in their Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics series.
Other books published in that series include Jason Merchant’s The Syntax of Silence: Slucing, Islands, and the Theory of Ellipsis!
Susan Goldin-Meadow (U. Chicago, Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor) will talk about “Gesture’s Role in Creating and Learning Language” at the Workshop on Language and Cognition on Friday, November 9 at 4pm in Green Hall, Room 104.
Chris Kennedy will be an expert panelist in a post-performance panel discussion of two short plays, written by Don DeLillo and Tanya Saracho, and staged as part of this year’s Chicago Humanities Festival. The topic of the Festival this year is ‘The Climate of Concern’, and all of the events take on the issue of global environmental and ecological disruption. For more info, visit http://www.chfestival.org/festival/index.cfm?fa=home.program&id=1950&sec=adult.
A huge number of University of Chicago linguists will be presenting at the LSA and SSILA meetings on January 3-6, 2008. Presenters at the LSA include:
- Nikki Adams
- Lobke Aelbrecht (visiting grad student during winter quarter)
- Maximilian Bane
- Jacqueline Bunting
- Amy Franklin
- Victor Friedman
- Anastasia Giannakidou
- Susan Goldin-Meadow
- James Kirby
- Yaron McNabb
- Jason Riggle
- Osamu Sawada
- Jerrold M Sadock
- Kjersti Stensrud
- John Sylak
- Christina Weaver
- Suwon Yoon
Besides presentations during the regular sessions, John Goldsmith will deliver one of the plenary lectures and Salikoko Mufwene and Susan Goldin-Meadow will be the speakers in an organized session, entitled ‘Language in Light of Evolution’.
Presenters at SSILA (Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas) are as follows:
- John Boyle (recent PhD)
- Amy Dahlstrom
- Erin Debenport
- John Lucy (Human Development)
- Patrick Midtlyng
- Eduardo Ribeiro
- Alan Yu
Chris Kennedy turned 40 on October 3. He celebrated his birthday in Paris, where he was an invited speaker for the 2007 Colloque de Syntaxe et Sémantique à Paris. Before Paris, he gave talks at the International Conference on Adjectives in Lille, and at the Workshop on Measurability in Tromsø. Happy birthday, Chris!
Jason Merchant and recent alum John Boyle will be presenting at the 2007 Mid-America Linguistics Conference to be held on October 26-28 at the University of Kansas. Jason will talk about “Spurious coordination in Vlach multiple wh-fronting” and John will present ”The Hidatsa mood markers revisited”.
We welcome many new faces in the department this Autumn. Lenore Grenble, Edward Sapir Professor of Linguistics and Slavic languages, has joined us from Dartmouth. She specializes in Slavic, Tungusic and languages of the North, discourse and conversation analysis, deixis, contact linguistics and language endangerment and revitalization. She is teaching Introduction to Slavic Linguistics this Fall and will offer a seminar on language contact in the Winter quarter. Another addition to our department is our new post-doc, Peter Alrenga. He came to us from UCSC, where he recently defended his dissertation, titled “Comparisons of quality and comparisons of quantity”. He’ll be working with Chris Kennedy for the next two years.
Last but not least, we welcome six new graduate students this year: Michael Bochnak, Peter Klecha, Alice Lemieux, Susan Rizzo, Jasmin Urban, and Christina Weaver. Susan Rizzo will officially start in the Winter quarter as she’s currently on maternity leave.
A bunch of UofC linguists will be presenting at the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in Saarbrücken, Germany (August 6-10):
Fang Liu and Yi Xu (UCL): Question intonation as affected by word stress and focus in English.
James Kirby and Alan Yu: Lexical and phonotactic effects on wordlikeness judgements in Cantonese.
Justin Murphy and Alan Yu: Moraic anchoring of f0 in Washo.
Alan Yu: Tonal phonetic analogy.
Susan Gal and John Goldsmith were elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007. Congratulations!