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.

Perspectives on English Language Studies:
A Symposium in Honor of Richard W. Bailey

Saturday, December 6th, 9:15-4:15
3222 Angell Hall

The Department of English Language and Literature is pleased to host a
symposium in honor of Richard W. Bailey, Fred Newton Scott Professor of
English Language and Literature in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.

For more information, see the symposium schedule below and visit our website:
http://www.lsa.umich.edu/english/bailey/. All events are open to the public.

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

PANEL 1 
(9:15-10:30)
Lessons Learned: Perspectives on the Past Forty Years in English Language Studies
Chair: Joshua Miller

Amy Devitt, “Studying Writing”
William A. Kretzschmar, Jr., “Forty Years of English Dialects”
John Smith, “The Computer as a Catalyst for Scholarship”

PANEL 2 
(10:45 – 12:15)
Puzzles that Remain: Perspectives on the Questions that Face English Language Scholars
Chair: Robin Queen

Sonja Lanehart, “Diversity and Intersectionality”
Colette Moore, “Renewed Philology”
Anne Curzan, “Does Prescriptivism Really Fail?”
Dennis Preston, “What Will English Be Next?”

ROUNDTABLE 
(2:00 – 3:15)
Getting the Message Out: English Language Scholars Talking with the Public
Chair: David W. Brown

Dennis Baron, “Let’s Go to the Phones”
Susanmarie Harrington, “Everyday Language Scholars”
Erin McKean, “Keeping it Simple (and Interesting)”

INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD W. BAILEY 
(3:30 – 4:15)
Interviewer: Michael Adams

The event is co-sponsored by the Institute for the Humanities, the Language
and Rhetorical Studies Interdisciplinary Workshop, the Office of the Vice
President for Research, Rackham Graduate School, and the College of LSA.

Ezra Keshet gave the colloquium talk on Friday, Nov. 14 for Wayne State’s Colloquium series.  The talk was entitled:  Split Intensionality:  A New Theory of De re/De dicto Distinction.

Abstract

The traditional scope theory of intensionality (STI) is inadequate, as evidenced by the scope paradoxes discussed in Fodor (1970), Bauerle (1983), and Percus (2000). For instance, the STI predicts (1) to mean something like “each democrat is such that if s/he were a republican, there would be only one political party” — clearly the wrong meaning for this sentence.
(1) If every democrat were a republican, there would only be one political party.
This talk will therefore propose a replacement for the STI, called split intensionality. Compared to an earlier replacement for the STI, the situation pronoun theory, split intensionality represents a more modest departure. The split intensionality system separates each intensional operator’s quantificational force from its intensional force, by use of a new operator, ^ (after Montague 1970). This move proves enough to solve the problems of the STI without overgenerating — as the situation pronoun theory does. In particular, the talk will focus on new data involving island constraints and negative polarity items that supports the split intensionality system over the situation pronoun system.

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.

Jon Yip and Eric Brown are attending the Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute for 8 weeks this summer at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

SEASSI is supported by a consortium of over a dozen universities, including the University of Michigan.  The program offers language and cultural classes to undergraduate and graduate students, professionals and heritage speakers in almost every national language of Southeast Asia, as well as some minority languages.  SEASSI provides one of the only opportunities in the United States to take certain Southeast Asian languages for credit.  This summer, Jon is taking Khmer language classes and acquainting himself with implosive stops and central vowel diphthongs.  Eric is taking Lao language classes and collecting information on the heritage language programs offered by SEASSI.  Those traveling to Madison the first week of August should come and watch them both play Javanese gamelan!”

Anna Babel has advanced to doctoral candidacy after passing her preliminary examinations in Anthropology and her QRP in Linguistics.  Anna is now off to Bolivia for the next year to conduct her doctoral field research.

Katherine Chen successfully defended her dissertation, “Linguistic Practices and Ideologies of Cantonese-English Bilinguals in Hong Kong” on Dec. 18, 2007.

The dissertation was co-chaired by Sally Thomason (Linguistics) and Judith Irvine (Anthropology).

Katherine will be leaving at the end of December to begin her new position as tenure-track faculty at the University of Hong Kong.