Monthly Archives: September 2010

Welcome, Ming Xiang

Meet our newest faculty member, Assistant Professor Ming Xiang. Dr. Xiang was born and raised in China, Hubei Province, on the southern bank of Yangtzi River. She is broadly interested in the relationship between language and cognition. Her recent work focuses on syntax and semantics processing at the sentence level.

She is currently setting up a Language Processing Lab at the Karen Landahl Center, which will be equipped with an EEG (Electroencephalography) system and an eyetracker. Before joining us at UChicago, she was an Assistant Prof. in the Linguistics Department in Victoria, Vancouver Island. She has also done post-doc research at U. of Maryland and Harvard University. When she is not working, she likes music. Her  favorite instrument of all time is cello.

The department is enormously pleased to have her on board and we anticipate a great first year. Welcome!

Job news: Osamu Sawada

We’re very proud of recent PhD Osamu Sawada (2010), who has accepted a permanent position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Faculty of Humanities, Law and Economics at Mie University, one of the national universities in Japan.  He will begin teaching Intro to Linguistics and a course on meaning and communication in October.  All the best, Dr. Sawada!

Recent conference appearances

On Saturday, September 4, Chris Kennedy participated in a workshop in Stuttgart on Dynamics in Semantics, Pragmatics and Logic, which was held to honor Professor Hans Kamp on the occasion of his 70th birthday.  His presentation was called “Vagueness and Imprecision: Meaning and Use”.

On Saturday, September 11, Peter Klecha presented his paper “Optional and Obligatory Modal Subordination” at Sinn und Bedeutung 15, which was held at the Universität des Saarlandes in Germany.

New faces around the department

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!