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!

For the first time in its nine-year history, the annual meeting of the International Conference on Greek Linguistics will be hosted stateside, and the University of Chicago Department of Linguistics is proud to be the first American host for this important gathering!

The conference will take place on campus in the International House (on 59th Street) from October 29-31. Registration is free for ALL students, and talks (and Halloween candy!) should be plentiful.

Among the in-house presentations at ICGL are the following:

Eleni Staraki: Temporal anchoring in the DP: the case of na

Suwon Yoon: Metalinguistic comparatives from Greek to Korean

Anastasia Giannakidou & Stella Grylla: Intonation in Greek n-words

Jason Merchant: Ενας ψηλότερός της άντρας: Implications of clitic standards of comparison in Greek

More fun stuff to report:

Second-year student Rebekah Baglini presented her paper “Modeling Variation and Change in Raddoppiamento Sintattico” at the Fifteenth Mid-Continental Workshop on Phonology (McWOP) at Indiana University last Sunday, October 11.

Alice Lemieux‘s paper “Small but significant: Body part incorporation in Washo” has been accepted for presentation at the 15th Workshop on Structure and Constituency in the Languages of the Americas (WSCLA), Feb. 5-7 2010, in Ottawa, Ontario.

Linguistics faculty member Karlos Arregi will present “The Syntax of Comparative Numerals” at NELS 40, to be held at MIT November 13-15.

Slavic/Linguistics joint-Ph.D. student Andrew Dombrowski will be giving a paper entitled “On Vowel Contraction in Macedonian” at the 7th Macedonian-North American Conference on Macedonian Studies, which will be held at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, November 5-8. He will also participate in a roundtable entitled “Macedonian Language Contact – from Linguistic League to Diaspora” at the national convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS), in Boston from November 12 – 15. Slavic faculty member Victor Friedman is likewise scheduled to give papers at the MNACMS and AAASS, as well as AATSEEL and a special conference on linguistic minorities in Turkey and Turkish minorities outside Turkey at the University of Cyprus.

Did you know the average professor publishes 0.7 journal articles per year? That’s what we hear, anyway. Our department chair Chris Kennedy, however, just had an entire paper (coauthored with Jason Stanley at Rutgers) come out in the philosophy journal Mind. Congratulations!