Sam Epstein has received the John D’Arms Faculty Award for Distinguished Graduate Mentoring in the Humanities.

The award ceremony will be April 17 at 4 pm

Congratulations, Sam!!

The LSA Executive Committee has recommended to the Provost that Julie Boland be promoted to Professor.

Congratulations, Julie!!

Sally Thomason gave an invited talk, “How much can  we know  about ancient language contacts?” at the workshop on Interaction and Networking: Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives, which was part of the project Early Networking in Northern
Fennoscandia held  in Oslø, Norway.
Abstract

For the vast majority of the world’s language families, there are no written records to help with the task of unraveling language history.  It is nevertheless possible, in favorable circumstances, to identify a history of language contact and to establish the existence and direction of contact-induced language changes.  This paper discusses methodological criteria for distinguishing favorable from unfavorable circumstances, using the Pacific Northwest Sprachbund of North America as an example.  The paper concludes with some observations about contributions that linguistic evidence can and can’t make — in conjunction with evidence from archaeology, cultural anthropology, and genetics — to efforts to understand human history.

San Duanmu presented “Syllabification and the Weight-Stress Principle” at the CUNY Conference on the Foot, City University of New York, New York

Abstract available in .pdf

View the slides or  Listen to the presentation

Chris Odato and Deborah Keller-Cohen have had their paper, Evaluating the speech of older adults: Age, gender, and speech situation, accepted for publication at the Journal of Language and Social Psychology.

The paper is based on Chris’ Qualifying Research Paper.

The first round for the Linguistics Olympiad team was held on Feb. 4, 2009, and the University of Michigan was an official host.  The first round had 1400 registrants from the U.S. and Canada.

San Duanmu has published The “spotty-data problem” and boundaries of grammar. In Interfaces in Chinese Phonology: Festschrift in Honor of Matthew Y. Chen on his 70th Birthday, ed. Yuchau E. Hsiao, Hui-Chuan Hsu, Lian-Hee Wee, and Dah-an Ho, 261-278. Taipei: Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica.

The Linguistics Department welcomed a new Key Administrator at the start of the term.

Lori Scott joined our administrative staff in January and has really hit the ground running.  In addition to mastering all the minutia of budgets and appointment fractions and many different personalities, she’s also been a supreme flood-fighter, managing the recent flooding of three offices with aplomb.

We are delighted that she has joined us.

Welcome to Linguistics, Lori!