Monthly Archives: November 2009

CLS 46 call for papers

The 46th annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society will be held April 8-10, 2010 at the University of Chicago. The conference will include a general session and three parasessions dedicated to Reevaluating the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface, Multilingualism, and Probabilistic Theories of Grammar.

We welcome papers from all major linguistic subfields and frameworks as well as from related cross-disciplinary areas. Papers relating to one of the parasession themes will be given preference.

Each talk will be given 20 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for questions. Presented papers will be published in the CLS Proceedings. See submission guidelines here.  All abstracts must be submitted by 11:59 PM CST on Friday, January 15, 2010.

We eagerly anticipate this year’s conference, including our own John Goldsmith as Main Session speaker. Registration information will be made available as the conference approaches. See you there!

– BLING & CLS 46

SLA annual prize goes to Ben Smith

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!

U. of C. connection in latest Language issue

The September 2009 issue of Language (Vol. 85, No. 3) contains a special section entitled “SIL and the disciplinary culture of linguistics,” comprising an important set of papers about the role of SIL’s linguistic work. Several of the contributors have connections to our department:  Lise Dobrin and Ken Olson are PhDs from our department; Jeff Good earned his B.A. here; and Courtney Handman is a current joint Anthro/Ling PhD candidate.

Thanks to all for your contributions to this issue, and thanks to Amy Dahlstrom for bringing this involvement to our attention!

This weekend we’re SWAMPed

Attention all semanticists and acronym lovers: The Semantics Workshop of the American Midwest and Prairies (SWAMP) will be taking place on campus this Friday, November 20.  The workshop brings together graduate student researchers from institutions across the Midwest. Ryan Bochnak and Tommy Grano are  among the presenters.

See the SWAMP website here, and do plan on attending!

Congratulations, Osamu Sawada

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.