students

Congratulations to James Kirby, who has been awarded a three-year Hanna Holborn Gray Advanced Fellowship! This fellowship is given annually to one third-year student in the Humanities division and one in the humanistic Social Sciences. We are very proud of James for receiving this honor.

As the Spring quarter comes to a close, we celebrate the many successfully defended QPs. Here’s the honor roll:

First QP

• Max Bane: Modeling the Typology of Quantity-Insensitive Stress Systems.
• Tommy Grano: At the intersection of form, meaning and use: Being assertive in Mandarin Chinese.
• Arum Kang: On the plurality of the Extrinsic Plural Marker -TUL in Korean.
• Yaron McNabb: Hebrew Coordinated Relative Clauses as a Window into the Nature of Resumption and Movement.
• Nassira Nicola: Dire N’IMPORTE-Q”: Identifying a free choice item in Quebec Sign Language.

Second QP

• Catherine Chatzopoulos: Negative Concord in Attic Greek.
• James Kirby: Comparative-induced event measure relations in English and Vietnamese.
• Osamu Sawada: The Historical Syntax of Japanese Comparatives.
• Eleni Staraki: Turkish Loanwords in Modern Greek: A Psycholinguistic Approach.
• Chris Straughn: The Development and Use of the Uzbek Complementizer.

Congratulations also to Jackie Bunting for successfully defending her dissertation proposal titled From English to Sranan: An Assessment of Structural Similarities and Differences. Good job, Jackie.

Congratulations to Angelina Bultaovic, who successfully defended her doctoral dissertation entitled ” MODALITY, FUTURITY AND TEMPORAL DEPENDENCY: THE SEMANTICS OF THE SERBIAN PERFECTIVE NONPAST AND FUTURE 2 “! in both The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures the Department of Linguistics for a dual Ph.D. Chestitamo na uspehu! Well done, Gina!

Congratulations to Nikki Adams, who has been awarded a Provost’s Dissertation-Year Fellowship for next year, and to Erin Debenport, who has been awarded an AAUW Dissertation Fellowship!

Congratulations also to the following students who have received Provost’s Summer Fellowships: Jackie Bunting, James Kirby, Yaron McNabb, Chris Straughn, and Suwon Yoon.

Congratulations go to the following eight graduating majors in linguistics, who have all finished their BA theses (the most ever), and to their advisors (in parentheses):

• Eric Bjerstedt, “The dominance of the unmarked in prosodic reduplication.” (Jason Riggle)
• Christine Boylan, “Causal inference processing in narratives: A fMRI study and review of methodology.” (Amy Dahlstrom)
• Elise Johnston, “Manually mapping the cognition of a culture: Revealing cognitive models in American Sign Language.” (Steven Clancy)
• Nicholas Kontovas, “An analysis of recent loans into the Standard Uyghur lexicon: What semantic distribution and phonological interpretation reveal about transmission environment.” (Alan C. L. Yu)
• Eric Prendergast, “Notice! The pragmatic basis for Balkan object reduplication in Albanian, Macedonian, and Bulgarian.” (Victor Friedman)
• Patrick Rich, “Hitting (at) the problem: An analysis of the conative construction/alternation.” (Steven Clancy)
• John Sylak, “Lak verbal morphology.” (Victor Friedman)
• Noah Yavitz, “Evaluating semantic accounts of the equative”. (Chris Kennedy)

Many of our graduating seniors will embark on new and exciting adventures soon:

• Christine Boylan will be working as lab manager of Alec Marantz & Liina Pylkkänen’s lab at NYU.
• John Sylak is going to Berkeley for his PhD in Linguistics.
• Eric Prendergast received a Fulbright to study in Skopje, Republic of Macedonia.

If you’re a graduating senior and want to report your future whereabout, please e-mail blingnews@gmail.com.

Congratulations to Shu-yu Guo, who is the recipient of this year’s annual Leonard Bloomfield prize (for the graduating linguistics major with the highest grade point average in courses towards the major: his grade point average in linguistics was 3.98)!

Erin Debenport has been awarded an American fellowship from the AAUW Educational Foundation for 2008-09. Congratulations, Erin!

A cohort of six students will be joining our department next year:

• Carissa Abrego
• Rebekah Baglini
• Jon Keane
• Tim Grinsell
• Martina Martinovic
• Julia Thomas

Thanks to all who helped out with recruitment.

Osamu Sawada, who was an alternate at the Vagueness and Language Use conference (where Chris Kennedy was an invited speaker), was able to present his paper “Vagueness and Adverbial Polarity Items”. Based on reports from our spies in Paris, Osamu gave an excellent presentation, which stimulated a lot of questions that he handled thoughtfully and comprehensively. Way to go, Osamu!

Max Bane recently went through the odyssey of typesetting a paper for WCCFL 26 in LaTeX. WCCFL, along with a number of other conferences, publishes its proceedings through the Cascadilla Proceedings Project, which unfortunately provides no LaTeX package for authors to implement its style sheet. Some of the requirements were sufficiently tricky to implement (particularly the copyright notice), so he decided to release his solution as a reusable LaTeX document class.

The package lives here: http://maxbane.com/?page_id=19

Jasmin Urban has been awarded a Critical Language Scholarship to study Arabic in Tunis, Tunisia this summer. Way to go, Jasmin!

Nikki Adams successfully defended her dissertation proposal on “The Internal Arguments of the Zulu Ditransitive” on March 31. Congratulations, Nikki!

The Semiotics Workshop: Culture in Context & Workshop on US Locations are pleased to announce:

“Language Use at Sandia Pueblo: Ideologies, Revitalization and Institutionalization”

Erin Debenport
Ph.D. Candidate
Linguistics

Discussants: Elise Kramer & Gabe Tusinski (Anthropology)

Tuesday March 11th (Note, this workshop is on a Tuesday)
4:30-6:00 pm
Haskell Hall, Room Mezz 102

The paper for this workshop is available by request. For a copy, please email Gabe Tusinski (tusinski@uchicago.edu) or
Elina Hartikainen (elina@uchicago.edu).

Suwon Yoon will present “Mood in Abstract Complementizers: Altaic vs. non-Altaic languages” at WAFL 5 (The fifth Workshop on Altaic and Formal Linguistics) at SOAS in London in May.

Tom Wier, who’s visiting the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology at Leipzig this year, sent us the following updates:

“I have recently given two talks:

(1) “The Typology of Tav-constructions and the Person-Role Constraint in Georgian” at the Ditransitives Conference at the MPI-EVA in Leipzig, 23-25 Nov 2007.
(2) “Polysynthesis in Caucasian Languages; or, What is Polysynthesis?” at the Caucasological Conference at the MPI-EVA in Leipzig, 7-9 Dec 2007.

I have also been asked by Martin Haspelmath to teach a course at the Leipzig Spring School on Linguistic Diversity, which I’ve entitled “Feature Hierarchies in Natural Languages”:

http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/conference/08_springschool/files/courses.html“

Adam Baker will present “Discourse coherence and VP ellipsis with split antecedents” at the 2007 Amsterdam Colloquium, one of the most prestigious conferences in semantics. Well done, Adam!

Nikki Adams successfully defended her QP, “Passivization and object marking in Zulu: High vs. low applicatives and agreement vs. pronominal object markers”. Congratulations!

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

A bunch of U of C linguists will be presenting at the first Arizona Linguistics Circle meeting at University of Arizona, Oct 19-21:

• Jackie Bunting: ”Identifying the Antecedent: Slovak Pronouns and the PAH”
• Malcolm Elliott: ”Nonhuman Participants and zibun in Japanese”
• Kjersti Stensrud: ”Reanalyzing Unergative Pseudocoordinations in Norwegian”

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.

April Grotberg’s paper “Stress and tone in Macuiltiangus Zapotec” has been accepted for poster presentation at the 13th annual Mid-Continental Workshop on Phonology at the Ohio State University to be held on October 26-28, 2007. Congratulations!

Congratulations to Peter Klecha and Osamu Sawada, who will be presenting papers at the Midwest Workshop on Semantics next Saturday, October 6, at Michigan State. This is the second meeting of an annual workshop highlighting grad student work in semantics that Chris Kennedy initiated here at Chicago last fall. Details on the workshop can be found here: http://www.msu.edu/~lingorg/mws2007.html.

We have a record number of linguistics majors graduating this year:

Lilibeth Contreras
Jessica Eanes
Mitcho Erlewine
Elliott Goodman
Ruth Krevitt
Max Masich
Eric Morley
Justin Murphy
Chelsey Norman
Dorothy Shope
Jessica Turon

Eric Morley, Justin Murphy, and Jessica Turon will also be graduating with honors. Mitcho Erlewine will be graduating with a joint BA/MA.

Jessica Turon, who will be attending graduate school in linguistics at MIT this fall, is also the recipient of the Leonard Bloomfield Prize for the graduating linguistics major with the highest grade point average in courses towards the major.

Congratulations to work well done!

James Slotta received the Fulbright-Hayes DDRA Fellowship and the Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant
for research on language variation in Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea. Way to go, James!

Osamu Sawada has been awarded a Graduate Achievement Fellowship from the Division of the Humanities. Congratulations, Osamu, for work well done!

Fang Liu will be presenting “The Neutral Tone in Question Intonation in Mandarin” with Yi Xu (UCL) at INTERSPEECH 2007 at Antwerp, Belgium, in August.

Malcolm Elliott successfully defended his first QP last week on semantic constraints on the distribution of the Japanese reflexive zibun. Good work, Malcolm!

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.

Several students have successfully defended their QPs last week:

James Kirby: “Lexical and phonotactic effects on wordlikeness judgments in Cantonese.”
Stefie Kuzmack: “In re re: A Case of Simultaneous Grammaticalization and Degrammaticalization.”
Patrick Midtlyng: “On hiatus resolution in Washo.”
Osamu Sawada: ‘Pragmatic aspects of implicit comparison: An economy-based approach’.

Well done y’all!

Kjersti Stensrud has been awarded a Mellon Dissertation Year Fellowship for 2007-08. Well-done, Kjersti!