The Department will host the 39th annual meeting of the Michigan Linguistics Society on Oct. 31, 2009.

Abstract submissions are due Sept. 12.

Acrisio Pires and Heather Taylor welcomed their daughter Stella to the world on August 7th.

Welcome Stella and congratulations Acrisio and Heather.

We’ll be back in September!

Clip art licensed from the Clip Art Gallery on DiscoverySchool.com

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

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.

Andries Coetzee  taught a course on “Variation in gradience in phonology” at the 19th Linguistics Institute of the Associação Brasileira de Lingüística (abbreviated as ABRALIN, “Brazilian Association of Linguistics”) at the UFPB ( Universidade Federal da Paraíba, “Federal University of Paraiba”) in João Pessoa,  March 2-4.

From Andries

The class was attended by about 30 people, both graduate students and professors. There was a good mix in the class of phonologists and sociolinguists of the variationist ilk, which made for very interesting and productive in class discussions. I was pleasantly surprised to see how active the phonology research community is in Brazil, and I have learned a lot from my interactions
with both faculty and students in the class.

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.