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

Marlyse Baptista was invited by the Institute Camoes and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University and by the Institute Camoes and the Department of Classical and Modern Languages at Rutgers University (Newark) to give the invited lecture:  “Creoles in the 21st century: when creolistics intersects with cognitive psychology and genetics”

Eric Brown has just received a graduate research fellowship from the National Science Foundation

From the program website:

“The Graduate Research Fellowship provides three years of support for graduate study leading to research-based master’s or doctoral degrees and is intended for students who are in the early stages of their graduate study. The Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) invests in graduate education for a cadre of diverse individuals who demonstrate their potential to successfully complete graduate degree programs in disciplines relevant to the mission of the National Science Foundation.”

Congratulations, Eric!

Lauren Squires presented a paper at the Expanding Literacy Studies conference at The Ohio State University in Columbus, OH.

‘Books: not really my style’: Representing presumed literacies in online discourse

This paper discusses the use of literacy products in online profiles by taking literacy practices as one aspect of perrsonal style. I discuss ways in which literacy is presumed, packaged, and claimed through the interface, suggesting that literacy products serve as a symbolic link between virtual and non-virtual cultural practice

Lauren was also on the Conference Committee that organized the event.

Jeff Heath’s course LING305:  Adverstising Rhetoric was noted in the Michigan Daily as one of six courses offered in F09 that caught the eyes of the Daily staff.