BLING

Susie Allen recently wrote a piece for the University of Chicago Humanities Division’s magazine Tableau, which profiles the Linguistics department: New tools, old questions.

Beginning this quarter and through Winter, we’re pleased to have Yusuke Kubota (OSU, PhD 2010) join the department on a postdoctoral fellowship provided by the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science. He will be working with Chris Kennedy, investigating aspectual composition in Japanese.

For those who hang around the Karen Landahl Center, you’ll be sure to see Julian Grove daily in the Language Processing and Phonology labs. He comes to us with a degree in cognitive science from Johns Hopkins and will be managing the labs, assisting researchers with technical support and running experiments.

We are also welcoming back postdoc Elena Castroviejo who will be here again this fall, and must congratulate her on being awarded a five-year postdoc and eventual tenure-track job at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in Madrid, which she will begin in January. Felicitacions!

And now for some exciting, non-professional news:

• Postdoctoral scholar  Itamar Francez reports from Ann Arbor (where he is spending the year) that he, his wife, Na’ama, and their daughter Alma are expecting a new baby in February …

• … and fourth-year PhD student Christina Weaver and her husband, Christopher are expecting their first child in November.

Congratulations!

BLING will go on hiatus for the summer. We will resume when the Fall quarter starts in September. Have  a wonderful break, everyone!

The Linguistics Department’s end-of-year barbecue will take place this Friday, June 11, from 1:00–3:00 p.m. on the Midway Plaisance, right outside our very own Classics building.  Come enjoy hearty BBQ fare, celebrate the end of another academic year, enjoy the late-spring sunshine at the home of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, and say your goodbyes to some of our departing friends.

Happy summer!

We’ll be on hiatus for the next few weeks, enjoying winter and its holidays (traditional and academic!).

Have a great one!

On October 8, our 2009-2010 Colloquium Series kicked off with a fascinating talk by Johanna Nichols (UC Berkeley) on lexical type-shift from Proto-IE to Proto-Slavic. Today, the fall series continues with a talk by Maria Polinsky (Harvard), who will be speaking on “Ergativity, Again” (abstract here).  Join us at 3:30 in Cobb 201, to be followed by department tea at 5:00.

The rest of the fall schedule:

November 5: James Yoon, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

November 19: Katherine Kinzler, University of Chicago

At long last—the (ostensibly) comprehensive list of U. Chicago representation presenting at LSA 2010:

Max Bane: “A Combinatoric Model of Variation in the English Dative Alternation”

Matthew Carlson, Colleen Balukas, Chip Gerfen (Psychology): “Suffix productivity and stem allomorph markedness in Spanish derivations with alternating diphthongs”

Andrew Dombrowski (Slavic & Linguistics): “Vowel Harmony Loss in West Rumelian Turkish”

James Kirby: “The role of probabilistic enhancement in phonologization”

Peter Klecha: “Context Dependence in English Futures”

Yaron McNabb: “Apparent Pharyngealization in French Loanwords in Moroccan Arabic”

Jason Riggle and Max Bane: “Choosing the right constraints (and the right theory of how they interact)”

Osamu Sawada: “The multidimensionality of the Japanese minimizers sukoshi/chotto ‘a little’”

Morgan Sonderegger and Partha Niyogi (Computer Science): “Combining data and mathematical models to study change: An application to an English stress shift”

Chris Straughn: “Grammaticalization without Grammaticalization: The Case of Uzbek Complementation” (poster)

Additionally, Jerry Sadock will be commenting on the talk by Alana Johns at the SSILA symposium on derivational morphology, while Lenore Grenoble (Slavic) co-organized a session with Doug Whalen on findings from targeted work on endangered languages. The session will lead off with their talk, “Leveraging small grants for maximum linguistic discovery: The Endangered Language Fund experience,” on Sunday morning.

Finally, Nassira Nicola‘s organized session, entitled “Interdisciplinarity and Current Trends in Undergraduate Linguistics Education,” was also accepted to the LSA. Very exciting!

Congrats to all of you, and enjoy Baltimore in January!