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Students, staff and faculty members who exceeded their job responsibilities to enhance the atmosphere for women at Cornell were recognized at the 20th Cook Awards luncheon March 12 in Warren Hall. Colleagues, family and academic leaders including deans, vice provosts, President Martha E. Pollack and Provost Michael Kotlikoff attended the...
Our faculty and grad students continue to impress with research and publications.GrantsSarah Murray, NSF, Documentation and Analysis of Discourse in Cheyenne, a Native American languageSarah Murray, Miloje Despic, and Carol-Rose Little, NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Award, Investigating Overt Definite Articles and Grammatical Variation...
Composed by specially trained practitioners (often university-trained scholars) and couched in elaborate Chinese-style parallel prose, ganmon were read out loud at religious services (primarily Buddhist in orientation, although there are ganmon addressing non-Buddhist deities).Columbia University's Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture will be...
Organized by John Whitman, Department of Linguistics, Cornell University and Sungdai Cho, Director of the Center for Korean Studies and Asian Studies at SUNY-Binghamton, this workshop brings together a group of leading scholars to discuss the place of the Korean language in the Northeast Asian linguistic area. The workshop will take place October...
Correction: The Sun previously reported that George Zimmerman is a police officer, when in fact he was a neighborhood watch volunteer. The Sun also incorrectly stated Zimmerman’s race. American courts, police forces, job search processes and standardized education systems all discriminate against speakers of Black Vernacular English, a Stanford...
Cornell’s South Asia Program (SAP) and Southeast Asia Program (SEAP), both part of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, have been awarded more than $3.9 million in Title VI grants under the federal National Resource Centers and Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships programs.The four-year grants, administered by the U.S....
A.D. White Professor-at-Large John Rickford (J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Linguistics and the Humanities, Stanford University) is visiting Cornell from September 17-21 as part of his residency in the A.D. White Professors-at-Large Program. The Cornell Chronicle provides details of his visit at http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2018/09/ad-white...
The Department of Linguistics at Cornell spans most of the major theoretical subfields of linguistics, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, computational linguistics, historical linguistics and language documentation. Our central research goal is the enhancement of our understanding of the cognitive mechanisms for...
Professor Despic was selected by the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly as one of the recipients of its annual Teaching, Advising, and Mentorship Awards. His students remarked that "Prof. Despic is not only an exemplary linguist, but he has showsn others what it means to do linguistics." Other award recipients include Professor Paulette...
Professor Abby Cohn is one of four Cornell faculty members to receive this year's Kendall S. Carpenter Memorial Advising Award. Read the full story at http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2018/06/carpenter-advising-awards-presented-four-faculty-members.
Linguistics major, Jose Armando Fernandez Guerrero, is one of 6 Cornell Mellon Mays Fellows starting a graduate program this fall.Read more at http://as.cornell.edu/news/mellon-mays-fellows-score-grad-school-admissions.
Mats Rooth and Pedro Rabelo Erber (Luso-Brazilian studies) received a small grant from the Institute for Social Sciences to bring a native speaker of the endangered language of Bororo, the last living language of a family of languages known as Bororoan. Read more at http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2018/04/small-grants-fire-new-research-social-...
Professor Molly Diesing has been appointed to serve on the ad-hoc committee charged with planning the observance of the Society's Centennial celebration in 2024.Read more at https://www.linguisticsociety.org/news/2018/02/13/centennial-planning-committee-appointed.
Mary Moroney spent winter break in Chiang Mai, Thailand collecting data on the Shan language for her dissertation. This research was made possible through a Research Travel Grant from the Graduate School.The Shan language is a Tai language spoken in Myanmar and surrounding countries. Mary’s research focuses on investigating definiteness and...
Fall 2017 brought a new wave of conferences, with our graduate students representing Cornell Linguistics.Carol-Rose Little attended the Twelfth International Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation, held in Lagodekhi, Georgia in September, presenting “Cardinal/ordinal meaning ambiguities in possessed numeral constructions in Ch'ol.”...
John Hale, Jixing Li, and Shohini Bhattasali recently presented their research at the 9th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language held in Baltimore, Maryland. As part of the invited symposium "Computational and quantitative methods in understanding the neurobiology of language," John Hale presented a talk titled "Word-by-...
Okki Kurniawan, a Linguistics PhD student, recently authored an article for the Southeast Asia Program Graduate Spotlight. The article, "The Language of Jakarta: Past and Present," focuses on his research with cross-generational language transmission in Jakarta Indonesian. Check out the full article on the SEAP website.
Cornell’s Southeast Asia Program (SEAP) and Cornell Institute for European Studies (CIES) welcomed new faculty leadership this fall.In her first weeks on the job, Abby Cohn – linguistics professor and new SEAP director – hit the ground running. Working with language instructors in the Department of Asian Studies, she organized and hosted the...
The summer began with a group of Cornellians heading to Thailand for the Chulalongkorn International Student Symposium on Southeast Asian Linguistics. Presenters included:Mary Moroney - "Internally-headed relative clauses in Shan" Sireemas Maspong - "Length contrast in Sukhothai vowel System" Lingzi Zhuang - "Unifying lexical aspect and...
The semantics of understudied indigenous languages is a small, but growing field. Still, however, little work has been done on the semantic and syntactic patterns of so-called exclusive operators (words and morphemes behaving like “just” and “only”) in these languages.Mia Wiegand and Carol-Rose Little, both doctoral candidates in linguistics, are...
“Korean is what we call a link language,” says John B. Whitman, Linguistics. “It has things in common with all the neighboring languages of the area, as if it’s a sort of middleman between them. We can’t say what modern language Korea is related to in the sense of being descended from the same common ancestor. But we can show it’s unique in that...
Hao Yi recently graduated with a Ph.D. in Linguistics. His dissertation is titled “Lexical Tone Gestures,” in which he explored the lexical f0 control in Mandarin within the framework of Articulatory Phonology. He worked closely with Professor Sam Tilsen, Abby Cohn, and Draga Zec. Hao was an active member of Cornell Phonetics Lab and served on the...
Say these words to yourself:Creek.Roof.Route.Whether you said “crick” or “creek,” “ruf” or “roof,” or “rowt” or “root,” says a lot about where you are from. And the chance that your neighbor may say those words differently says a lot about Lansing and Tompkins County.“There are a lot of things going on that we are not conscious of,” said John...
Five Linguistics' seniors gave presentations of their Honors Theses research on May 9th to an audience of faculty and students. For their outstanding research, two seniors were awarded Magna Cum Laude honors, and three were awarded Summa Cum Laude honors.Their presentations were as follows:Christian Brickhouse (Summa Cum Laude) - Concurring in...
