Hearty congratulations to Ming Xiang, who has received the David B. and Clara E. Stern Professorship, in recognition of her stellar achievements as a superb scholar and citizen, and her contribution to the success and excellence of the Department of Linguistics.

Susie Allen recently wrote a piece for the University of Chicago Humanities Division’s magazine Tableau, which profiles the Linguistics department: New tools, old questions.

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!

And now for some exciting, non-professional news:

• Postdoctoral scholar  Itamar Francez reports from Ann Arbor (where he is spending the year) that he, his wife, Na’ama, and their daughter Alma are expecting a new baby in February …

• … and fourth-year PhD student Christina Weaver and her husband, Christopher are expecting their first child in November.

Congratulations!

BLING will go on hiatus for the summer. We will resume when the Fall quarter starts in September. Have  a wonderful break, everyone!