Professor Jason Merchant will be giving an invited colloquium at MIT on March 11, and is also an invited speaker at a workshop on ellipsis at Stanford, this April 29-30. He doesn’t know yet what he’ll talking on at either place, but says it will probably be about gender features under ellipsis.
Author Archives: Max Bane
Chicago at BLS
Chicago linguistics researchers will be making a good showing at the 37th annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, which begins February 12th. Professor Salikoko Mufwene will be presenting an invited paper, Let’s Bury the Pidgin-to-Creole Evolutionary Myth Once and for All!, and three of our graduate students will be presenting papers in the regular sessions:
- Carissa Anne Abrego-Collier: Liquid dissimilation as listener hypocorrection
- Thomas Wier: Typological rara (and rarissima) in Khevsur and Tush
- Julia Thomas: The role of gender in monophthongization of /aI/ in African-American English
Victor Friedman: Keynotes, plenaries, and more
Professor Victor A. Friedman recently gave the keynote address for the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages at the annual meeting in January. The title was “Families, Leagues, and Hybridity: The Past and Future of Slavic and East European Languages”. The talk will be published in the Spring 2011 issue of the Slavic and East European Journal.
Victor also gave two plenary papers in January:
- Thailand-Malaysia-Indonesia/Greece-Macedonia-Bulgaria – Parallels and Prospects. Southeast Europe and Southeast Asia: Islam, Merges, and Margins, National University of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur 4-5 January 2011
- A Thousand Years of Evidentials: From Al-Kashghari to Watergate and Beyond, Conference on Evidentials, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, 14-16 January
Finally, a review of Victor’s edited translation of Bai Ganyo has been published on BULstack, a blog of Bulgarian culture.
Rella I. Cohn research awards
The first round of awards have been made from the Chicago Linguistics Graduate Student Research Fund in Honor of Rella I. Cohn. The following projects received individual awards in amounts up to $450:
Ryan Bochnak, ‘Syntax and semantics of Luganda “exceed” comparatives’
Jon Keane, (ASL fingerspelling database for automatic recognition)
Susan Rizzo, ‘Performance errors in the manual modality: the case of ASL fingerspelling’
Christina Weaver, (emphasis in Neo-Aramaic phonology)
Congratulations to Ryan, Jon, Susan, and Christina!
There will be another round of applications for the Rella Cohn fund in Spring 2011; in subsequent years awards will be made once a year in the spring. Look for an announcement next spring about the application deadline.
Alumni news: Ilya Yakubovich
In Spring 2010, Ilya Yakubovich moved from Chicago to Moscow, where he accepted the position of a Privatdozent (Assistant Professor) at his alma mater, Russian State University for the Humanities, and research appointments at the Moscow State University and the Russian Academy of Sciences. In January 2011 Ilya relocated to Oxford, where he was offered Jill Hart Postdoctoral Fellowship in Indo-Iranian Philology. He took a temporary leave from his teaching job, but continues to combine his work in Oxford with research appointments in Moscow.