We’ll be back in September!

Clip art licensed from the Clip Art Gallery on DiscoverySchool.com

Anna Babel’s paper, “”Dizque”, evidentiality and stance in Valley Spanish” has been accepted for publication at Language in Society.  The paper explores evidentials in Andean Spanish and shows the importance of the differential usage of evidentials for various social goals and within and across individual speakers.  This paper is a revision of Anna’s Qualifying Research Paper.

Congratulations, Anna!

Robin Queen has received an Excellence in Education award from the College of LSA.  This award recognizes efforts in the areas of classroom teaching, curricular innovation, and the supervision of student research, as well as other significant contributions to the quality of the College’s teaching-learning environment.

Ezra Keshet has received a grant from the LSAIT committee to create the Online Semantic Calculator, which will help students learn semantic analysis techniques.

Alan Mishler has received the highly competitive Marshall Sahlins Social Science award from the Honors College. The Marshall Sahlins award is part of the Goldstein Honors prizes, a set of prizes estalished to recognize scholarly excellence and outstanding achievement.

Alan received the prize based on his many academic strengths as well as his service and leadership on campus.

Alan’s thesis, Voice Onset Time in Japanese Voiceless Stops: Domain-initial Strengthening and Perceptual Salience,  is an acoustic and perceptual investigation of domain-initial strengthening in Japanese. The goal of the acoustic study was to determine whether a set of Japanese consonants exhibited domain-initial—in particular, word-initial—strengthening. It did, which led to the perceptual study, whose goal was to assess whether native Japanese speaking listeners could use the acoustic consequences of strengthening to identify word onset. The perceptual study addresses whether strengthening is perceptually useful.

Congratulations, Alan!

Rosalie Edmunds has been awarded a Virgina Voss award for Excellence in Writing by Senior Honors Women from the Honors College for her honors theses, “They’ll be doing away with those buffalo”: Language, Culture, and History in a Salish-Pend d’Oreille Narrative.

The thesis combines linguistic and anthropological analysis with historical research in order to elucidate the background and structure of a traditional narrative set in the late 19th century and early 20th century on the Flathead Reservation of northwestern Montana.

Congratulations, Rosalie!

This year, we had four outstanding Honors Theses written in the Department.

Rosalie Edmunds: They’ll be doing away with those buffalo”: Language, Culture, and History in a Salish-Pend d’Oreille Narrative.  Supervisors:  Sally Thomason (Linguistics) and Barbara Meek (Anthropology)

Charles Fletcher III:  La Lengua Rosa: A Sociolinguistic Study of Gay Spanish in Madrid.  Supervisors:  Webb Keane (Anthropology), Robin Queen (Linguistics), Deborah Keller-Cohen (Linguistics)

Alan Mishler: Voice Onset Time in Japanese Voiceless Stops: Domain-initial Strengthening and Perceptual Salience.  Supervisors:  Pam Beddor (Linguistics), Andries Coetzee (Linguistics)

Ania Musial: Overcoming The Subset Problem: The Subset Problem and You Or, Maximum Entropy Modeling of L2 Phonotactic Acquisition. Supervisors:  Andries Coetzee (Linguistics), Steve Abney (Linguistics).

Congratulations to these fine scholars on their excellent work.

Marlyse Baptista received an award from the Center for World Performance Studies for bringing to campus the Cape Verdean sculptor, painter and sketch artist Ida Abreu.  Baptista nominated Abreu for a four-week residency at the University of Michigan during April 2010.   Abreu will offer exhibits of his art, as well as three campus lectures.  In addition, he and Baptista will visit several public schools in Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti and Detroit where they’ll discuss with students the connections between art, language and identity.

Michael Marlo (Ph.D.  2007) has been offered a position as research scientist in African languages and Pashto at the Center for the Advanced Study of Language at the University of Maryland.

Shortly before he received the offer, Michael and his wife welcomed Jayden Marlo to the world.

Many congrats Mike and Jacinta