NEWS FROM THE COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS
SPOTLIGHT ON PEOPLE
BETH HUME At the end of the month Beth Hume is resigning after five years of service as our chair and moving on to a new position at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. How long have you been at OSU? I came to OSU in 1991 from Cornell, where I was finishing grad school. I had two years of postdoc funding from the Social Sciences Research Council of Canada which I was planning to take to work with faculty at another university. When I was offered the position at OSU, then-chair, Brian Joseph, was able to put off my faculty appointment for a year or two so that I could do the postdoc. He also cleverly convinced me to bring my postdoc money to OSU. I only ended up doing one year of a postdoc since I was afraid OSU might change their mind if I waited too long! What were some highlights of your time here? Can you share a particular story or event that stands out? I remember when I first came to OSU and graduate students would come to my office (#223, where the sociolab now is) to talk about their research. It seemed so strange since I still felt like a graduate student myself! When I think about what I knew about linguistics and academia when I finished grad school compared to what I know now (and know I don’t know!), I can see how much I’ve learned and grown in my 20 years at OSU. I’m so grateful to have been able to be in a department where so many areas of linguistics are studied, and that has such a richness of perspectives and methodological approaches (theoretical, experimental, computational). I can’t think of a better place to have grown up academically. While my training before coming to OSU touched upon each of these methodologies, it has been by learning from the students and faculty at OSU that I’ve been able figure out what I believe the “big picture” is and how we can make sense of it using all the tools at our disposal. Some highlights: •
Discussing research problems with brilliant graduate students.
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Learning from very smart colleagues.
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Having such a fun and dedicated staff to work with.
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Co-teaching seminars on interesting problems.
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Making chocolates at my house with folks from the department.
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Christmas lunch at the Blackwell with the folks in 222.
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Sammy greeting folks in the main office.
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What do you think you’ll miss most about Columbus and OSU? The people of course! You’ve changed the program in many ways for the positive. Could you describe your influence on the program? Whether or not I›ve had a positive influence on the program isn›t really for me to judge, but I can at least tell you some of the things that I was trying to achieve during my 5+ years as department chair and, before that, (4 years?) as director of the undergraduate program. One was to expand our undergraduate course offerings in order to increase undergraduates› awareness about linguistics, to make linguistics more visible to the higher administration, and to give the department a stronger enrollment base. Another goal I had was to encourage interactions among the huge number of faculty and students at OSU who do research on language, and to improve relations between Linguistics and other programs. This was the motivation for creating the Buckeye Language Network and some other initiatives that we›ve been a part of. Another objective was to draw the administration›s attention to the fact that we have definitely outgrown Oxley Hall and need a facility that will accommodate our needs. I also hoped to make the department as smooth-running and supportive as possible from an administrative perspective so that faculty, students and scholars could spend as much of their time as possible doing research, teaching and other things the love to do. Finally, I›ve tried to foster a sense of community. This is why one of my first official acts as chair was to create a lounge where we could have Cinq à Septs, etc. (not to mention it gives me an excuse to get away from my desk and share a glass of wine with department members!) What would you like us to remember most about you? My email address, so that you can keep in touch. What do you hope to accomplish in NZ? I’m really hungry to get back to doing more research and to get my hands even dirtier testing hypotheses, collecting and analyzing data!
We wish Beth the best in New Zealand, and look forward to working with our new chair, Shari Speer.
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SPOTLIGHT ON:
LINGUISTICS COMPUTING The Linguistics Department maintains various computing resources for the use of the students and faculty in the department. The Aquarium, our Linguistics computer lab, consists of 9 computers. Each of these machines can run any of three operating systems. Our students use these for everything from doing analysis to checking email, and it also serves as a gathering place for students from every subfield. For students needing more computing power, the department maintains two public compute servers, which are currently available to run tasks. These servers have more
processing power and memory for more intensive jobs. In coming months, Jim Harmon and Jon Dehdari intend to aggregate our current servers- both the public servers, and other department and faculty-maintained machines- into a Hadoop cluster, which will allow the servers to be used in a more efficient way. Once it is up and running, it should allow more tasks to be run faster on our current machines.
IN RECOGNITION Congratulations to faculty member Peter Culicover, who was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Congratulations to faculty member Mary Beckman, who won a Harlan Hatcher Arts and Sciences Distinguished Faculty Award.
Peter Culicover was also awarded this year’s Linguistics Chair’s Teaching Award!
Graduate student DJ Hovermale (pictured right) was awarded the university’s GA Teaching Award.
Undergraduate Christina Witt (pictured below) participated in the Denman Undergraduate Research Forum in May.
Graduate student Deborah Morton has been awarded a $4,500 International Affairs Graduate Student Grant to carry out fieldwork in the fall on Anii in Africa. Congratulations to faculty member Cynthia Clopper, who was awarded a five-year NSF CAREER grant for her research project: “Representations of phonetic reduction and dialect variation in speech production and perception”. Graduate student Marivic Lesho was awarded both a Fulbright-Hays fellowship for
advanced language training in Filipino, and an NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant.
Faculty member Brian Joseph was awarded the OSU Founder’s Award for teaching excellence. Graduate student Kodi Weatherholtz has been awarded a three-year National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) Fellowship.
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Congratulations to graduate student Murat Yasavul, who was awarded an Arts and Humanities Graduate Research Small Grant to help fund his dissertation research in Guatemala.
Congratulations to Jungmee Lee and Anastasia Smirnova, who graduated in spring quarter, and Steve Boxwell, Adriane Boyd, DJ Hovermale and Christin Wilson who are graduating this quarter.
Graduate student Katie Carmichael won fourth place in the Best Student Paper competition at NWAV this year for her paper “’Up the Bayou-Down the Bayou Syndrome’: Patterning of Cajun French substrate features in the performance of Boudreaux and Thibodeaux jokes.” Congrats to undergraduate Lark Hovey, who has graduated and is now attending graduate school at Ohio University. Lark worked in the office for several years, and we wish her well.
GRAD STUDENT PRESENTATIONS AND PUBLICATIONS Steve Boxwell and Dennis Mehay presented SRL for CCG without Treebanks? at the International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP) 2011 in Chiang Mai, Thailand. S Boxwell, C Brew, J Baldridge, D Mehay, and S Ravi. Katie Carmichael presented Living on the Hilltop: Oppositional identities and The Construction of Place in an Urban Community as part of a panel on linguistic expression of place identity at the American Anthropological Association’s 110th Annual Meeting in Montréal, Québec, Canada. Katie Carmichael also presented Language and Place: Social Perception of Regional American English and Up The Bayou-Down The Bayou Syndrome: Patterning of Cajun French Substrate Features in The Performance of Boudreaux and Thibodeaux Jokes at New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 40 in Washington, DC.
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Jon Dehdari, with Lamia Tounsi and Josef van Genabith, published Morphological Features for Parsing Morphologically-rich Languages: A Case of Arabic. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Statistical Parsing of Morphologically Rich Languages, 12-21, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics. Marivic Lesho and Eeva Sippola presented The Sociolinguistic situations of The Manila Bay Chabacano-Speaking Communities, at Associação para o estudo dos Crioulos com Base Lexical Portuguesa e Espanhola in Porto, Portugal. Scott Martin and faculty member Carl Pollard published “Hyperintensional dynamic semantics: Analyzing definiteness with enriched contexts” in Proceedings of the 15th Conference on Formal Grammar, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Scott Martin also presented Weak Familiarity and Anaphoric
Accessibility in Dynamic Semantics at ESSLLI in Ljubljana and Creating Disjunctive Logical Forms From Aligned Sentences for Grammar-Based Paraphrase Generation (with faculty member Mike White) at ACL in Portland, Oregon. Liela Rotschy and Kurt Queller presented Subjectification Via Metanalysis: The American Vernacular Personal ative Construction at the Societas Linguistica Europaea Annual Meeting in Logroño, Spain. Liela Rotschy and Michael O’Rourke presented Against Speaker Intention at the University of Idaho/Washington State University Philosophy Colloquium in Moscow, Idaho, the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division Conference in Washington D.C., and the ILCLI International Workshop on Semantics, Pragmatics, and Rhetoric in Donostia, Spain. {Continued on the next page.}
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GRAD STUDENT PRESENTATIONS AND PUBLICATIONS {Continued} Brice Russ presented at the Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics (GURT) in March 2011 on Examining Regional Variation Through Twitter. Rory Turnbull, Magnus Pharao Hansen and Ditte Boeg Thomsen presented “From academic salvage linguistics to community-based documentation in only three weeks: Report from a collective and interdisciplinary fieldwork on Acazulco Otomí” at the 2nd International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Rory Turnbull also presented Towards An Understanding of Acazulco Otomi Phonology: Phonetic Evidence at The Ohio State University Congress on Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics (OSU CHiLL).
Kodi Weatherholtz presented Socially-motivated garden pathing: When social expectations influence sentence comprehension at Variation and Language Processing 2011: From Pragmatics to Sound Change in Chester, UK.
Rory Turnbull and faculty member Beth Hume presented Redundancy in Sound Systems at the Workshop on Information-Theoretic Linguistics at the 2011 Linguistic Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and Empirical Assessment of an InformationTheoretic Approach to Nasal Place Assimilation (with post-doc researcher Rebecca Morley) at MidPhon 17 in Champaign-Urbana.
FACULTY PUBLICATIONS BECKMAN CULICOVER Edwards, J., Munson, B., & Beckman, M. E. (2011). Lexicon-phonology relationships and dynamics of early • Culicover, Peter W. Core and Periphery. The language development — A commentary on StoelCambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences. Gammon’s (invited encyclopedia entry). 2011. ‘Relationships between lexical and phonological development in young children’. Journal of Child HUME Language, 38(1): 35-40. • Okalidou, A., Syrika, A., Beckman, M. E., & Edwards, • Van Oostendorp, Marc, Colin Ewen, Elizabeth Hume J. (2011). Adapting a receptive vocabulary test for and Keren Rice. (2011). Companion to Phonology (5 preschool-aged Greek-speaking children. International volumes). Blackwell Publishing. Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, • Hume, Elizabeth. (2011). Markedness. In M. van 46(1): 95-107 Oostendorp, C. Ewen, E. Hume and K. Rice (eds.), Companion to Phonology. Blackwell Publishing. CLOPPER JOSEPH • Clopper, C. G. (2011). Checking for reliability. In M. Di Paolo & M. Yaeger-Dror (Eds.), Sociophonetics: A • Grammaticalization: A General Critique. To Student’s Guide (pp. 188-197). London: Routledge. appear in H. Narrog & B. Heine (eds.) Handbook of • Clopper, C. G., Hay, J., & Plichta, B. (2011). Grammaticalization. Oxford University Press (2011). Experimental speech perception and perceptual • Historical Linguistics and Sociolinguistics – Strange dialectology. In M. Di Paolo & M. Yaeger-Dror (Eds.), bedfellows or natural friends? To appear in Language Sociophonetics: A Student’s Guide (pp. 149-162). and History, Linguistics and Historiography, ed. by London: Routledge. N. Langer, S. Davies & W. Vandenbussche. (HiSoN • Clopper, C. G., & Smiljanic, R. 2011. Effects of gender Publications), 2011. and regional dialect on prosodic patterns in American English. Journal of Phonetics. Vol. 39. : 237-245. {Continued on the next page.} •
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FACULTY PUBLICATIONS {Continued} • •
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Revisiting the Origin of the Albanian 2PL Verbal Ending –ni. In Festschrift for H. Craig Melchert, 2011. On Pronoun-Personal Affix Connections: Some Light from Algonquian. To appear (2011) in L. Mikkelsen et al., eds., Representing Language: Essays in honor of Judith Aissen. Linguistic Research Center, University of California, Santa Cruz: University of California eScholarship Repository. Chapter 41: English in Contact: Greek. To appear in Historical Linguistics of English: An International Handbook (Handbook of Linguistics and Communication Science (HSK) series), Volume 1, ed. by Alexander Bergs. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2011 Children rule, or do they (as far as innovations are concerned)? Invited peer commentary on J. Meisel “Bilingual language acquisition and theories of diachronic change: Bilingualism as cause and effect of grammatical change”. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 14 (2011). Review article on O. Tomić, Balkan Sprachbund Morphosyntactic Features. Acta Slavica Iaponica 30 (2011) Lexical Diffusion and the Regular Transmission of Language Change in its Socio-Historical Context. To appear in the Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics, ed. by J.M. Hernández-Campoy. Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2011. Editorial Introduction to Kenneth E. Naylor Memorial Lecture Series, No. 6 (2011), p. ii-v, to appear. Preface. In Teaching Linguistics: Reflections on Practice, edited by Koenraad Kuiper. To appear (2011), Equinox Press. Review article of O. Fischer et al., eds., Pathways of Change; D. Ziegler, Hypothetical Modality; and R. Cacoullos, Grammaticalization, Synchronic Variation, and Language Contact. To appear in Language Sciences (2011) Review of Rolf Hesse, Syntax of the Modern Greek Verbal System. The Use of the Forms, Particularly in Combination with tha and na (2nd edition). To appear in Yearbook of Modern Greek Studies (2011).
ROBERTS •
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Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh, PA, January, 2011. “Towards a taxonomy of projective content,” with Judith Tonhauser, Mandy Simons and David Beaver. Simons, Mandy, Judith Tonhauser, David Beaver & Craige Roberts. 2011. What projects and why. In Nan Li & David Lutz (eds.), Semantics and linguistic theory (SALT) 20, 309–327. Ithaca, NY: CLC Publications.
SCHULER •
Stephen Wu, William Schuler. Structured Composition of Semantic Vectors. Proceedings of the International Workshop on Computational Semantics (IWCS’11), Oxford, UK, Jan 2011.
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Ito, K. & Speer, S. R. (2011). Semantically-independent but contextually-dependent interpretation of contrastive accent. In Sonia Frota, Pilar Prieto and Gorka Elordieta, Eds., Prosodic categories: production, perception and comprehension. Chicago: Springer.
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Yusuke Kubota, Jungmee Lee, Anastasia Smirnova and Judith Tonhauser (2011), “Cross-linguistic variation in temporal adjunct clauses”, to appear in Cahier Chronos: Selected Proceedings of Chronos 8, Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi: pp. 135-155. Mandy Simons, Judith Tonhauser, David Beaver and Craige Roberts (2011). “What projects and why?”, in Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 20, 309-327, Ithaca, NY: CLC Publications. Cynthia G. Clopper and Judith Tonhauser (2011). “On the prosodic coding of focus in Paraguayan Guaraní” , in Proceedings of the 28th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 249- 257, Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
LEVINE •
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2011. SGF coordination in English: light vs. heavy stylistic inversion and the status of pro. In Representating Language, electronic volume published by The University of California/UC Santa Cruz Linguistics Research Center.
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ALUMNI UPDATES
Peggy Wong (’06) organized a mini OSU reunion at ICPhS in Hong Kong this summer!
From L->R, back row: Janice Fon (’02), Pauline Welby (’03), Kiyoko Yoneyama (’02), Jeff Holliday (current grad student), Ho-hsien Pan (’90), Mira Oh (’90) Middle row: Allison Blodgett (’04), Peggy Wong, Mary Beckman, EunJong Kong (’09) Front: Sun-Ah Jun (’93)
Peggy Wong (’06) welcomed her third child, Karis, on July 12.
Helena Riha (’08) and her husband Stephen welcomed their first child, Nate this summer!
WELCOME 2011 GRADUATE STUDENTS!
Anton Rytting (’07) and his wife Megan announced the arrival of their newest daughter, Katherine Anne in May.
From left to right: Daniel Miles, Marten Van Schijndel, Liela Rotschy, Qingyang Yan, and Manjuan Duan
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UPCOMING EVENTS FRIDAY, JANUARY 13, 2012: Martin Luther King Day Symposium THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 2012: Semantics Workshop on Vagueness FRIDAY, APRIL 27, 2012: Annual Kenneth E Naylor Memorial Lecture See the Department Calendar (ling. ohio-state.edu/calendar/) for more information! In the Spring, Penny Eckert was invited as the Underlings’ annual speaker. Here, she poses with undergraduates Kenny Hensley, Kristen Scudieri, and Jennifer Boguski.
PAST NEWS AND EVENTS In June, the staff and their families enjoyed their annual picnic at chair Beth Hume’s home. In the Spring, Penny Eckert was invited as the Underlings’ annual speaker.
Grad students Katie Carmichael, Rachel Steindel and Mike Phelan enjoyed the Circleville Pumpkin Festival this year.
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PLEASE SUPPORT THE DEPARTMENT! Your support of the Department means a lot to us. Please consider donating through OSU’s iGive program. We have set up two funds for that purpose: LINGUISTICS DISCRETIONARY FUND A fund for enriching research, teaching and other opportunities for members of the OSU linguistics community (faculty, students, alumni). Donations to this fund will be used to support visiting scholars, invite speakers, support activities that recognize excellence in teaching, research and service, host conferences/ workshops at OSU and elsewhere, and other such activities. DISTINGUISHED LINGUISTICS PROFESSORSHIP FUND A fund to provide compensation and academic support for a faculty member in the Linguistics Department. The fund will become endowed when it reaches $25,000.00. The endowment fund will be invested by the University with the income used to provide support for, in this case, a prestigious faculty position in Linguistics. Visit giveto.osu.edu for more information.
For questions, comments, or to send newsletter items, please contact the newsletter editor Julia Papke, papke.5@osu.edu or 247-5322.
linguistics.osu.edu DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS 222 Oxley Hall 1712 Neil Avenue Columbus, OH 43210