Updates from Friedman and Mufwene

Victor Friedman, on foreign leave from the Slavic department, continues his tour of Europe and the Balkans. In addition to several recent papers, presentations, and invited public lectures through Macedonia, Victor also had the honor of receiving the Krste P. Misirkov Liftetime Achievement Award for contributions to Macedonian Scholarship from the Ramkovski Foundation in Skopje. Amazing!

Meanwhile, Salikoko Mufwene has a good deal of new work to report. Publications include “Some offspring of colonial English are creole” in Vernacular universals vs. contact-induced language change; and “Kituba, Kileta, or Kikongo: What’s in a name?” in Naming Languages in Sub-Saharan Africa: Practices, Names, Categorisations, as well as a number of appearances both as an invited and accepted speaker at a number of conferences and the University of Sao Paolo.

For more complete recent bibliographies of each of these linguists, click here: Continue reading →

Belated QP congrats

Laudations are overdue for some spring QP defenses:

Hearty congratulations are due to Yaron McNabb for defending his second qualifying paper, titled “Apparent pharyngealization in French loanwords in Moroccan Arabic.”

Congratulations also to Peter Klecha, who very successfully defended his first qualifying paper, “Modality and context-dependence in English futures.”

Great work, guys! Hope both of you had a great summer!

Lemieux going to SSILA

Third-year Ph.D. student Alice Lemieux had her paper, “A compositional approach to bipartite verbs in Washo”, accepted for presentation at the SSILA 2010 Annual Meeting in Baltimore, January 7-10. Way to go!  Alice is also currently at the University of Rochester this fall as a member of the Human Language Processing Lab/Jaeger Lab.

. . . Stay tuned for a complete list of Chicago representatives at the LSA Annual Meeting! We trust it’s a sizable one this year.

Publications over the summer

Jackie Bunting’s article on Sranan, “‘Give’ and take: how dative gi contributed to the decline of ditransitive taki,” has just been published in the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages (24: 199-217, 2009).

In addition, over the summer, Jason Riggle, Max Bane, and Morgan Sonderegger had their joint article “The VC Dimension of Constraint Based Grammars” published in Lingua (article currently online, soon to appear in print).

Proof positive of summer productivity at the U. of C. Congratulations!

End-of-the-year BBQ Thursday

Our department BBQ will be held today, June 11, starting at 4 p.m. in the quad in front of the Social Science building. We’ll have burgers, hot dogs, corn on the cob, and all the usual summer favorites. All you need to bring is your kids and significant others, your frisbee and maybe your croquet set. We especially encourage all graduating BAs to show up along with their families to celebrate the grand occasion. Come celebrate the end of another long and successful academic year!