Linguistics Notes

The department newsletter of the Department of Linguistics at UCLA

Volume 5 (2004-5, prepared July 2005)

Contents of this issue:

Jobs for our grad students Peter Ladefoged’s 80th birthday: September 17, 2005     Ryskamp Fellowship for Philippe Schlenker Conferences at UCLA 2004-2005 Seven Dissertation Year Fellowship Winners Booth in the Infant Lab Lenart Fellowship for Dimitrio Ntelithios Ladefoged appointed Leverhulme Professor Visitors in Mathematical Linguistics Forthcoming Keenan Talks Tuebingen Talks Deo Ngonyani Promoted UCLA at LASSO Serrano Language Revitalization Project (Marcus Smith) Commencement

Colin Wilson holds forth on computational phonotactics.

Jobs for our students

Our graduate students and former graduate students had a good year on the job front during 2004-2005.

• Tim Arbisi-Kelm (Ph.D. in progress) will begin a postdoctoral fellowship next Fall in the Department of Communication Disorders at the University of Wisconsin.
• Leston Buell (Ph.D. in progress) will begin a postdoctoral fellowship next Fall at the Leiden Centre for Linguistics.
• Taehong Cho (Ph.D. 2001), after several years on the research staff of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, has taken a tenure track position at Hanyang University in Seoul.
• Heidi Fleischhacker (Ph.D. in progress) is a Conflicts Researcher in the Los Angeles offices of Paul Hastings Janofsky and Walker
• John Foreman (Ph.D. in progress) has accepted a tenure-track offer from Utica College.
• Jill Gilkerson (Ph.D. in progress) has accepted a linguistics position at Infoture, Inc., in Boulder, Colorado
• Ying Lin (Ph.D. 2005) has accepted a tenure-track offer from the University of Arizona
• Alex MacBride (Ph.D. 2005) is employed at Google in their Santa Monica offices, with the job title, Linguist.
• Deogratias Ngonyani (Ph.D. 1996) has been promoted to tenure at Michigan State University.
• Jason Riggle (Ph.D. 2004) has accepted a tenure track offer from the University of Chicago
• Marcus Smith (Ph.D. in progress) has accepted a position with the San Manuel tribe as the head linguist for their Serrano language revitalization program.
• Mariame Sy (Ph.D. in progress) has accepted a teaching position in Wolof and Fula at Columbia University
• Harold Torrence (Ph.D. in progress) has accepted a tenure-track offer from the University of Kansas

Congratulations to Leston, Heidi, John, Jill, Ying, Alex, Jason, Mariame, and Harold! 

Professor Emeritus Peter Ladefoged will turn 80 in the Fall, and in recognition the Acoustical Society of America will host a special session at its October 2005 meeting. The session is entitled “Phonetic linguistics: Honoring the contributions of Peter Ladefoged” and is described as “In honor of Peter Ladefoged's 80th birthday and his 50 years of research in linguistic phonetic aspects of speech communication”. The session will include invited talks and contributed posters describing how Peter’s work has influenced others in the field. Peter himself will attend the conference from the University of Edinburgh, his alma mater, where he will be teaching that term.

Peter was awarded the Silver Medal of the Acoustical Society in 1994. His 60th birthday in 1985 was marked by publication of a book edited by Vicki Fromkin, his first PhD student (Phonetic Linguistics: Essays in Honor of Peter Ladefoged, Academic Press).

Ryskamp Fellowship for Philippe Schlenker

Philippe Schlenker won a prestigious Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.

Conferences at UCLA 2004-2005

During the past academic year, the UCLA Linguistics hosted two prestigious international conferences in linguistics:

• The 12th meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association
• The 15th Semantics and Linguistic Theory conference (SALT)

Department members worked very hard to make both conferences a success.

Here is a snapshot taken of the participants in AFLA:

Seven Dissertation Year Fellowship Winners

During the Spring 2005 competition, seven of our graduate students--an unusually high number--won Dissertation Year Fellowships from the UCLA Graduate Division.

Booth in the Infant Lab

The Linguistics Department's Infant Lab in  Dodd Hall now has a custom-made booth for studies in infant speech perception, thanks to the efforts of graduate student Lauren Varner and Prof. Colin Wilson.  The booth is modeled on that used by the late Peter Jusczyk of Johns Hopkins University, a pioneer in this area.

Lenart Fellowship for Dimitrio Ntelithios

Dimitrios Ntelitheos has won a Lenart travel fellowship to conduct dissertation research in Madagascar this summer. This highly competitive research travel fellowship is generously provided for by Mrs. Harry Lenart.

Ladefoged appointed Leverhulme Professor

Peter Ladefoged has been appointed a Leverhulme Professor at Edinburgh University for the Fall semester, 2005.

Visitors in Mathematical Linguistics

Our Mathematical Linguistics group had two finishing grad student visitors this year: Thomas Holder from Berlin, who has been working on the Bare Grammar work that Ed Keenan and Ed Stabler did (CSLI monograph 2003) and Denis Bonnay, from Paris, who is doing a PhD in Logic there. Both Thomas and Denis were here for about three weeks and met with various of our faculty, including Ed Keenan, Philippe Schenker, Ed Stabler, Marcus Kracht as well as, in Denis’ case, Joseph Almog in Philosophy and Yiannis Moschovakis in Math.

Forthcoming Keenan Talks

Ed Keenan has been invited to address the Amsterdam Colloquium next December. It is perhaps the major international semantics colloquium, held every two years.  Ed has also been invited to give a Marschak Colloquium at UCLA (November 18), and to address the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association, which meets in Taipei this coming March.

Tuebingen Talks

Our Mathematical Linguistics faculty, Ed Keenan, Ed Stabler and Marcus Kracht, all gave talks (independently) at a conference in Germany organized by Tuebingen University and entitled ‘The Formal Description of Natural Languages’.

UCLA at LASSO

Special Session on Expressing Location in Zapotec

Brook Lillehaugen is co-organizing a special session on Expressing Location in Zapotec with Aaron Huey Sonnenschein (Cal State Northridge), which will be held at LASSO 2005 in Lubbock Texas. At this special session she will also be presenting a paper entitled “Multifacted Lohoh: The Meanings of Lohoh ‘Face’ in Colonial Valley Zapotec” which analyzes the broad range of meanings of this morpheme, from metaphoric component part (the face of a house), to locative (in front of), to dative.

Serrano Language Revitalization Project

Marcus Smith has accepted a position with the San Manuel tribe as the head linguist for their Serrano language revitalization program. The program has already started teaching children common words and expressions. The next step is to produce a grammar and dictionary that can be used in classroom instruction.

Spring Commencement

Our undergraduate student Hannah Kim accepts flowers and congratulations at the Spring 2005 commencement.  11 Linguistics faculty attended the ceremony.  Thanks to Pam Munro for the photo.

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