Alan Mishler has received the highly competitive Marshall Sahlins Social Science award from the Honors College. The Marshall Sahlins award is part of the Goldstein Honors prizes, a set of prizes estalished to recognize scholarly excellence and outstanding achievement.

Alan received the prize based on his many academic strengths as well as his service and leadership on campus.

Alan’s thesis, Voice Onset Time in Japanese Voiceless Stops: Domain-initial Strengthening and Perceptual Salience,  is an acoustic and perceptual investigation of domain-initial strengthening in Japanese. The goal of the acoustic study was to determine whether a set of Japanese consonants exhibited domain-initial—in particular, word-initial—strengthening. It did, which led to the perceptual study, whose goal was to assess whether native Japanese speaking listeners could use the acoustic consequences of strengthening to identify word onset. The perceptual study addresses whether strengthening is perceptually useful.

Congratulations, Alan!

Rosalie Edmunds has been awarded a Virgina Voss award for Excellence in Writing by Senior Honors Women from the Honors College for her honors theses, “They’ll be doing away with those buffalo”: Language, Culture, and History in a Salish-Pend d’Oreille Narrative.

The thesis combines linguistic and anthropological analysis with historical research in order to elucidate the background and structure of a traditional narrative set in the late 19th century and early 20th century on the Flathead Reservation of northwestern Montana.

Congratulations, Rosalie!

This year, we had four outstanding Honors Theses written in the Department.

Rosalie Edmunds: They’ll be doing away with those buffalo”: Language, Culture, and History in a Salish-Pend d’Oreille Narrative.  Supervisors:  Sally Thomason (Linguistics) and Barbara Meek (Anthropology)

Charles Fletcher III:  La Lengua Rosa: A Sociolinguistic Study of Gay Spanish in Madrid.  Supervisors:  Webb Keane (Anthropology), Robin Queen (Linguistics), Deborah Keller-Cohen (Linguistics)

Alan Mishler: Voice Onset Time in Japanese Voiceless Stops: Domain-initial Strengthening and Perceptual Salience.  Supervisors:  Pam Beddor (Linguistics), Andries Coetzee (Linguistics)

Ania Musial: Overcoming The Subset Problem: The Subset Problem and You Or, Maximum Entropy Modeling of L2 Phonotactic Acquisition. Supervisors:  Andries Coetzee (Linguistics), Steve Abney (Linguistics).

Congratulations to these fine scholars on their excellent work.

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.

Kate Rice, one of our undergraduate concentrators, has received the Donald J. Cohen Fellowship in Developmental Social Neuroscience, a two year fellowship at Yale University. The primary project she’ll be working on is a prospective, longitudinal study of children from birth to 36 months.  One of the biggest components right now is eyetracking research.  The project hopes to be able to diagnosis autism sooner based on early differences in the tracking of social scenes.

Congratulations Kate!

Letter: Teacher finds U-M to be a valuable neighbor
by Janet M. Popper, Ann Arbor
Sunday January 25, 2009, 12:28 PM
I beg to differ with the letter of Jan. 12 that leveled a charge at the University of Michigan for its “lack of support to the community.” I must say from my experience, U-M does share its talents with the public schools.

For the 12 years I have been an elementary teacher in Ann Arbor, I have consistently had U-M students. They have come via various programs through the U-M, helping out in my classroom.

Athletes who mentor children, students from a linguistics class focusing on language issues and Project Outreach students who provide teacher/student assistance have all been a part of my life as a teacher. Just recently, a group of neuroscience students presented to a fifth-grade class, and my colleague said they did an awesome job of enriching the curriculum.

Furthermore, each year in May, after the campus quiets down, I take my elementary students to the U-M campus to be “college students” for a day. From the commuter bus (free) trips to North Campus to the exceptionally well-received tours we get of the graduate library (especially the Map Room), also free, to the numerous other places on campus that we have always been welcomed to, and reminded to come back and visit any time, I consider the U-M to be a most welcome and supportive neighbor and friend to this teacher in the public schools.

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.

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!

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)