… on the successful defense of her dissertation, “The Zulu ditransitive verb phrase”! Her CV can be found here. On behalf of the entire department we wish you the best, Nikki!
Monthly Archives: January 2010
Update from Sali
Another member of our faculty, Salikoko Mufwene, has also been keeping a brisk pace with his scholarly activity of late. His recent publications range from several chapter contributions to new books on the evolution of language, language change and global Englishes to a co-authored peer-reviewed article on “Building social cognitive models of language change” (Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13: 464-469).
Sali has also given several public lectures (in Montreal and the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association) and radio interviews on both Radio Canada International (on African contributions to creole language varieties and cultures) and BBC “Word of Mouth” (on creoles and media representation of nonstandard dialects).
Victor Friedman on the go
Victor Friedman has kept himself busy after returning to Chicago last fall after a year in Eastern Europe. His recent activities include a paper on Macedonian dialectology and Balkan dialectology, as well as an article entitled “Turkish Infinitives in Balkan Romani” in the Encyclopedia of Sociolinguistics of the World’s Languages (ed. Martin Ball, Routledge), coming out this year. In November and December, he traveled widely, from Salt Lake City to Boston to the University of Cyprus, speaking variously about Balkan dialects, language policy, and even the topic of violence in Balkan literature.
Victor also received the distinction of the 2009 Annual Award for Outstanding Contributions to Scholarship from the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages.
Between January and April 2010, he is scheduled to give papers at the LSA, UC Berkeley (Slavic linguistics), Melbourne (Macedonian and Balkan linguistics), Izmir (Balkan Music), and OSU (Seventeenth Biennial Conference on Balkan and South Slavic Linguistics, Literature and Folklore), so watch for those.
Bochnak heading for D.C. and beyond
Ryan Bochnak will be presenting a paper called “Interpreting a category of adjectives in Luganda” at the Georgetown Linguistics Society‘s annual meeting, February 12-14 in Washington, D.C. His work is based in part on data collected from our Field Methods course last year.
In addition, his paper “Two sources of gradability within the verb phrase” was accepted for presentation at a special workshop on the Subatomic Semantics of Event Predicates, to be held at the XX Colloquium on Generative Grammar, at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, in March.
Congrats, Ryan!
Winter 2010 colloquia
The Department of Linguistics will have its first colloquium of the (new) decade in a few weeks. For now, you can content yourself with our colloquium schedule for Winter quarter 2010 (abstracts available soon):
- February 25: Katherine Kinzler, University of Chicago
- March 4: Craige Roberts, Ohio State University
- March 11: Marcela Depiante, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire
This is also a good time to remind everyone to hit up the various graduate workshops affiliated with our department. There’s something for everybody, including Semiotics: Culture in Context, Workshop in Semantics and Philosophy of Language, Workshop on Language and Cognition, and Workshop on Language Variation and Change, all of which have several talks scheduled for the coming weeks and months.