We are delighted to welcome Ezra Keshet to the Linguistics Department as a new Assistant Professor in Semantics beginning in Fall 2009. Ezra completed his PhD in semantics at MIT and has been a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department this year. Ezra’s work focuses on syntax, pragmatics and discourse.

His dissertation argues that possible worlds and times must be explicitly represented in the syntax of natural language and explains several constraints such representations must obey. He has also done research on scalar implicature, showing that an analysis involving alternative semantics solves several puzzles relating to the topic; and telescoping, including arguments that syntactic rules sometimes bridge multiple sentences, given the proper discourse environment.

Other interests of Ezra’s include singing, cooking, and computational linguistics.

Jeff Heath expects to receive official confirmation soon of a three-year continuation grant from the National Science Foundation as part of a long-term fieldwork project on the 20 or so languages of the Dogon family in Mali, West Africa. Other fieldworkers on the project will be Steve Moran (U Washington grad student), Kirill Prokhorov (Russian grad student), and Abbie Hantgan (Indiana U grad student). Kirill and Abbie also did fieldwork under the expiring three-year grant, while Steve has been the website administrator. Another student, Laura McPherson, is finishing her current fieldwork and will enroll in the UCLA Linguistics PhD program this fall.

Sally Thomason has been a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies for March, 2009.

Sally recently gave an invited lecture at the Workshop on Language Contact at FRAIS entitled, “Contact-induced language change sociolinguistics vs. historical linguistics?”

Abstract:

In studying language change, sociolinguists and historical linguists address the issues from very different perspectives.  Sociolinguists focus on ongoing change; historical linguists study past changes.  At least in part because of this difference in perspective, it sometimes seems as if the two groups of scholars are talking past each other rather than to each other.  In this paper I’ll argue that the respective sets of data should in fact permit compatible analyses, because any viable theory must surely encompass both synchronic variation and diachronic change.

Kate Rice, one of our undergraduate concentrators, has received the Donald J. Cohen Fellowship in Developmental Social Neuroscience, a two year fellowship at Yale University. The primary project she’ll be working on is a prospective, longitudinal study of children from birth to 36 months.  One of the biggest components right now is eyetracking research.  The project hopes to be able to diagnosis autism sooner based on early differences in the tracking of social scenes.

Congratulations Kate!

Dina Kapetangianni has been awarded a 2009-2010 Constantine Tsangadas Fellowship for research in post-Classical Greece.

Congratulations Dina!

Andries Coetzee  presented a keynote address at the VI Congresso Internacional da ABRALIN (6th International Congress of ABRALIN) entitled”Grammar and non-grammar: an integrated model of phonological variation”.

In the talk, he develops an Harmonic Grammar model of phonological variation that simultaneously allows for grammatical and non-grammatical factors to impact variation. Over 3000 people from all over Brazil attended the conference, and it therefore felt like attending the LSA Annual Meeting.

Julie Boland and Robin Queen received a Faculty Research Award jointly from the Office for the Vice President for Research and the LSA Dean’s Office for their work on exploring the relationship between grammatical and natural gender in both implicit and explicit discrimination tasks.

As part of their fundraising event, the Linguist List has been posting “Linguist of the Day” stories, and Sally was among them.  You can read about how she decided to become a linguist, her experiences learning how to conduct fieldwork and several interesting anecdotes.

Two Linguistics faculty will be teaching courses at the 2009 LSA Summer Institute.

Carmel O’Shannessey will be teaching  LSA 216:  Linguistic effects of language attrition and shift

The course will explore changes that take place within languages and speech communities when the dynamics of language use changes, so that languages spoken less often come to be spoken more often, and others come to be spoken less often. We will examine the linguistic processes occurring in use of the languages from which speakers are shifting and those to which they are shifting, including creation of new mixed languages or varieties. We will examine the interplay of language learning and attrition through individuals’ dynamic use of first and second languages in these complex situations.

Sally Thomason will be teaching LSA 212:  Language contact and language change

Because language contact is a fact of life for most of the world’s people, it is hardly surprising that it often plays a major role in language change. This course will begin with a brief survey of historical, social, and political settings of language contact, to provide background for the main focus of the course: contact-induced language change. Among the topics that will be covered are social and linguistic predictors for the effects of language contact (together with a discussion of why they can never be expected to yield deterministic predictions); the effects of contact-induced language change on the structure of the receiving language; criteria for establishing contact as a cause of language change; mechanisms of contact-induced change; linguistic areas as a special problem for the study of contact and change; mixed languages (pidgins, creoles, and bilingual mixed languages); and contact-induced changes in some (not all) dying languages.