Ph.D. student Jackie Bunting, currently ABD, has received a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation. She’ll spend three months in Suriname conducting fieldwork for her thesis, entitled “English to Sranan: An Assessment of Structural Similarities and Differences,” starting on October 18th. Hope you have an enjoyable, fruitful trip!

Also this year, Thomas Wier is continuing his Fulbright-Hayes fieldwork documenting dying Georgian dialects/languages, looking for evidence of different kinds of morphological blocking processes. While abroad, he has also given two talks:  (1) The Case In and Across Languages conference in Helsinki, Finland: “Morphosemantax and case-marking in Georgian” and (2) The Tbilisi Forum on Language and Logic, in Bakuriani, Georgia, where he spoke about “Nonconfigurationality in Georgian.”

• 2009. ‘I want to buy it’ in the Albanian glossary of Arnold von Harff.  Transactions of the Philological Society. Volume 107: 2: 231-252.
• With Şerife Geniş.  Formation of a Diasporic Community: The History of Migration and Resettlement of Muslim Albanians in the Black Sea  Region of Turkey.  Middle Eastern Studies.  Volume 45: 4: 553-569.

Meanwhile, here is a photo from Kelly’s summer jaunts:

Kelly makes friends with a Swedish runestone

She explains: “The stone is two fragments of a 10^th century runestone fromSigtuna, Sweden that have been re-attached. According to a nearby plaque, translated into English it reads, ‘Sven had this stone set up in memory of his father and Frödis in memory of her husband Ulv. God help his soul.’ The script employed is the younger futhark, popular in Scandanvian stone carving between 800-1100. One way you can tell it’s the younger runes is by looking at the rune by the knuckles in my right hand near the crack. It is a vertical line with two horizontal lines going all the way across. This is the rune for [o].”

Fun stuff. Thanks, Kelly, for sharing!

BLING and the entire department would like to congratulate Kjersti Stensrud for her successful defense of her thesis “Aspects of Event Composition in Norwegian and English,” which happened on September 16.  Belated felicitations, Kjersti! Best of luck!