The Undergraduate Club meets  Monday, November 9 at 7:30 for “Questions and Condiments”.

Bring some homework, questions, or anything interesting Linguistics-related, and the Club will provide some delicious snacks to doctor up your dilemmas.  We’d love to see you there!

“Questions and Condiments”
7:30 November 9
403 Catford Room

Two of our undergradaute concentrators, Baird Campbell and Charlotte Peterson, have been awarded English Teaching fellowship from the Fullbright Program.

Congratulations Baird and Charlotte!

“Caramel Apples to Apples”
Monday at 7:30pm
403 Lorch (Catford Room)

The Linguistics Club will be meeting Monday, Oct. 26 for an event we’re calling “Caramel Apples to Apples.”   The gracious LingClub exec board will be providing apples and caramel for you, which you can enjoy while playing a rousing game of “Apples to Apples.”  This will be a great way to de-stress after all those midterms (and if you still have exams coming up, take a break!).

The Michigan Linguistics Club will have its kick-off meeting in 403 Lorch on Monday, Oct. 5 at 730

The most important thing to know: there will be delicious rewards for the caloric expenditure required for ascending the many delightful flights of stairs to the Ling Department. (Or, you could take the sketchy elevator, not expend any calories, and still get the delicious rewards – we will never know…)

But seriously, what is the ling club? It is your forum.

Want to bake IPA cookies? Want to guess which facebook profile picture belongs which professor?

Maybe you don’t – maybe you think that’s silly. In which case:

What about attending linguistic related events in the community? Getting connected with other concentrators as well as professors and grad students? Talking about wacky languages and getting some advice about… gulp… applying to grad school or finding a job?

The ling club is at your service and we want to know what is fun and helpful for you! That means that we need you to come tell us just what that might be.

If you have any questions before our meeting, or just want to express your sheer excitement (yes, we know, it’s intense), direct your emails to Reed at: scipio@umich.edu.

Alan Mishler (Linguistics ‘09) received a highly competitive Baggett Fellowship to serve as a research assistant at the University of Maryland during the 09-10 academic year.  Alan works primarily on phonetics and speech perception with an emphasis on Japanese tonal and prosodic phenomena.  Alan was also the recipient of the Marshall Salins Social Science Award last spring.

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.