Chris Odato’s QRP, “Revisiting off-target verbosity:  The effect of discourse context and speaker identity,” has been accepted by his readers and he is now advanced to Doctoral candidacy.

Brook Hefright’s Qualifying Research Paper, “The People in the Gayborhood:  Metapragmatics in Language Crossing and Identity Construction,” has been accepted by his readers, and he is now advanced to Doctoral candidacy. 

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.

This fall, Catherine Fortin (dissertation: Indonesian Sluicing and Verb Phrase Ellipsis: Description and Explanation in a Minimalist Framework, defended summer 2007) began a two-year appointment as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Carleton College Linguistics Program. She will be teaching several different courses in syntax and related subfields of linguistics (semantics, morphology, intro, acquisition, and ‘field methods’). This term she is teaching Introduction to the Theory of Syntax and First Language Acquisition. With only one other full-time faculty member in Linguistics, Catherine constitutes about half of the program!

Catherine will also be presenting a paper at the upcoming Western Conference of Linguistics (WECOL) at UCSD in November, on some of her dissertation research, Verb Phrase Ellipsis in Indonesian.

After successfully defending his dissertation (Shifting Dunes: Changing Meanings of Urdu in India) in August, Rizwan Ahmad joined the faculty of the American University of Kuwait as Assistant Professor of English. In this three-year appointment, he will teach courses in composition and history of the English language.

Rizwan is also currently collaborating with Elabbas Benmamoun of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who is a Fulbright fellow at the American University of Kuwait. Their project explores aspects of language and ethnicity in Kuwait, focusing on speakers of Egyptian and Lebanese dialects who were born and raised in Kuwait.

After successfully defending his dissertation in April, Robert Felty started a post-doctoral fellowship at Indiana University in July, under the tutelage of Prof. David Pisoni. The Speech Research Lab at Indiana University has been in operation for over 30 years, and Prof. Pisoni has funded post-docs throughout this time with an NIH training grant. The lab is built in an interdisciplinary and collaborative manner, with a variety of psychologists, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, speech and hearing scientists, and linguists.

Robert is currently working on two projects in the lab:

Discovering neighborhoods through recognition errors

In this collaborative project with Adam Buchwald, we have developed a large (> 1400 words) stimulus list which is designed to be representative of the entire English lexicon in terms of lexical frequency, number of syllables, syllable structure, and initial phoneme. We are presenting these materials in open-set word recognition tasks in order to discover what words are actually being activated in the mental lexicon

A new perceptually robust test of spoken word recognition

In this project with David Pisoni, we are developing a new spoken word recognition test battery to be used in clinical situations, which more accurately represents normal communicative situations, by including sources of variation that we commonly encounter, including speaker specific characteristics such as gender and dialectal variation, as well as a variety of degraded listening situations

You can learn more about Robert’s research from his website.

Eric Brown graduated 4 years ago from UC Berkeley in linguistics and is originally from Southern California. He is interested in language contact and theories of language change, specifically with the languages of Southeast Asia, separated language communities, and variants of Portuguese. He’s spent the past few years working and volunteering at a youth crisis line, teaching in Japan, and working at Pfizer here in Ann Arbor.

David Medeiros is interested in syntax and first language acquisition.

Joseph Tyler has interests primarily in interactional sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and conversation analysis. He earned his BS in Languages with a major in German from Georgetown University

Jonathan Yip is interested in phonetics, phonology, and the phonetics/phonology interface. In 2006, he received his bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, concentrating in Linguistics and German