Ian Catford, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Phonetics, and his daughter Lorna visited the department May 6. He visited his office, the Catford library and conference room, and the sound lab.
The Catford lectures, a series of lectures given on the occasion of Professor Catford’s retirement, are available for streaming viewing.
Wilfredo Valentin-Marquez has accepted a tenure-track job in the Department of Foreign Languages at Millersville University in Lancaster, PA.
Wilfredo completed his degree in 2007 in the joint Linguistics-Romance Languages program.
Congratulations, Wilfredo!!
Robin Queen participated in the Michigan Road Scholars Program. The Michigan Road Scholars Tour for faculty at the University of Michigan is a five-day traveling seminar on the State of Michigan. This educational tour exposes participants to the state’s economy, government and politics, culture, educational systems, health and social issues, history, and geography.
Designed to increase mutual knowledge and understanding between the university and the people and communities of the state,the tour introduces participants to the places the majority of our students call home, encourages university service to the public, and suggests ways faculty can help address state issues through research, scholarship and creative activity. In addition the experience is expected to develop beneficial ties and promote interdisciplinary discussion among the touring faculty.
This year’s tour visited sites in Detroit, Flint, Lansing, Battle Creek, Grand Rapids, Traverse City, Leeland, Peshawbestown, Pellston, Sault St. Marie and Kencheloe.
The Road Scholar participants with Lt. Governor, John Cherry
Susannah Levi, who has been the Language Learning Assistant Professor in Phonetics this year, begins her new position as Assistant Professor of Phonetics in the Dept. of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology at New York University.
Congratulations Susie!!
Ezra Keshet will be our visiting Assistant Professor in 2008-09, holding the Language Learning visiting faculty position. Ezra will teach two of our semantics courses in 2008-09. He is current completing his PhD in semantics at MIT, but his work also touches on syntax, pragmatics and discourse.
His dissertation argues that possible worlds and times must be explicitly represented in the syntax of natural language and explains several constraints such representations must obey. He has also done research on scalar implicature, showing that an analysis involving alternative semantics solves several puzzles relating to the topic; and telescoping, including arguments that syntactic rules sometimes bridge multiple sentences, given the proper discourse environment.
Other interests of Ezra’s include singing, cooking, and computational linguistics.
Welcome, Ezra!
The Linguistics Club is hosting a panel discussion with three
professional translators/interpreters from the University of Michigan
Health Services:
Fawzi El-Shafei (Arabic-English)
Maria Militzer (English-Spanish)
Linda Steinke (Arabic-English)
We will also hear from Helen Merenda, an undergraduate in the UROP
program, about her German-English translation project.
As always, cookies, brownies, and coffee will be forcefully offered.
Thursday, 17 April 2008
3:00pm - 4:30pm
Lorch Hall (room TBA)
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!!
Alan Pagliere reports on his blog that a series of eight 1-hour lectures given by Ian Catford on the occasion of his retirement in 1985 are now digitized and available from Deep Blue, the University’s repository for academic research.
To access them, go to Deep Blue and type in “Catford” in the search box.
Report from the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year election in the Michigan Daily
