Category: Student News

Jason Ostrove travelled to the University of Kansas at the end of the week to present a paper at ACAL 2014, the 45th Annual Conference on African Linguistics. Jason’s paper (whose title was The Extended vP Domain in a Songhay Language) centered on word order variation in transitive clauses in Songhay (the topic of his recent S-circle presentation). Among the other speakers at ACAL was alumna Ruth Kramer, who gave one of the plenary talks.

We are happy to be able to announce that Mark Norris has been offered and has accepted a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Linguistic at the University of Oklahoma. At Oklahama, Mark will join alumnus Dylan Herrick who has been at Oklahoma since 2006.

We are also very happy to be able to announce that graduate student Nick Kalivoda has won an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Nick’s project centers on loanword adaptation in the Zapotec of Teotitlán del Valle and grows out of his long-term collaboration with undergraduate Teresa Martinez, who is a native speaker of the language. Nick’s fellowship is one of just ten awarded by the Foundation in the field of Linguistics this year.

Graduate student Brianna Kaufman meanwhile did not have to travel to the northeast to achieve celebrity. She was featured in the Santa Cruz Sentinel in its edition of March 31st, as she cycled to campus up Coolidge Drive, running just ahead of the showers that were finally expected that day.

We are very happy to be able to report that Boris Harizanov has been offered and has formally accepted a tenure-track position in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University. Boris will take up his new position in the coming academic year and he will join fellow alums Chris Potts and Vera Gribanova on the Stanford faculty.

The quarter finally ended and LASC 2014, the department’s annual celebration of graduate student research, took place. The pictures are here (courtesy of Oliver Northrup). Karl DeVries, Clara Sherley-Appel, Brianna Kaufman, Erik Zyman, Karen Duek, Anna Greenwood, Nick Kalivoda, along with guest speaker Ruth Kramer of Georgetown University delivered papers on an impressively wide range of topics in current linguistics—real-time processing of agreement, sublexical coordination, the acquisition of unproductive morphological processes, the typology of degree constructions, polysemy and reference, phonological acquisition, loanword adaptation, and the morphosyntax of gender—all under the watchful eye of LASC Czarina Sandy Chung. A party of considerable proportions ensued at the midtown home of Sandy and Jim McCloskey.