Whamit!

This week we welcome home our contingent of students who presented papers or posters at last weekend’s NELS conference at Cornell: Luka Crnic & Tue Trinh, Patrick Grosz, Jeremy Hartman and Gillian Gallagher. Recent alums with NELS papers this year included Julie Legate (PhD 2002), now on the faculty at Penn; Jon Gajewski (PhD 2005), now on the faculty at UConn (presenting a joint paper with his colleague Željko Bošković); and Ivona Kučerová (PhD 2007), currently a post-doc at University College, London.

This week, Jessica Coon will be traveling from her temporary fieldwork home in Chiapas, Mexico to the Universidad de Sonora, where she will present a paper jointly written with Omer Preminger on Positionals and Passives in Chol at the  X Encuentro Internacional de Lingüística en el Noroeste.

Writing from his new home as an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at UMass/Amherst, Seth Cable (MIT PhD 2007) informs us that a book manuscript based on his MIT dissertation The Grammar of Q has just been accepted for publication by Oxford University Press. Seth’s dissertation developed results from his NSF-funded fieldwork on Tlingit to argue that pied-piping does not exist as an independent phenomenon, but follows from the right theory of the syntax and semantics of questions.  Congratulations, Seth!!

Claire Halpert is at Yale this week, presenting a paper on South African Kwaito music at the conference Language in African Performing and Visual Arts.

Jillian Mills successfully defended her master’s thesis, ‘Non-specific objects in the pseudopassive’, on September 3. The thesis investigates the properties of nominal phrases when they appear in the direct object position of English pseudopassive sentences. It is argued that due to the particular syntax of pseudopassives, these nominals are restricted to being D(eterminer)-less NPs, which in turn correlates with their non-specific interpretation, as well as other peculiarities of their syntax and semantics. The committee was Michel DeGraff, Kai von Fintel, and Norvin Richards.

Hyesun Cho is speaking at TIE (Tone and Intonation in Europe) 3, held September 15-17 at the University of Lisbon. Hyesun’s paper is entitled ‘Effects of speech rate on segmental anchoring: A model of F0 timing as a function of slope and alignment targets’.

Jessica Coon is spending the fall semester in Chiapas, Mexico, continuing her work on Chol (Mayan) with support from an NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant. Jessica and her husband are living in San Cristóbal de las Casas, where she is a visiting scholar at CIESAS-Sureste, a Mexican language and culture research institution. CIESAS offers a master’s degree in Mesoamerian Linguistics, which is designed to train native speakers to document and analyze their languages. Currently the program includes speakers of Chol, Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Zapotec, Zoque, and Nahuatl. Jessica will be helping out in the morphosyntax class during the week, and will spend most weekends in a Chol-speaking village, collecting data. She sends saludos to the department, and looks forward to seeing everyone in the spring.

Jonah Katz successfully defended his generals paper, “Romance and Restriction”, on Thursday. The paper concerns the descriptive dichotomy between ‘restrictive’ and ‘non-restrictive’ adjectives, in particular the way these properties interact with word order in Romance languages. The committee was Edward Flemming, Norvin Richards, and chair Kai von Fintel.

This Tuesday (4/15), Omer Preminger is off to give a talk at the CUNY Syntax Supper, on the topic of “Breaking Agreements: Distinguishing Agreement and Clitic-Doubling by Their Failures”

Congratulations to Sophia Tapio for successful completion of her MA thesis, The Effects of Frequency and Composition on Production Duration in Morphological Processing.

Gillian Gallagher will present at ConSOLE XVI (Conference of the Student Organization of Linguistics in Europe) in Paris January 10. She’s presenting joint work with Jessica Coon, entitled “Identity and Consonant Harmony in Chol (Mayan).”