students

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!

To commemorate this one-month mark after the closing of our fabulous CLS 45 conference, we’ve put up a summary page on the website so you can relive it. Be sure to check out the photo album, chock full of pictures from the conference and banquet, taken and compiled by our own Christina Weaver. Thanks again for helping us make CLS 45 great!

-Ryan Bochnak, Peter Klecha, Alice Lemieux, Nassira Nicola, Jasmin Urban, and Christina Weaver

CLS 45

Congratulations to Juan Bueno-Holle, Alice Lemieux and Ryan Bochnak for each successfully defending a qualifying paper this spring!

Juan defended his second QP, entitled “Lexical Tone in Isthmus Zapotec.” Meanwhile, Alice successfully defended her first QP, “A Reanalysis of Washo Bipartite Stems,” and Ryan defended his, “Half as a promiscuous modifier.”  Great job to all of you—may there be more to come!

Workshop on Language, Cognition, and Computation
(Sponsored by the Council on Advanced Studies)

Vowel variability within and between days

Shannon Heald (Psych, U. Chicago)

Friday, May 15 at 3:30pm, in the Karen Landahl Center (basement of Social Science)

Rachel Lehr has been awarded an AAUW dissertation fellowship for her dissertation, Pashai Grammar.  Rachel is in Afghanistan right now doing fieldwork on Pashai. Congratulations, Rachel!

…to Tommy Grano, who has successfully defended his second qualifying paper, “English Emotive Factive Verbs and the Semantics of Nonfinite Complementation.”  Excellent work, Tommy!

Congratulations are due to Jasmin Urban and Malcolm Elliott for their recent QP defenses!

Jasmin successfully defended her first qualifying paper, ”Towards a unified theory of questions: What open questions can tell us about what questions mean,” on April 7.

Meanwhile, Malcolm passed his second QP, titled “Seeming and Believing: A look at perception verbs and evidential doubt in English.”

Both can now breathe a little easier and bask in a job well done!

Patrick Midtlyng gave a talk entitled “The effects of speech rate on initial plosives and click accompaniments in Zulu” at the 40th Annual Conference on African Linguistics. The conference was held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign last Friday, April 10. Great job, Patrick!

Alejandro Paz, joint PhD student in Linguistics and Anthropology, has accepted a position at the University of Toronto - Scarborough. The position is half in Linguistics and half in Intersections, Exchanges and Encounters in the Humanities.

Meanwhile, Erin Debenport has been awarded a Mellon/ACLS postdoctoral fellowship for next year. Many congratulations to each of you, Erin and Alejandro!

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.

Mark your calendar! This year’s QP-Fest will take place on March 16-17. The tentative program is as follows:

March 16 (Location: Harper 140)

March 17 (Location: Harper 130)

Ed King, one of our many talented undergraduates, will be presenting “Generation Effects on Vowel Production in Latvian-English Bilinguals in Chicago” at the Toronto Undergraduate Linguistics Conference (TULCon), March 27-29, 2009.

Arum Kang’s paper, ‘On Pluralizing Event: Plural Marking Event Pluralizer tul in Korean’,  has been selected for presentation at JSM (Journées de Sémantique et Modélisation)’09. Congratulations!

We have just received word of two upcoming defenses:

Fang Liu will defend her dissertation on ‘Intonation Systems of Mandarin and English: a Functional Approach’ on Tuesday, February 17, 2009 at 10:00 a.m. in Classics 312 (department lounge).  A draft of Fang’s dissertation, including abstract, can be found here. 

Meanwhile, Osamu Sawada will be defending his dissertation proposal on ‘Pragmatic Aspects of Scalar Modifiers’ this Wednesday, February 11, at 12:00 p.m. in Classics 312. 

Wish them luck!

Good news: there is such a thing as a free lunch. The first Ling Lunch of the quarter will take place today, February 9 at noon in the Karen Landahl Center. We will hear from Ryan Bochnak on “Promiscuous modification and the syntax-semantics interface,” and from Jasmin Urban on “A modal approach to open questions.”

This Ling Lunch will be conference-style, with two 20-minute talks with 10-minute Q&As. Both papers (along with several others from Chicago linguists) will be presented at BLS next weekend.

We hope to see many of you there.

Nassira Nicola’s paper, “Black Face, White Voice: Rush Limbaugh and the ‘Message’ of Race,” has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Language and Politics. Excited for you, Nassira!

Fourth-year Ph.D. student Chris Straughn will be defending his dissertation proposal, ”Evidentiality in Uzbek and Kazakh,” today, January 22. The defense will take place at 11 a.m. in Classics 312 (department lounge); the abstract can be viewed here. We’re wishing Chris the best!

The University of Chicago will be well represented at the upcoming annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, which will be held February 14-16, with several members of our department featured in the program.

Student presenters will include Ryan Bochnak, “Promiscuous modification and cross-categorical part structures”; Jasmin Urban, “A Modal Approach to Open Questions”; and Osamu Sawada and Thomas Grano, “Investigating an asymmetry in the semantics of Japanese measure phrases.”

Susan Goldin-Meadow and Amy Franklin (PhD, 2007) will present ”Getting Ahead in Development: Multi-Modal Acquisition of Negation” (with Amy Franklin) and Alan Yu will also be presenting his work, “Tonal mapping in Cantonese vocative reduplication.”

See the BLS 35 website for details about the meeting program and abstracts.

. . . are due to two fourth-year Ph.D. students, Osamu Sawada and Jackie Bunting!

Osamu’s manuscript “Pragmatic aspects of implicit comparison: An economy-based approach” was accepted for publication in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Pragmatics.  As department chair Chris Kennedy has expressed, “This is a very impressive achievement indeed — well done, Osamu!”

Meanwhile, Jackie’s manuscript, “‘Give’ and take: How dative gi contributed to the decline of detransitive taki,” has been accepted for publication into the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics. Nice work!

Alejandro Paz, Ph.D. candidate for the joint degree in Anthropology and Linguistics, has won the annual prize given by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology for a graduate student paper. “The Circulation of Chisme and Rumor: Gossip, Evidentiality and Authority in the Perspective of Latino Labor Migrants in Israel”  will appear in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology.

A job well done for Alejandro! His paper will also be presented at the upcoming American Anthropological Society meeting.

The 2008 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, which will be in San Francisco from November 19 through 23, will include a paper given by Chicago’s own Erin Debenport.

Erin’s paper, “Private Notice: Negotiating Secrecy in Public Uses of a Pueblo Language,” is part of the excitingly titled panel “Privates and Counterprivates,” which will focus on the modern conceptualization of the ‘private’ sphere in a world of ever-expanding ‘publics.’ We expect to hear good things after the conference!

The highly anticipated and newly redesigned web page of the venerable Chicago Linguistic Society has now been launched, so please be sure to visit the new site for more information and updates from CLS 45! 

humanities.uchicago.edu/cls/   

Thomas Wier was recently awarded a Fulbright-Hayes Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad grant to do dialectological study of morphological and syntactic feature hierarchies across six Georgian dialects and two other Kartvelian languages. He will begin his journey in Leipzig and move to Tbilisi for fieldwork in February. Congratulations, Tom!

A warm welcome to this year’s cohort of new graduate students as well as Luisandro Mendes de Souza, who is visiting us from Brazil. Here’s what they have to say about themselves:

• Carissa Abrego: “I come to Chicago after living in sunny Southern California for 21 years. My undergraduate years were spent first at UCLA and later Biola University, where I earned her B.A. in a self-designed Human Communication major in May 2008. My research interests lie in historical lx and sociolinguistics, syntax and pragmatics, and linguistics and literature. My “other” interests include musicology, 20th-century English and Spanish literature, going to concerts, and watching college football and basketball games.”
• Rebekah Baglini: “I grew up in Philadelphia and attended Bryn Mawr College, where I studied linguistics and philosophy. I am particularly interested in the syntax and semantics of Mandarin Chinese, the syntax-phonology interface, psycholinguistics, language contact, genetic linguistics, and language documentation.   My non-academic interests include backpacking internationally, photography, cooking, documentary films, and writing fiction.”
• Timothy Grinsell: “I graduated from Dartmouth College with degrees in cognitive science and Russian, and then I received a masters in logic from Carnegie Mellon.  I’m interested in semantics, formal pragmatics, and the philosophy of language.  Within these areas, I’ve worked on negation, aspect, modality, and context-dependence. “
• Jonathan Keane: “I got my BA in linguistics from the University of Florida. I’m interested in Syntax, morphology, and computational linguistics.”
• Martina Martinovic: “I studied Croatian language and literature & Phonetics at the Faculty of Philosophy, the University of Zagreb. My degree would be the equivalent of a Master’s degree. Phonetics is a separate field of study in Croatia, and it incorporates basically anything and everything that has something to do with voice, speech, rhetoric, speech and hearing pathology, etc. I did course work and research in different fields that have “real” voice and speech as a point of departure -neurophonetics, speech and hearing pathology, South Slavic accentology and dialectology. Through that, my interests have narrowed down to linguistics, with phonetics and phonology as fields of concentration, which I am hoping to supplement with knowledge from cognitive linguistics.”
• Patrick Rich: “I recently graduated from the College with majors in Linguistics and French. I am coming back this year to complete a Master’s in Linguistics. His interests include Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics, Romance and Germanic languages, Balkan/Caucasian languages, and language acquisition.”
• Luisandro Mendes de Souza: “I’m PhD student at State University of Santa Catarina, Brazil (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina), my dissertation proposal is on the semantics of canonical comparative sentences in Brazilian Portuguese. I’m also interested in the syntax of comparative structures and Pragmatics.”
• Julia Thomas: “I received an M.A. in French Linguistics from Indiana University in Bloomington.  I am interested in pursuing work on language contact and sociolinguistics, in general.  I am particularly interested in studying Michif. I am excited to join the department!”

Besides our new students, joining the faculty this year is Karlos Arregi. Karlos got his Ph.D. at MIT in 2002. His interests include syntax, the syntax-semantics, syntax-phonology interfaces, and morphology; he also specializes in Basque and Romance Linguistics.

Chicago will be well-represented at the upcoming Jaunary LSA and SSILA in San Francisco! Congratulations to the following students and faculty for their acceptances!

LSA

• Peter Alrenga: Stipulated vs. Asserted Anaphora.
• Adam Baker: Phonology as Compression: Capturing Vowel Harmony.
• Tommy Grano: Predicating gradable adjectives in Mandarin Chinese: Should we posit POS?
• April Grotberg: The prosody of overt case marking in Coptic. (Poster)
• James Kirby: Comparative-induced event measure relations.
• James Kirby and Alan Yu: Morphological paradigm effects on vowel articulation.
• Stefanie Kuzmack:  Origin and its connotations: A cline of semantic degrammaticalization.
• Jason Merchant and Jerry Sadock: Case, agreement, and null arguments in Aleut.
• Nassira Nicola: DIRE N’IMPORTE-Q: Evidence for polarity in Quebec Sign Language.
• Alice Lemieux: Evidence from Hindi for Proximity as a Consistent Temporal Relation. (Poster)
• Susan Rizzo: Harmonic Grammar and Grandfather Effects: A New Approach to an Old Problem. (Poster)
• Eleni Staraki: Turkish Loanwords in Greek: A New Framework of Loanword Theory. (Poster)
• Morgan Sondereger: Rhyme graphs, sound change, and perceptual similarity.
• Morgan Sondereger and Alan Yu: A rational account of perceptual compensation for coarticulation.
• John Sylak (BA, 2008):  Lak Reduplication: Neither Phonological Nor Morphological Fixed Segmentism.

SSILA

• Juan Bueno-Holle: Lexical tone in Isthmus Zapotec.
• Amy Dahlstrom: Second’ objects with no first object:  a typology of Meskwaki objects.

Jerry Sadock will also be giving one of a small series of talks celebrating the career of Ellen Prince, present president of the LSA, who will not be able to attend the conference for reasons of health.

Tommy Grano and Eun Hae Park will be presenting at the Second International Conference on East Asian Linguistics, to be held in Vancouver in November:

• Thomas Grano: Chang-Chang, Wang-Wang, and Domain Restriction in Mandarin Quantificational Adverbs
• Eun-Hae Park: An Expressive Analysis of -na in Korean and its Free Choice Component

Eun-Hae, Osamu Sawada and Suwon Yoon will also present at the  18th Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference, to be held at CUNY around the same time:

• Eun-Hae Park: Low-level versus indiscriminate reading in Korean free choice amwu-na (poster)
• Osamu Sawada: Comparison, indeterminateness, and the semantics-pragmatics interface (poster)
• Suwon Yoon: Expletive negation in Japanese and Korean

Osamu will also be presenting “Comparison with indeterminateness: a multidimensional approach” at NELS 39 in November!

Anastasia Giannakidou and Suwon Yoon will be presenting “Metalinguistic Functions and the Expressive Dimension: Expressive Comparatives in Greek and Korean” at Sinn und Bedeutung 13 in Stuttgart (Sept 30-Oct 2).

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!