We are thrilled to announce the revival of our departmental newsblog, your go-to source for the latest updates, stories, and achievements within our community! The summer had been a season of vibrant activities and remarkable accomplishments for many of our members. Below is a sample of these activities and achievements. As we gear up for an exciting new academic year, we look forward to sharing more stories of innovation, adventure, and academic excellence. Stay tuned, and welcome back to a revitalized and more engaging departmental newsblog!

Karlos Arregi spent some time in Germany in June to give talks on his joint work with Asia Pietraszko (https://asiapietraszko.com) on head movement and verbal periphrasis. He gave a colloquium at the University of Potsdam, and was an invited speaker at the Myopia in Grammar Workshop at Leipzig University (https://home.uni-leipzig.de/tebay/myopia.htm).

Steven Castro just completed from two one month fieldwork trips from Fiji. I was there collecting data through interviews and ethnographic observations for my dissertation on language and mixed race identity. I also will be presenting at NWAV and LSA in the coming months. 

Lucas Fagen attended Sinn und Bedeutung 29 in Noto, Sicily (September 17-19) to present joint work with Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) on minimal sufficiency readings of exclusives.

During this past summer, Gabriel Gilbert presented at the 16th International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics (16-ICAL) hosted by De La Salle University in Manila, Philippines. He presented a talk titled “Possibility > Apprehensive > Prohibitive: The Case of Hawaiian mai”. This talk used both historical and spoken data to illustrate a proposed grammaticalization path where a marker of epistemic possibility develops into a deontic modal item, adopting the methods of formal diachronic semantics.

Salikoko Mufwene held the “Chaire annuelle Mondes francophones 2023-24” at the Collège de France in Paris in spring. He gave several lectures on how his approach to the emergence of creoles and his  scholarship on globalization and language help explain more adequately the history of French in Europe and in the rest of the world. He submitted the typescript of his “leçon inaugurale” for publication at the Editions du Collège de France this summer. According to Amazon.com, the small book retitled Migrations humaines et évolution linguistique will be published in February 2025.  He was featured several times in the French media about his interpretation of the history of French and recorded a podcast on multilingualism in Africa with an Australian entrepreneur (released this summer and is posted at his Facebook page). He is part of a documentary titled Biographie de la langue française which was broadcast on October 3 by TV5 Monde. He was interviewed recently by Billets d’Afrique (Paris) and gave a webinar to their audience on October 1. He participated as an academic consultant in a UNESCO meeting in late June for advice on the preparation of a World Atlas of Languages. He also completed his typescript of a book titled Ecological perspectives on language endangerment and loss.

In late June, first-year Ph.D. student Joohee Ko attended the 19th Conference on Laboratory Phonology: LabPhon 19 in Seoul, South Korea. There, she presented a talk titled “The time course of phonetic cue integration in Seoul Korean sibilant fricatives”, with James Whang (Seoul National University).

Anna-Marie Sprenger finished up 9 months of ethnographic fieldwork, funded by a Fulbright-Hays DDRA Grant, in Iași, Romania for their dissertation. They conducted 43 sociolinguistic interviews, collected interactional and soundscape recordings, and collaborated with local queer / feminist organizations and a center for Ukrainian refugees.  Part of this research, which focuses on English usage among queer activists in Iași, was accepted to NWAV 52, where Anna-Marie will present in November.  Anna-Marie’s manuscript, “Parodying Incompetence in (I)europa: Hearing Glide Insertion and Communism in a Romanian Politician’s Speech” was accepted for publication to the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology for their upcoming January issue. 

Saule Tugenbaeva co-taught at the NYI summer linguistic school this July. Below is a screenshot and the link to the event: https://nyispb.org/vnyi9/VNYILing/theoretical-linguistics-cognitive-science_339.html.

Yiin Wang conducted fieldwork this summer in several villages in Jiangxi Province to study sound changes occurring in Linchuan Gan Chinese. The project, which involved interviewing speakers of different generations using picture-based slides, was funded by the University of Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression. Data on tones, Voice Onset Time, and final consonants were gathered for further analysis and research.

Ming Xiang did a lot of traveling in the summer. In mid-June she chaired the dissertation defense for Sanghee Kim at the University of Chicago Paris center. Congratulations to Dr. Kim! After that, she visited Humboldt University in Berlin for some collaborative work with local researchers. She also gave a talk at Humboldt university on syntactic change driven by language contact, presenting a case study based on experimental data she collected on Cantonese and Mandarin.  Berlin was one of her favorite cities. Watching EURO 2024 soccer games on big TV screens in Berlin restaurants alongside beer-drinking locals was a delightful experience (without being converted to a soccer fan). After spending some time in Europe, she went back to China, where she attended workshops on brain research methods in Beijing and Guangzhou. In those sizzling hot summer days in China, good Chinese food was her reward. In late August, she returned to Chicago, stopping in Hong Kong (good food again!) for a few days on her way. Over the summer, three papers of hers were accepted/published. One paper co-authored with Dr. Sanghee Kim was published in the journal Cognitive Science (title: Incremental discourse-update constrains number agreement attraction effect); another paper with Dr. Eszter Ronai will appear in the journal Language and Cognition (title: Scalar inference calculation through the lens of degree estimates); and the third paper with a previous UofC undergrad student Jiayuan Yue (now a master student at UCL linguistics) will appear in a Festschrift volume for Masha Polinsky (title: The argument-adjunct asymmetry revisited: the role of focus alternatives in island effect). An additional paper was revised and resubmitted in August, co-authored with Ming’s visiting student Yunsong Li and also her collaborator Dr. Suiping Wang in China (title: Working memory capacity limit is dependent on encoding granularity: evidence from Mandarin Chinese). Also in August Ming’s new NSF grant was finally official! This NSF project will take a quantitative and experimental approach to assess the uncertainty of question under discussion in naturalistic discourse and also examine the effect of such uncertainty on sentence processing. 

Alan Yu attended the 19th Conference on Laboratory Phonology in Seoul in late June where he was a discussant at the “Phonetic Imitation: Representation, Sound Change, and Other Theoretical Implications” workshop. He also delivered a lightning talk at the CorpusPhon workshop and presented a poster in the main session of the conference. In July, he visited the Bilingual Cognition and Development Lab at the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, where he gave a talk on categorization consistency. In August, he taught a course on sound change actuation at the Fudan International Summer School of Linguistics. James Kirby (PhD, 2010) was also an instructor at that summer school. Alan also started a UChicago Global-funded project, titled “Crowdsourcing Language Change in Hong Kong with Smartphone Applications,” collaborating with Ming Xiang and alumni Yenan Sun (PhD, 2022) and Jackie Lai (PhD, 2021).

Erik Zyman traveled to Germany to give two invited colloquium talks—one at the University of Potsdam and one at Leipzig University—entitled “Nakajima-Clefts as a Window onto Verb Phrase Structure.” The linguists at both universities gave him a warm welcome and engaged him in exciting discussions of both his investigations and their own. Erik also pushed forward three of his other current research projects, entitled “On the Symmetry Between Merge and Adjoin,” “Radical Tmesis Is Internal Merge,” and “On the Syntactic Autonomy of Theme Vowels.” Among his non-linguistics-related activities were visiting Berlin and hiking in Acadia National Park in Maine.