BLING

Jason Merchant was awarded the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching on May 24, 2012. Congratulations, Jason. Well-deserved!

The 2013 LSA Institute will be held from June 24 to July 19 at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Several Chicago faculty and (so-to-be) alumni of the Linguistics department will be teaching courses there:

• Computational Modeling of Sound Change: James Kirby (PhD 2010, now at University of Edinburgh) and Morgan Sonderegger
• Individual differences in sound change: Jeff Mielke (University of Ottawa) and Alan Yu
• Introduction to Morphosyntax: Karlos Arregi
• Language Variation and Thought: John A. Lucy (Comparative Human Development)

Jason Merchant gave a colloquium talk on “More comparatives than you can shake a stick at: The case of Greek” at the Department of Linguistics at McGill University.

Several Chicago linguists will be presenting at WCCFL 30 at UC Santa Cruz!

• Peter Alrenga (former post doc, now at Boston University), Chris Kennedy, and Jason Merchant: A New Standard of Comparison
• Jesse Harris (BA/MA 2003, now Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Pomona College)On the Semantics of Domain Adjectives in English
• Steve Sanpietro, Ming Xiang, Jason Merchant: Syntax, Semantics, and Discourse in Ellipsis: Accounting for Voice Mismatch

Great job y’all!

Several Chicago linguists will be heading to Ohio State in March to present at the Workshop on Innovations in Cantonese Linguistics:

• Jackson Lee: Representation of contour tone in Cantonese
• Holman Tse (MA, 2007): Lexical tone effects on voice onset time in Cantonese

Alan Yu is one of the invited speakers. His talk is titled “Determinants of Cantonese syllable wellformedness.”

On Feb 11-12, several U of C linguists will be presenting at BLS 38:

• Rebekah Baglini: Reduced clausal structure in comparatives: evidence from Wolof
• Andrew Dombrowski: Multiple relative marking in 19th century West Rumelian Turkish
• Matthew Faytak (BA, 2011): Logical sonority scales and turbulence in fricative-vowel languages
• Jackson Lee: The representation of contour tones in Cantonese

In addition to these student presenters, our very own Victor Friedman is one of the invited speakers. His talk is titled “Languages are Wealth: The Sprachbund as Linguistic Capital”.

Congratulations to Karlos Arregi and Jason Riggle on their promotion to Associate Professor with tenure! Way to go!

Check out Professor Riggle on the words of the year!