Category Archives: faculty

Hot off the presses from Sali

Salikoko Mufwene has begun another calendar year with several new publications, which include
  • (With Cécile B. Vigouroux, eds.) 2008. Globalization and Language Vitality: Perspectives from Africa. London: Continuum Press.
  • 2009. “Some offspring of colonial English are creole.” In Vernacular Universals and Language Contacts, ed. by Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola, and Heili Paulasto, 208-303. New York/London: Routledge.
Last weekend, Sali also presented his paper, “Humans as the ecology of language(s),” at The Nexus of Biology and Linguistics, the 6th Annual Martin Luther King Day Linguistics Symposium, held at The Ohio State University on January 19.

Kennedy, McNabb among paper acceptances

“On the Extraction of Attributive Adjectives and Deletion in Palestinian Arabic Comparatives,” a paper by department chair Chris Kennedy and third-year Ph.D. student Yaron McNabb, has been accepted to two upcoming conferences:

  • The 37th North American Conference on Afroasiatic Languages (NACAL) meeting in Albuquerque, NM, to be held March 13-15, 2009
  • The 23rd Arabic Linguistics Symposium at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, to be held April 3-5, 2009

In addition, a paper by April Lynn Grotberg, “Prosodic override of a differential object marking system,” was accepted to NACAL as well. NELC/Linguistics joint-Ph.D. student Charles Otte III will also be presenting at NACAL. Congratulations, all!

Chicagoans travel to Berkeley

The University of Chicago will be well represented at the upcoming annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, which will be held February 14-16, with several members of our department featured in the program.

Student presenters will include Ryan Bochnak, “Promiscuous modification and cross-categorical part structures”; Jasmin Urban, “A Modal Approach to Open Questions”; and Osamu Sawada and Thomas Grano, “Investigating an asymmetry in the semantics of Japanese measure phrases.”

Susan Goldin-Meadow and Amy Franklin (PhD, 2007) will present “Getting Ahead in Development: Multi-Modal Acquisition of Negation” (with Amy Franklin) and Alan Yu will also be presenting his work, “Tonal mapping in Cantonese vocative reduplication.”

See the BLS 35 website for details about the meeting program and abstracts.

Dahlstrom at Algonquian Conference

Amy Dahlstrom presented a paper last weekend in Minneapolis at the 40th Algonquian Conference, an international meeting for researchers working in Algonquian studies from anthropology to ethnobotany and including, of course, linguistics. Amy’s paper was titled “Pattern and presentation: Highlighting syntactic and rhetorical structures in texts” and delivered in a special session on Problems and Strategies in the Analysis, Redaction, and Presentation of Native Texts. Click here to view the full program for the conference.

Mufwene wraps up a prolific year

Salikoko Mufwene recently returned from a short trip to Paris, where he gave the keynote address at the CNRS-LACITO Workshop on Ecology and Language Evolution. His October 23 talk, “Humans as the ecology of language(s),” is the latest in a series of over a dozen papers presented by Salikoko in 2008.

In addition, several of his articles entitled “Creoles,” “Pidgins,” “Koinés,” and “Lingua Franca,” plus several other shorter ones on specific creoles and pidgins, were recently published in Encyclopedia Britannica Online, wrapping up a year of several such publications on topics related to language evolution and creole-related phenomena.