Susan Lin, Miki Obata and Chris Odato have all received one of the highly competitive Rackham Pre-Doctoral Fellowship Awards.
The awards offer 12 mos. of funding for the completion of the dissertation.
Congratulations and well-done Susan, Miki and Chris!
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!!
Jane Poling, one of our undergraduate concentrators, has won the Roger M. Jones Poetry contest for her poetry, including Consonants A Sonnet
Consonants, a Sonnet
In English speech the following abide,
Yet select few we boldly aspirate.
The liquids, semi-vowels, a few glide,
Distinguished as we coarticulate.
And then we come to basic allophones,
Which fill the classes of English phonemes.
These unit sounds more frequently are known,
In floods of sleeping modern linguist dreams.
Yet more to us the English language gives,
(This rhythmic noise linguistically expressed)
In affricates, the plosives, fricatives.
Oh, bursting air pulmonically egressed!
I rest myself in consonantal bliss,
As sounds pour out my facial orifice.
Excerpted from the National Science Foundation
The sixth International Linguistics Olympiad ended today in Slanchev Bryag, Bulgaria, and U.S. high school students captured 11 out of 33 awards, including gold medals in individual and team events. This was only the second time the U.S. has ever competed in the event. Their achievement brings a new focus on computational linguistics.
This year’s Olympiad featured 16 teams from around the world, including Bulgaria, Estonia, Germany, Latvia, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Sweden, South Korea and Slovenia. Each problem presented clues about the sounds, words or grammar of a language the students had never studied, such as Micmac, a Native American language spoken in Canada, the New Caledonia languages of Drehu and Cemuhi, as well as several historical Chinese dialects. They were then judged by how accurately and quickly they could untangle the clues to figure out the rules and structures of the languages to solve the problem.
Team 1 was composed of Guy Tabachnick of New York City, Jeffrey Lim of Arlington, Mass., Josh Falk of Pittsburgh, Pa, and Anand Natarajan of San Jose, Calif.
Jae-Kyu Lee of Andover, Mass., Rebecca Jacobs of Encino, Calif., Morris Alper of Palo Alto, Calif., and Hanzhi Zhu of Shrewsbury, Mass. participated as Team 2.
Team 1 claimed a silver medal in the team competition and Team 2 captured a gold. Team 2 also won a trophy for the highest combined score on the individual competition. In the individual competition, Jacobs, Lim and Tabachnick were awarded bronze medals, Alper and Natarajan won silver, and Zhu captured a gold.
The U.S. teams were led by head coach Dragomir Radev, associate professor of computer science, information, and linguistics at the University of Michigan, and associate coach Lori Levin, co-chair of NACLO and associate research professor in the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Adam Hesterberg, who achieved the highest individual score in last year’s Olympiad and is currently attending Princeton University, was present this year as an assistant coach. The team was also accompanied by National Board Certified Teacher Amy Troyan, who also serves as gifted program coordinator at Taylor Allderdice High School.
Lauren Friedman’s Honors Thesis received the Virginia Voss award from the Honors Program and the Matt Alexander Prize from the Linguistics Department due to its outstanding quality.
The thesis, entitled “The loss of Old English Null Expletive hit/it“, explores the loss of the null expletive it, or rather the changes that led to the requirement of an overt expletive hit/it in constructions which lack an overt thematic subject in Spec, IP of a clause. From the descriptions and analyses of OE considered in this study, along with an analysis of EPP (Extended Projection Principle) properties in OE (Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou 1998, Holmberg 2005, Jaeggli & Safir 1989), the thesis argues that OE is in stage 3: null true expletive it is possible across paradigms while null thematic and null quasi-arguments are restricted in use. Additionally, I contend that despite the possibility for null subjects in OE, the EPP is checked is checked by Move XP (i.e. insertion of an overt category in the subject [Spec, IP] position).
Lauren has been an active member of the department and the undergraduate club over the last several years. She leaves the University of Michigan to attend graduate school in Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Congratulations and good luck, Lauren!
Vera Irwin has been awarded a dissertation writing fellowship from the Sweetland Writing Center.
Congratulations, Vera!
Eric Brown has been received a FLAS fellowship from the Center for Southeast Asian Studies to continue his work on Thai.
Congratuations, Eric!
Brook Hefright has received a Fullbright Fellowship to conduct fieldwork on language contact and ethnic identity among the Bai people of Yunan Province, China.
Congratulations Brook!!
Cati Fortin was named as a 2008 recipient of the highly competitive Distinguished Dissertation Award.
Cati’s dissertation, “Indonesian sluicing and verb phrase ellipsis: Description and explanation in a minimalist framework” investigates two elliptical phenomena, sluicing and verb phrase ellipsis (VPE), in Indonesian. The dissertation is equally concerned with description and formal analysis, and provides the first in-depth description and generative analysis of both Indonesian sluicing and VPE.
Cati is currently a visiting assistant professor in syntax at Carleton College.
Congratulations. Cati!!
The College of Literature, Science and the Arts has recommended that Acrisio Pires be promoted to Associate Professor with tenure.
This is an outstanding accomplishment and wonderful news.
Congratulations, Acrisio!!
