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!
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.
Eric Brown has received a grant from the International Institute to go to Cape Verde this summer to begin a project looking at Cape Verdean Creole phonology, variation and orthographic reform.
Congratulations, Eric!
Lauren Squires and Robin Queen have received a grant from the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching to assess the use of the Bluestream Media database, a collection of appromimately 800 video and audio clips that illustrate various sociolinguistic principles. They will be investigating the effectiveness of the database for teaching and learning core sociolinguistic and general linguistic concepts and principles.
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!
