BLING

A little birdie told us that Ben Smith (joint PhD candidate in Linguistics/Human Development) has won the 2009 Society of Linguistic Anthropology prize for Outstanding Paper by a Graduate Student. His paper, “Of marbles and (little) men: Bad luck, Aymara boyhood and masculine identification,” will be published in the Journal of Lingusitic Anthropology. (By the way, this makes two years in a row that the prize goes to a Chicagoan!)

Congratulations, Ben!

If you haven’t already, give a big congratulations to Osamu Sawada (ABD), who has been awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science to conduct research on his project “The semantics and pragmatics of scalar expressions: Their dimensionality and context-dependency”.

During the period of this fellowship (which will begin after he finishes his dissertation later this year), Osamu’s host institution will be the University of Kyoto, but he will also have the opportunity to spend a significant amount of time at Stanford, working with Chris Potts, and at the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics, working with Rick Nouwen.

Laudations are overdue for some spring QP defenses:

Hearty congratulations are due to Yaron McNabb for defending his second qualifying paper, titled “Apparent pharyngealization in French loanwords in Moroccan Arabic.”

Congratulations also to Peter Klecha, who very successfully defended his first qualifying paper, “Modality and context-dependence in English futures.”

Great work, guys! Hope both of you had a great summer!

Third-year Ph.D. student Alice Lemieux had her paper, “A compositional approach to bipartite verbs in Washo”, accepted for presentation at the SSILA 2010 Annual Meeting in Baltimore, January 7-10. Way to go!  Alice is also currently at the University of Rochester this fall as a member of the Human Language Processing Lab/Jaeger Lab.

. . . Stay tuned for a complete list of Chicago representatives at the LSA Annual Meeting! We trust it’s a sizable one this year.

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!

Several of our current and former linguistics undergrads will be heading to graduate schools this Fall.

Eric Prendergast, who’s currently on a Fulbright fellowship researching in Macedonia, will be heading to Berkeley, joining fellow Chicago grads Clara Cohen and John Sylak in the Department of Linguistics.

Eric Morley, who has been serving in the Peace Corp in Benin the past couple years, will begin his graduate studies in emotion and speech synthesis at the Oregon Health and Science University. 

Patrick Rich, our current BA/MA student, will begin PhD studies in Linguistics at Harvard. 

Mitcho Erlewine, who was on a Fulbright fellowship teaching in Taiwan, but is now working for Ubiquity in Japan, will be heading to MIT. 

Justin Murphy will be starting his master’s degree in Journalism at Syracuse University in the Fall. 

Congratulations to all!