News and Events in the Department of Linguistics

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Cornell at LabPhon

Several of the Ph2 gang will be heading to Stuttgart for LabPhon 13 in July:

There will be a talk by:
Sam Tilsen: Articulatory gestures are individually selected in production

And posters by:
Christina Bjorndahl: The phonology and phonetics of ambiguity: a case study of /v/
Becky Butler: Intrusive schwa in Khmer
Peggy Renwick: Phonological effects on vowel coarticulation and variablity

A quick glance at the program link also reveals that Ioana Chitoran (Ph.D. 1997) is among the "confirmed speakers and commentators"!

News from the Interface Lab.

Becky Butler to present at CLS 48

Becky Butler will be presenting at the 48th meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, which is being held April 19-21. The title of her talk is A Gestural Account of Minor Syllables: Evidence from Khmer.

Becky will not be a lonely Cornellian in Chicago. Adam Albright, BA '96 is one of the invited speakers.

Congratulations to Dr. Renwick!

Peggy Renwick's thesis Vowels of Romanian: Historical, Phonological and Phonetic Studies has been approved! She is now officially Dr. Renwick, not to be confused with Renwick Dr.

For her next gig, Dr. Peggy has accepted as position as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Phonetics Lab at the University of Oxford, where she I'll be working with Professor John Coleman and Dr. Rosalind Temple on the Word Joins project, studying the phonetics of consonants in portions of the British
National Corpus.

Best wishes to Dr. Renwick!

Congratulations...

Cornellians at 25th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing.

Christina Bjorndahl presents at CUNY Phonology Forum.

Chung-Shieh "Ken" Shan to give invited talk at the 18th Amsterdam Colloquium

Marisa Boston takes job at Nuance Communications

Our recent PhD Marisa Boston has just landed a new job as a Senior Research Engineer at Nuance Communications Inc. Her project aims to give IBM's "Watson" system a knowledge of English syntax, with the goal of developing a clinical decision support system to aid the diagnosis and treatment of patients in medical settings.

Congratulations, Marisa!

Cornell University Doctoral/Postdoctoral Diversity Fellowship

Michael Weiss in California

Michael Weiss will be the keynote speaker at the UCLA Indo-European conference on October 28th. He will then head to the UC Berkeley Department of Linguistics, for a talk on Halloween. His title in both places is "Italo-Celtica: Linguistic and Cultural Points of Contact Between Italic and Celtic". He tells me that he will not be performing in costume, but he is revivifying a dead idea.

Welcome to Kenneth Ko!

Please join me in extending a warm welcome to Kenneth Ko, born to Jiwon and Seongyeon on September 22 at 11:21 PM at Cayuga Medical Center in Ithaca. My sources tell me that Kenneth weighed 7 lbs. 10 oz. (3.46 kg. for the metrically inclined) and was 19.75 inches long (50.17 cm.).

You will have to judge for yourselves whether he shows any aptitude for Mongolian wrestling.

Adam Cooper and Marisa Boston pass B-exams

Fortunately, September is bringing us more than just rain. On September 2nd, Adam Cooper successfully defended his dissertation Aspects of Indo-European Syllable Structure. Marisa Boston likewise defended her thesis, A Computational Model of Cognitive Constraints in Syntactic Locality on September 9th.

Congratulations to Adam and Marisa!

News from Effi Georgala

Effi Georgala writes from Chexbres, Switzerland, a place of stunning views and superb chocolate. The idyllic setting also seems rather conducive to linguistics, specifically dissertation-writing. Effi returned to Ithaca in July to defend her dissertation: Applicatives in their structural and thematic function: A minimalist account of multitransitivity.

At the beginning of September, she will start a postdoc at the Linguistics Department at the University of Geneva. Along with many fine linguists, chocolate and mountain vistas are also readily available there.

Welcome to new faculty and visitors!

We have two visiting faculty joining us this fall. Chung-chieh "Ken" Shan is joining the department as Visiting Assistant Professor this semester. Ken's most recent papers (from 2010) are "The character of quotation" (in Linguistics & Philosophy), "Fun with type functions", "Generating quantifiers and negation to explain homework testing", "The case for JavaScript transactions", and "Principles of interdimensional meaning interaction" (this last in SALT). Ken is here for the fall semester.

Our second visitor is Miloje Despić, a Mellon post-doctoral fellow who will be with us for two years. Miloje recently finished his dissertation Syntax in the Absence of Determiner Phrase at the University of Connecticut. This fall he will be co-teaching a seminar on syntax with your news editor (a.k.a. the DGS) on cross-linguistic variation in the syntax and semantics of functional categories in the nominal domain.

Finally, we have a new phonetician, Sam Tilsen. Sam comes to us from USC, where he was a post-doctoral fellow. He did his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley (2009), but he is originally from Minnesota, so the Ithaca winters should pose no challenges for him. He will be teaching courses in both phonetics and phonology, and will be a lively presence in the PLab.

You can meet Ken, Miloje, and Sam at the Department Luncheon on Monday the 22nd at 12:30. There will be plenty of food as well.

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