BLING

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)

Double congratulations are in order to the two students who successfully defended their dissertations yesterday:  Don Metlay, for his dissertation on ‘[take] and the ASL Verb Complex: An Autolexical Account’, and Eduardo Ribeiro, for his dissertation ‘A Grammar of Karajá’.

Great job, Don and Eduardo!

Morgan Sonderegger has accepted a position of assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics at the McGill University in Montreal, Canada. The position starts in August, 2012.

Congratulations, Morgan!

Linglunch will feature two presentations on Wednesday, April 11 at noon down in the Landahl Center:

12.00 Andrea Beltrama - Italian-issimo: intensification at the semantic/pragmatics interface

12.30 Julia Thomas and Tim Grinsell – ‘Finna’ as a Socially Meaningful Quasi-Modal in African American English

Aikaterini Chatzopoulou presented “Renewal and inertia in the history of Greek negation” at Deutschen Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS 2012) on March 8th and ”Jespersen’s Cycle Redefined” at the Penn Linguistics Colloquium on March 24.

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.”

Julia Thomas and Jackson Lee will be presenting at the Penn Linguistics Colloquium on March 23-25.

• Julia Thomas, Holly Craig and S. Hensel:  ”A look at copula usage in school-age AAE speakers”
• Jackson Lee: “The representation of contour tones in Cantonese”