Linguistics at Indiana University

Fall 1998

In this issue:
Short Notices
Ph.D. Degrees Awarded / Ph.D. Defenses
Degrees Awarded
Faculty Notes
Student Notes
Alumni News

This newsletter is published each fall by the Department of Linguistics, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405 (e-mail: lingdept@indiana.edu; telephone: 812-855-6456). Edited and produced by Liz Peterson with assistance from Damon Stewart, Steven Franks, Ann Baker, Marilyn Estep, Dan Dinnsen, and Stuart Davis. Transferred to HTML by Mikael Thompson.



Franks Appointed New Linguistics Department Chair

Dean Morton Lowengrub of the College of Arts and Sciences appointed Associate Professor Steven Franks to a three-year term as chair of the Linguistics Department in August. Franks replaces Professor Paul Newman, who served as chair from 1992-1998 (and will be on sabbatical this spring).
Franks, who began teaching at Indiana University in 1987 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1994, received a Ph.D. in Linguistics in 1985 from Cornell University. He currently holds a joint appointment with Slavic Languages and Literatures, is a member of the Cognitive Science faculty and the Russian and East European Institute, and is an adjunct faculty member of Speech and Hearing Sciences.

Steven Franks

Franks' primary research area is syntax, concentrating in the comparative morphosyntax of the Slavic languages. He has published extensively in this area, including two books, Parameters of Slavic Morphosyntax (Oxford University Press, 1995) and, with Tracy King (Xerox Parc), A Handbook of Slavic Clitics (Oxford University Press, in press). He is editor-in-chief of Journal of Slavic Linguistics, IU.
In addition to his teaching appointment at IU, Franks has served as a guest professor at the University of Connecticut (1996-97), Princeton University (1996-97), and as a Mellon Faculty Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania (1990-91). Before joining the IU faculty, he was a language analyst for the Department of Defense in Washington, D.C.


Coordinator Hired for African Languages

For the first time in the African Languages Program at IU, a full-time program coordinator will oversee program functions. Dr. Ani Hawkinson came to IU from the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont, where she had recently been promoted to Associate Professor in the Department of Language Teacher Education. She brings with her many years of experience as a language teacher educator and program administrator. She has worked in Mali, Tanzania, Morocco, Burkina Faso, Fiji, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Western Samoa, Papua New Guinea, and most recently in Japan, where she directed SIT's Master's Degree program for four years.

Ani Hawkinson

Her practical experience, her academic training in general linguistics (MA, Ph.D., UC Berkeley), Bantu linguistics (MA, University of Dar-es-Salaam), Language Teaching (MAT in French and English, SIT), and her knowledge of Swahili uniquely qualified her for the responsibilities required for the new coordinator position. Hawkinson is responsible for hiring, training, and supervising African language instructors, managing African-language materials development and distribution, designing and implementing long-term plans for program development in collaboration with the African language instructors, faculty, and administrators from the Department of Linguistics (where the program's courses are offered) and the African Studies Program. As coordinator she will oversee the Summer Cooperative African Language Institute that will be hosted by IU in 2000. Hawkinson also teaches courses in Swahili and supervises student recruitment for African language classes.
She is committed to promoting language teaching that is innovative, communicative, collaborative, and culturally appropriate. For students in the Program, new oral assessment activities have already been introduced in some of the Swahili, Twi, and Hausa classes, as well as the use of card games, and color-coded sound and word charts. In addition, student-generated conversations and stories can be listened to through special headphones (available in the language lab) on the Web for students in beginning Swahili classes. In November, the African Languages Program offered its first pan-African educational activity, when students from African language classes met and learned in traditional African methods of education.
A new system of supervision has been established for instructors in the program where instructors meet and discuss their personal teaching values and objectives, and observe and comment on the coordinator's classes prior to being observed themselves. The purpose is to find ways to work collaboratively to develop each instructor's teaching expertise in ways consistent with both the program's goal of helping students learn to interact appropriately in the languages they study, and consistent with each teacher's personal beliefs about what helps students learn. Next semester, students and instructors will collaborate in the development of a common communicative curriculum to be used as the basis for all the language classes offered in the program beginning in the fall of 1999. In addition, a new course in teaching methodology, with a special focus on the use of non-traditional approaches to foreign language teaching for the teaching of African languages, will be offered collaboratively by Hawkinson and the senior instructors in the program.


Interdisciplinary Linguistics Advisory Council Started

With a general purpose to promote the interdisciplinary atmosphere of linguistically oriented activities across the university, an Interdisciplinary Linguistics Advisory Council (ILAC) was formed recently with RUDY Professor Albert Valdman (French and Italian/Linguistics) and Linguistics Department chair Steven Franks as co-chairs. Other members are Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig (TESOL/Applied Linguistics), Jon Barwise (Philosophy/Mathematics, Cognitive Science) Chris Beckwith (Central Eurasian Studies), Clancy Clements (Spanish and Portuguese), Phil Connell (SPHS), George Fowler (Slavic Languages and Literatures), James Lee (Spanish and Portuguese), Phil LeSourd (Anthropology), David Pisoni (Psychology/Cognitive Science), Robert Port (Linguistics/Computer Science/Cognitive Science), Linda Smith (Psychology), Rex Sprouse (Germanic Studies), Natsuko Tsujimura (East Asian Languages and Cultures), Barbara Vance (FRIT), and Kathleen O'Conner (graduate student, FRIT/Linguistics).
The council hopes to stimulate communication among diverse units engaged in teaching linguistics-related courses and conducting language research. According to ILAC's statement of purpose, the organization will determine ways to promote cross-fertilization and coordinate instructional and research efforts. Some goals include to become involved in hiring activities for linguists, to promote interdisciplinary reading and study groups, to bring speakers to campus who will be of interest to multiple units, to monitor language and linguistics-oriented conference and workshop events on campus, to seek standardization of course offerings and programs to avoid duplication, to develop outreach programs to encourage undergraduate and graduate studies of language and linguistics, and to recommend new teaching and research directions for units with linguistic concerns.


Katherine Demuth receives Distinguished Alumni Award

Katherine Demuth, Associate Professor of Cognitive and Linguistic Science at Brown University and a 1983 alumna of the IU department of linguistics, was awarded the Distinguished Alumni Award from the department during her October visit to the campus. Previous recipients of the award include alumni Ken Hale, James Flege, and Dell Hymes. Professor Robert Port presented the award and various gifts to Demuth at the beginning of her presentation as the first speaker in the Linguistics Department Colloquia Series for the 1998-99 school year. During her visit, Demuth also presented a lecture to students in Professor Dan Dinnsen's seminar on phonological acquisition.

Laura Wilbur McGarrity, Demuth, Bob Port, and Karen Baertsch visit at the post-colloquium reception.

Demuth specializes in child-language acquisition and African linguistics. While completing her dissertation, she received a Fullbright-Hays Dissertation Grant to do research in Africa. She completed post-doctoral work at Berkeley. Demuth has participated in visiting positions at the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen, Netherlands; the Rank Xerox Research Institute in Grenoble, France; the University of Stuttgart, the National University of Lesotho, Stanford University, and the University of Leiden. She has received a number of research grants from the National Science Foundation, including an Andrew Mellon Grant and a Social Science Research Council grant. She serves on the Linguistics Advisory Panel for the National Science Foundation, the editorial board for the journals Syntax and Studies in African Linguistics, and she is associate editor of the Journal of Child Language.
Sponsors of Demuth's visit included Horizons of Knowledge, the Department of Linguistics, the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, the Cognitive Science Program, the NIH Training Grant on Speech, Hearing and Sensory Communication, and the IU Linguistics Club.


Students Visit LabPhon

Last July at the University of York, linguistics scholars from IU presented four out of 16 papers at the Sixth Conference on Laboratory Phonology. Professor Ken de Jong helped secure funding for several U.S. linguists to attend "Lab-Phon," one of the most important conferences in the world for laboratory phonology.
Presenting were de Jong, "Temporal Constraints and Characterizing Syllable Structure," Bushra Zawaydeh, "The Interaction of the Phonetics and Phonology of Gutterals," Keiichi Tajima and Robert Port, "Speech Rhythm in English and Japanese," and Richard Wright (Psychology) "Factors of Lexical Competition in Vowel Articulation."


Colloquium Series Continues in '98-'99

The Colloquium Series continues for another year, organized again by Professor Julie Auger. A committee consisting of Betsy McCall, Erik Levin, Damon Stewart, Masa Deguchi, and Liz Peterson assists her with arrangements for transportation and accommodation of guests, as well as the receptions that usually follow the talks. Early this year five distinguished researchers from departments all over the United States were invited to present their research on many topics. On Oct. 15, Katherine Demuth, an Indiana University alumna now at Brown University, presented a talk entitled "Understanding the shapes of children's early words." On Nov. 20, Barbara Vance of the Indiana University French and Italian Department presented "Syntax, discourse, and diachrony in French Stylistic Inversion."
On December 4, John McCarthy of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst presented a paper on his research entitled, "Sympathy, Cumulativity and the Duke of York Gambit." Next semester, the colloquia promise to be just as informative. On March 26, Lesley Milroy from the University of Michigan will present a talk entitled, "Specifying the Trajectory of Language Change: The Interaction of Gender with Other Social Categories." John Singler of New York University will be here Feb. 24-26, when he will present "Mississippi in America, Mississippi in Africa: the search for historical African American English." Chris Kennedy of Northwestern University will also a paper on his syntax research, with the date to be announced.


From the Chair

For those of you who do not know me--and I suspect there are many--I would like to use this column to say a few words about myself. I feel it very important that you have a sense of me as a person, and not just of my professional background. I hope that faculty, staff, students and alumni alike will feel comfortable coming to me to discuss problems and to suggest ideas for improvement. I see my job as chair as one which crucially involves people. My main role is to facilitate the smooth day-to-day operation of the department, and this practical goal requires invariable cooperation, frequent compromise, and occasional sacrifice. Like all of us, I want the study of language and linguistics at Indiana University to flourish, and in order to accomplish this I will need your help and input, your cooperation and support.
In the few short months since I became chair I have learned that the job brings with it many serious challenges. An effective chair must always look in two directions at once. On the one hand, the chair is appointed by the dean, not only in order to implement the College's policies, but also to provide the dean with advice about what those policies should be and about how well they are succeeding on the departmental level. On the other hand, the chair represents the department and serves as the department's chief voice with the administration. I am thus a conduit for information and a resource for conflict resolution that runs in two directions at once. This raises an obvious dilemma--where should a chair's loyalties lie, with the administration or with the department? Since, in my opinion, this dilemma is fundamentally irreconcilable, my approach is going to be to make sure that the question of loyalties is never truly put to the test, by working as hard as possible to act in both the department's interests and in those of the College. In an atmosphere where we strive for a mutually supportive rather than adversarial relationship, what is good for Indiana University should be good for the IU Linguistics Department, and vice versa.
I believe that the best way to ensure that our discipline prospers locally is to keep avenues of communication open among all friends of linguistics at IU. Linguistics is by its nature interdisciplinary; preparation for research in linguistics can (and typically should) involve training in foreign languages, mathematics, psychology, sociology, philosophy, anthropology, physics, and so on, depending on one's area(s) of specialization. Here at IU, faculty whose academic homes can be found in diverse units across campus are engaged in teaching linguistics-related courses and conducting language research.
Similarly, students pursuing degrees in other fields regularly take linguistics courses and interact with Linguistics Department faculty, just as linguistics students always take courses outside of our department. The strength of these connections with fine linguists in other departments is in my view our most valuable asset. The interdisciplinary nature of our field makes Indiana University one of the very best places in the world to study linguistics, from any perspective. Although we all have different ideas about how the study of language should be pursued, about how research should be conducted, about what questions are fundamental to ask, and about what assumptions are critical in answering them, we share certain goals. Among these, I see as most essential the education of students to reason creatively and the pursuit of knowledge about how human language works.
It seems to me that the tension which accompanies our diversity of perspectives can serve as a healthy, constructive force, compelling us to respect and take seriously alternative points of view. Problems do not come labeled with the kinds of solutions they require. As a syntactician, oriented towards seeking formal, structural accounts of why elements combine in the ways they do, I am nonetheless ready to admit phonological, semantic, and functional explanations for phenomena that otherwise elude me. And I believe that, in my dozen years at IU, my openness to ideas which I might have once rejected out of hand is to no mean degree due to the collegial and supportive atmosphere of professional interaction to be found in the IU linguistics community.
As chair, I intend to nourish that kind of interaction. I believe that the future of linguistics at IU depends on our ability to exploit the wealth of linguists and language specialists scattered all over campus. This is a superb resource, one that linguistics continues to take advantage of through adjunct appointments, diversified reading groups, and novel teaching arrangements. I would like to see this interaction strengthened and formalized. I have found my own joint appointment with Slavic Languages and Literatures extremely beneficial, and hope very much to see other talented linguists in the College receive partial FTEs in Linguistics. Joint appointments will enable these individuals to teach courses in our department more regularly, advise our students, and in general become more involved in the day-to-day life of the Linguistics Department. It will also allow our students greater access to related disciplines and should encourage students to pursue more joint degrees.
Another initiative underway which is designed to promote cooperation across departments involved with teaching and researching linguistic issues is the new Interdisciplinary Linguistics Advisory Council, which I chair together with Professor Albert Valdman. The ILAC will serve as a sounding board for different units which deal with language and linguistics and will function to bring individuals with similar concerns together to discuss common issues. More than this, however, it is our intention that the ILAC will be empowered to implement changes leading to coordination of functions across departments. The result will provide a much more effective representation of language and linguistics across the Bloomington campus.
Another vital aspect of improving our departmental profile and visibility concerns alumni relations. Just as we want you to know what is going on here, we are very interested in hearing from alumni. I would like to be able to report more information about alumni activities and personal news as a regular feature of the departmental newsletter, so please keep in touch with us and let us know what you have been up to. I would encourage you to feel free to contact me or other faculty at any time, especially (for UG alumni) our Undergraduate Advisor, Ken de Jong, or (for grad alumni) our Director of Graduate Studies, Stuart Davis. I will look forward to finding out what people have been up to. We can all be reached at the departmental mailing address or via e-mail at franks@indiana.edu, kdejong@indiana.edu and davis@indiana.edu, respectively. Davis and De Jong each wrote a column in this issue of the newsletter.
As part of this outreach effort, we are hosting a reception for "Friends of Linguistics at Indiana University" at the annual meeting of the Linguistics Society of America in Los Angeles. The reception will be from 6:30-8:00 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 8, in the Los Cerritos Room at the conference hotel, the Westin Bonaventure. I hope that, if you are reading this column, you will consider yourself invited. Drop by, visit with old teachers and friends, colleagues and students. Find out what is new at IU. And share some gossip of your own. I hope very much to see you there!


Thirteen New Graduate Students Join Linguistics Department

Thirteen new graduate students accepted invitations to join the Linguistics Department this fall, and their biographical sketches illustrate the department's commitment to students with diverse backgrounds, as well as the department's strength in various fields of interest.

Back row. Richard Gaines, Graham Troop, Sean McLennan, Erik Levin.
Front row. Jennifer Moless, Damon Stewart, Nadia Dueñas, Mike Koh.

Nadia Dueñas is from La Ceiba, which is located on the Caribbean coast of Honduras. After graduating from high school, she decided to come to the United States to continue her education. She earned a Bachelor's degree in psychology with an emphasis in educational studies from Knox College in Illinois. Her current interests are phonological acquisition and disorders in children.
Richard Gaines is from Edwardsville, Illinois, and received a B.A. in French from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. His main interest is African linguistics, so he is currently taking Hausa and plans to study other African languages when he can fit them into his schedule.
Sun-Yang Hwang came here from Korea, where she attended Ewha Women's University in Seoul. She studied English Education there, which fostered her interest in general linguistics. She is especially interested in phonology. Personally, she has another very special interest, her six-month-old son, who she says is becoming increasingly sensitive to sound.
Steven Jarosz transferred to the Linguistics Department in the spring of 1998, but he had already completed much coursework in the department over the previous two years. In fact, having earned a B.A. in Russian Language and Culture from Colby College in 1994, he went on to receive an M.A. in Slavic Languages and Linguistics from the Slavics Department here at I.U. His current interests include Russian and Slavic Phonetics and Phonology, as well as Computer Science.
Michael Koh grew up in an Indiana suburb trying to deny his Korean heritage and language. He realized that this was plainly quite a mistake later in life and was even later surprised to find that learning his parents' language was not a trivial task. In fact, to this day his inability to process Korean morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics still bedevils him. He has a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering, which he says is ironic considering his lack of mechanical aptitude. However, he was working in an economically productive job before he came to IU. Unfortunately, he was very bored with it and decided to go to graduate school in the only subject that inherently interested him as an undergraduate. He hopes to work on getting a computer to understand human language, because he has spent much of his adult life shouting expletives at his computer and wishing that the computer would react in an appropriate manner.
Hye-Ryoung Kwon is from Seoul, South Korea, and she attended Yonsei University in Seoul. Having majored in mathematics, her interests are now psycholinguistics, phonological acquisition, language disorders, and phonology.
Erik Levin is from a town in Maryland with more cows than people, so he says Indiana seems vaguely familiar. After graduating from the University of Maryland with a degree in Japanese, he moved to Hawaii. He then spent two years in Japan teaching with the JET program. Currently, his interests include African linguistics, historical linguistics, and linguistic universals. Between 11 p.m. and midnight he can usually be found at Lennie's, where, according to him, the only decent American beer besides Samuel Adams is served.
Sean McLennan was born and raised in Calgary, Canada. There he did his undergraduate work at the University of Calgary in linguistics, specializing in phonetics and syntax, coupled with a minor in Japanese. After graduating, he went to Japan for nearly two years to study Japanese and teach English. He decided to come back to university life because he developed a passionate interest in dynamic parallel systems and the issues of computational modeling of language. The joint Cognitive Science / Linguistics program drew him to IU in particular. He will most probably look at concept learning and its ramifications for the lexicon. His non-linguistic obsessions include, in descending order, ancient civilizations and especially Egypt, Loreena McKennitt (the great goddess of Canadian Celtic music), drawing portraits and Celtic knots, costuming, and science fiction, including The X-files, Star Trek, and Rice-ian Vampires. Anyone can check out all these interests at his website.
Jennifer Joan Moless is from California. She went to school at the University of Chicago, where she earned both a bachelor's and a master's degree. She is interested in Bantu linguistics and sociolinguistics, and she is currently taking Zulu. She thinks Bloomington is very pretty and small, but that IU is too big to have so few posted maps for the new students.
Chad Damon Stewart grew up in Evansville, Indiana, which is a town very close to the meeting of the rivers that separate Indiana from Kentucky and Illinois. Having traveled west to attend Brigham Young University, he finally shed his first name, and has since been known as Damon by everyone but people from Evansville. He earned a B.A. in English Literature and Language in 1992, and worked until he entered the Peace Corps in 1993. With the Peace Corps he spent three years teaching English to high school and college students in Lithuania, after which he continued traveling east around the world before returning to the United States to apply to graduate school. His stay in Lithuania, where Vilnius University linguists have a popular weekly television program, intensified his undergraduate interest in linguistics. Consequently, though he intends to pursue cognitive science and linguistics at IU, his interests include all areas concerning Baltic linguistics. In his free time he plays the guitar and eagerly awaits the arrival of his fianceé, who recently received a bachelor's degree in business administration from Kaunas Technological University in Panevezys, Lithuania.
Graham Troop earned a B.A. in history in 1996 from Georgetown College, which is located in central Kentucky. He went on to receive an M.A. in linguistics from the University of Louisville, which he completed in 1997. His main interests include syntax, semantics, and the interface between the two. He has been married since August of 1997. His wife is an attorney who practices mostly environmental law in Louisville.
Pei-Chun Tsai is from Taiwan. She came to IU immediately after graduating from Providence University in Taiwan. Phonology and syntax are now her main interests. However, she says that she changes interests often, and cannot be sure what other fields she will pursue in linguistics.
Robert Glen is another new graduate student in the department.


Franco-Bulgarian Fulbright Scholar Visits

Ms. Iskra Iskrova has recently arrived for a Fulbright year at the IU Linguistics Department. Iskrova describes herself as "a nomad arriving from France, after a long travel from Bulgaria through Africa and Quebec." Iskrova was born in Bulgaria, grew up in North Africa, and was shaped in French culture and education. Her geographic journey has led her to various languages and aroused her curiosity concerning their structure and peculiarities.

Iskra Iskrova

For her Ph.D., Iskrova is working on secondary imperfectives in Bulgarian at the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations in Paris. She hopes to receive support and advice about aspect semantics from the Bloomington linguistics community. Iskrova writes that she "is delighted to spend a year on your campus. I knew that Bloomington was a nice place for me after the visit of Pei's Art Museum, recalling so much his Parisian Pyramid, and my amazement to meet Calder's 'Peau Rouge Indiana' on the campus. Modern art and architecture remain an inexhaustible source of visual pleasure!"
While studying linguistics, she also completed a master's degree in Berber Studies. This led her three years ago to the most exciting experience of her life. To improve her skills in Tamashaq, Iskrova spent four months in the Sahara desert in North Mali, where she shared everyday life with Tuaregs and discovered "with delectation" the culture and customs of the people.
Iskrova describes her life as a long voyage throughout crafts, music, dances and spirituality of various ethnic groups. Her professional goal is to understand human linguistic ability through the diversity of natural languages.
Iskrova encourages anyone concerned with Berber or Slavic languages, as well as those sharing her curiosity for the Near East, the Maghreb and West Africa, to contact her at iiskrova@indiana.edu.


Department Welcomes New Secretary

This year the Linguistics Department welcomed a new addition to our administrative staff. Marilyn Estep joined the department on July 6, 1998, as the Administrative Secretary. She has 12 years of experience here at Indiana University, and formerly worked in the Afro-American Studies Department as the Faculty Secretary. Marilyn has two sons, loves animals, and likes spending time outdoors. She says she enjoys learning all her new responsibilities in this job and finds the department very professional and respectful. Marilyn also remarks that she wishes to thank Ann Baker for all of her support, sharing knowledge, and making the transition smooth. Like Ann, Marilyn has become an invaluable member of the department, and continues to provide excellent service to faculty and students.


Professor Granted IU Tenure

Professor Yoshihisa Kitagawa, who teaches mainly syntax courses for the department, was promoted to the position of Associate Professor with tenure last spring. Kitagawa has been a faculty member at IU since 1994. He received his Ph.D. in linguistics in 1986 from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His main research interests are syntax and its interaction with semantics and morphology. Secondary interests are topics such as language acquisition, phonology, and music theory. His major publications include the book Subjects in Japanese and English (Garland Publishing) and the articles "Copying Identity" in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory and "Prosodic Faithfulness and Correspondence: Evidence from a Japanese Argot" in Journal of East Asian Linguistics (co-authored with Armin Mester and Junko Itô). In most of his work, Kitagawa pursues the theory of universal grammar through the comparison of Japanese and English and, when relevant, other languages. Kitagawa is on sabbatical leave for the fall semester 1998.


Students Present at MCWOP

During the weekend of October 16, the University of Michigan hosted the Fourth Midcontinental Workshop on Phonology. There was strong participation by our department, with five presentations by various students and faculty. Minkyung Lee presented "Phonology of Javanese Affixation: an OT Approach." Betsy McCall presented "Restrictions on Stop-Stop Clusters in Ancient Greek: Implications for Alignment." Bushra Adnan Zawaydeh, Keiichi Tajima, and Mafuyu Kitahara presented, "Rhythmic Structure in Arabic: A Comparison with English and Japanese through a Speech Cycling Task." Also presenting was Yongsung Lee, a visiting scholar from Korea who finished his Ph.D. in the Indiana University Linguistics Department in 1993. The title of his paper was "Glide Formation and Compensatory Lengthening in Korean Verbal Conjugation." Professor Stuart Davis presented a paper entitled "An Optimality-Theoretic Analysis of The Distribution of /h/ and Aspirated Stops in American English."


Phonetics Students Visit Haskins

In February 1998, two graduate students, Bushra Zawaydeh and Mafuyu Kitahara, in conjunction with IU Professor Ken de Jong, participated in a project at the Haskins Laboratories in Connecticut. The project, designed to study the articulatory coordination of the lips, tongue, and jaw in syllable production, represents the most cutting-edge technology of articulatory studies. Haskins utilizes an Electromagnetic Midsagittal Articulometer (EMMA) for non-invasive dynamic tracking of articulatory movements. DeJong was awarded an IU Grant-in-aide to support the trip. Details and photos of the students' participation can be seen here.


Semantics Professor Accepts New Position

Professor Alice G.B. ter Meulen, professor of linguistics, philosophy and cognitive science at IU, accepted a special university chair position at Groningen University in Holland, effective this fall. Ter Meulen, who primarily taught semantics courses at IU, earned a Ph.D. in philosophy of language at Stanford University. Prior to becoming a faculty member at IU, she taught at the University of Washington. At IU, she supervised the dissertations of Robert Westmoreland, "Information and intonation in natural language modality" (1998), June Wickboldt (1997) "The semantics of 'since,'" and Young Chul Jun (1997) "Genericity in Korean."


Tribute: Professor Emeritus Carleton Hodge

Carleton T. Hodge, 1917-1998, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Anthropology at IU, passed away at his home in Bloomington on September 8, 1998. He was an unpretentious individual who was warmly appreciated for his sincerity and his wit.
Hodge received his BA (1939) from DePauw University, where he met Carl Voegelin, who remained a friend and mentor throughout his life. He did his graduate work in linguistics and Near Eastern studies (including Ancient Egyptian) at the University of Pennsylvania. His Ph.D. dissertation (1943) was a descriptive grammar of Hausa. From 1946 to 1963, Hodge worked for the Foreign Service Institute, where he supervised courses in foreign language training and also prepared pedagogical materials on languages as varied as Serbo-Croatian, Greek, Persian, and Hausa.
After a visiting appointment at Brandeis, Hodge took up a position at Indiana University (1964). (This was at the urging of Voegelin, who by then had joined the IU Anthropology Department.) At IU, Hodge taught linguistics and was fully involved in the African Studies Program, of which he was one of the original members. Drawing on the breadth of knowledge about the languages of the world, Hodge directed dissertations not only on such African languages as Sayanci (Chadic), Manyinka (Mande) and Sara (Central-Sudanic), but also on Turkish, Urdu, Japanese, and T'in (Mon-Khmer).
As an Africanist, the focus of Hodge's linguistics work was the analysis of Hausa and Ancient Egyptian. He is best known, however, as a comparative-historical linguist. Much of his research was concerned with classification and reconstruction of Afroasiatic (for which he coined the term "Lisramic"). He also devoted his extensive knowledge and energies to the problem of establishing a relationship between Afroasiatic and Indo-European (a super phylum he named "Lislakh").
Hodge remained extremely active and productive as a scholar during the 15 years following his retirement in 1983, attending numerous linguistic meetings and producing a steady stream of articles and book reviews. A full bibliography of his writings--more than 150 publications--was prepared on the occasion of his 80th birthday by Gyula Décsy (compiler), Carleton T. Hodge: Bibliography 1944-1997, Bloomington: Eurolingua 1997.

Written by Paul Newman and reproduced, with modifications, from the IU Office of International Programs Newsletter, October 1998.



From the Graduate Advisor

Indiana University is a center for language-related research. At the heart is the Department of Linguistics. The department maintains a broad disciplinary focus covering phonetics and phonology, syntax, historical comparative linguistics, sociolinguistics, and language acquisition, along with maintaining a strong program in African languages and linguistics.
The department enjoys both formal and informal links with Cognitive Science, foreign language departments, Psychology, Anthropology, African Studies, and Speech and Hearing Sciences, among other programs. I think it is essential for all graduate students to take advantage of the resources of Indiana University and become acquainted with one of these other programs in addition to linguistics. You should do this for both the intellectual curiosity and the possibility that it will make you more marketable once you leave Indiana University. Over the past seven years there have been more than 30 Ph.D.'s listed in general linguistics. Many of these Ph.D.'s have been successful in finding academic or other similar type employment. For many of them, the combination of their work with other programs along with linguistics has proved beneficial for their post-IU careers.
As another way of expanding your horizons as a graduate student in linguistics, I would encourage you to attend at least one Linguistic Institute. These are sponsored by the Linguistic Society of America and are held every other summer. In the Summer of 1999 the Linguistic Institute will be held at the University of Illinois which is located about 2.5 hours from Bloomington. This is a place where you would be able to interact with faculty and students in linguistics from all over the world. In fact, it can shape the direction of your studies and career. I strongly encourage you to attend the Institute. Since I have attended most of the Linguistic Institutes since 1983, feel free to come by my office if you have any questions about it.
If you have particular questions regarding the graduate program and its requirements, please contact me at 855-2043, by e-mail at davis@indiana.edu, or drop by during my office hours.

Stuart Davis, Graduate Advisor



From the Undergraduate Advisor

The linguistics program at Indiana University is one of only a small number in the country to offer a complete training in linguistics. For anyone interested in finding out about how languages work, what makes up the several thousand different languages of the world, or what's going on in the everyday English around us, the IU department of linguistics has a lot to offer.
As you can tell from the notes and articles in this volume, our faculty teach and do active research in many different areas of language structure and use. By becoming a part of the IU linguistics department, undergraduates have had opportunities to pursue interests about where languages come from, how children learn them, how physical sound is involved in speaking, how language varies from place to place, and a host of other possibilities.
Enrollment of linguistics majors has remained steady over the last 20 years, graduating around eight undergraduate majors per year. Linguistics students have done very well in their studies. Each year we typically have two or three students graduating in the top 10 percent of their classes; recently we've had students graduating in the top 10 of students in the College of Arts and Sciences. This excellence in the work of some students reflects a preponderance of very high quality work by most of the students. Last year the median G.P.A. of the graduating class was around a lofty 3.7. These facts, I believe, indicate that work in linguistics not only attracts good students, but also equips the students we do get to do well academically.
The core of the undergraduate coursework in linguistics teaches what it is that languages are made up of. We also require that students get a chance to apply what they learn in a final course where students work with a speaker of a language about which little is known. The goal is to figure out the structure of the language. Students have found this a challenge that proves that they have learned enough to be able to go out and study any language situation from scratch. We think, then, students will have the skills necessary to observe and analyze not just languages, but also situations and problems in everything from law to business to international problem solving.
Indiana University is a unique setting for learning about languages, not just because of the high quality undergraduate program, but also because of the wealth of other resources available on campus. Many of our students are double majors, enriching their work in linguistics by learning about psychology, cognitive science, speech and hearing science, sociology, or philosophy. IU offers a remarkable array of language and culture studies, from the usual to the exotic. Right now, our linguistics students are studying various languages, from French and Spanish to Arabic, Lakota, Hausa, Japanese, Russian, and Mongolian. And these are just a few of the possibilities. A stroll through next semester's class listings reveals around 45 different languages.
We believe that the linguistics program is a great choice for undergraduates to find out about language and to acquire valuable skills to go on and be successful in many endeavors. If you have questions about the program, contact me at 855-8199, or by e-mail at kdejong@indiana.edu.

Ken De Jong, Linguistics Undergraduate Advisor



IULC Update

The club has had a busy semester so far. We started off the year with our annual Fall Potluck at Bryan Park to welcome our new students and catch up on what everyone was doing over the summer. The picnic also represents the mid-point of the IULC mentor program, as this is the first time many of the new students get to meet their mentors in person. We followed up on our social calendar with a bowling night at the end of October (we proved that linguists are a coordinated bunch).
Our LingLunch series is continuing this year. Our goal with this series is to provide a friendly environment in which to present our research and get a little feedback on it before presenting to larger audiences at conferences and in more formal settings. This semester so far, we've previewed five papers presented at MCWOP in Michigan (from Yongsung Lee, Betsy McCall, Mafuyu Kitahara, Keiichi Tajima, Bushra Zawaydeh, Minkyung Lee and Stuart Davis) as well as a paper by Laura Wilbur McGarrity that she and Dan Dinnsen presented at the BU Conference on Language Acquisition.
We have added a new speaker series this year--The Faculty Research Series. For each of these presentations, we invite a faculty member to meet with us and talk very informally about the kind of research they like to do and/or some of the things they have done or are currently working on. Thus far, we have learned a little bit about the interests and activities of Stuart Davis, Paul Newman, Robert Botne, Steven Franks, and Julie Auger.


IU to Host Reception in Conjunction with Annual LSA Conference

The Linguistics Society of America will celebrate its 75th anniversary at its annual conference this year, to be held in Los Angeles on January 7-10, 1999. Several IU faculty and students will attend and present. At the conference, the IU linguistics department will host a reception from 6:30-8:00 p.m. on Friday, January 8, in the Los Cerritos Room of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel. All friends of IU are invited to attend.
IU linguists presenting at the conference are Bushra Zawaydeh and Stuart Davis, "Arabic hypo-coristics and their implications"; Steven Franks, "The analysis of Polish PNs as inflections" and "Clitic second as verb second" (with Ljiljana Progovac, Wayne SU); Laurent Dekydtspotter and Rex Sprouse, "The scope of discontinuous constituents in English-French interlanguage"; Eun-Hee Lee (with Alice ter Meulen, Groningen), "Dynamic and stative information in temporal reasoning"; Hae-Kyung Wee, "Not narrow focus, but definite focus"; Mafuyu Kitahara, "De-voiced vowels and accentual contrast in Tokyo Japanese"; and Paul Kroeber, "Emergence of an infinitive-like category in Thompson River Salish." The Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics will meet concurrently with the LSA. IU linguists presenting at SPCL are Elizabeth Winkler, "Morphosyntax and lexical borrowing from Spanish into Limonese Creole," and Clancy Clements and Andrew James Garboden, "The history & development of Daman Creole Portuguese."


Scholarship-Alumni Fund Grants

Linguistics students Chin Wan Chung, Llorenc Colome Comajoan, and Hans-Joerg Tiede recently received Scholarship-Alumni Fund grants from IU to support their presentations at various conferences. Comajoan will be presenting a paper "Lexical Aspect & Discourse Grounding in L2 Catalan Verbal Morphology" at the Second Language Research Forum, which will be held in Hawaii. Tiede will present a paper "Lambek Calculus Proofs and Tree Automata" at the Logical Aspects of Computational Linguistics conference in Grenoble, France. Chung will present "Reconsidering Weight Complementarity in Korean Partial Reduplication" at the Western Conference on Linguistics at Arizona State University.


The Fred W. Householder Fund

The Fred W. Householder Fund was established to support graduate student research. Awards, which normally are between $100 and $400, enable students to cover the expenses of materials or payment to subjects related to specific, clearly defined research projects. The projects are often, but not exclusively, connected with students' dissertation work.
Recent contributors include the following students, colleagues, and friends of Householder, to whom we express our thanks:

AnonymousRobert Botne
Stuart DavisKenneth Hale
Lynne HouseholderTokuichiro Matsuda
Paul NewmanRobert Port

Chin Wan Chung recently received a Householder Award to support his research on Korean.

The Linguistics Department also maintains a Linguistics Enrichment Fund account through the IU Foundation, which funds various other activities, such as receptions hosted by the department and special faculty research projects. If you would like to contribute to this fund or to the Fred W. Householder Fund, please contact departmental Administrative Assistant Ann Baker at Memorial Hall 322, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405; phone 812-855-6456; e-mail afbaker@indiana.edu. Checks should be written to Indiana University.


Short Notices





Ph.D. degrees were awarded to the following students during the past six months:






M.A. degrees have been awarded to the following students:


General Linguistics
ESL/Applied Linguistics

B.A. degrees with a major in Linguistics have been awarded to the following students:




Faculty News

Julie Auger continues her work on Picard, an endangered language spoken in northern France, with a team of three research assistants, transcribing the corpus and researching various linguistic and sociolinguistic issues. She was in the region completing fieldwork from May-June 1998. Her paper "Le redoublement des sujets en français informel québé'cois: une approche variationiste" has been accepted for publication in the Canadian Journal of Linguistics. She presented "Vowel epenthesis in Vimeu Picard: A preliminary investigation" at New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAVE) 27, Athens, Georgia, October 1-4, 1998 (Jeffrey Steele, coauthor).


Robert Botne's "Asymmetric coordination in Lega" (with Jin Young Tak) was published in Afrikanistische Arbeitspapier volume 54. His paper "Future and distal -ka-'s: Proto Bantu or nascent forms?" was published in Advances in Bantu Historical Linguistics (Larry Hyman and Jean-Marie Hombert, eds.), CSLI (Stanford). "The evolution of future tenses from serial 'SAY' construction in central eastern Bantu" was published in Diachronia, 15.2. His "Prosodically-conditioned vowel shortening in Chindali" was published in Studies in African Linguistics, 27.1. Botne presented "The role of deixis in the grammaticalization of motion verbs: 'come' and 'go' in Lamnso and English" at the Mid-American Linguistics Conference, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, in October. He presented his paper "Cognitive schemas and motion verbs: 'come' and 'go' in Eastern Bantu" at the 29th Conference on African Linguistics, Yale University, March 26-29, 1998.


Stuart Davis was an invited speaker at the Workshop on the Syllable held in Tübingen Germany in June 1998. He talked about "The Controversy over Geminates and Syllable Weight." In August he presented an invited talk at Osaka University of Foreign Studies, where he gave a lecture on "The distribution of /h/ and aspiration in American English." At the end of January he will present similar information at the HIL Phonology workshop in Leiden. He gave a talk on the same topic at the recent Mid-Continental Workshop in Phonology. He will be presenting a paper (with Bushra Adnan Zawaydeh) "Hypocoristic formation in Ammani-Jordanian Arabic" at the LSA meeting in January 1999. This paper has been accepted for publication in volume 12 of Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics. Davis has been asked to give a talk at the Phonology 2000 Symposium, to be held next spring at MIT. Davis recently had two papers published, "Syllable contact in optimality theory" in Korea Journal of Linguistics and a co-authored paper (with Gina Torretta) "An optimality-theoretic account of compensatory lengthening and geminate throwback in Trukese," in NELS 28.


Ken de Jong presented two joint papers last spring at the Texas Linguistic Forum, the first, "A sketch of Arabic stress and duration," reported results of an experiment done with Bushra Zawaydeh on Arabic stress. The second, "Syllables and supersyllables: evidence for low level phonological domains," reported experimental work with Anna Bosch on Gaelic syllable structure. He presented one of four IU papers at the Sixth Conference on Laboratory Phonology in York, England, "Temporal constraints and characterizing syllable structuring," and reported work on the phonetics of syllable structure in English. For this conference, he was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to support travel to England by scholars from the U.S. Also last spring, he was awarded an IU Grant-in-aide to support a data-gathering trip to Haskins Laboratories in Connecticut to collect articulatory recordings as part of his on-going syllable structure project.


Dan Dinnsen and Jessica Barlow's paper "On the characterization of a chain shift in normal and delayed phonological acquisition" appeared this summer in the Journal of Child Language. Another paper of theirs, "Root and manner feature faithfulness," was published in the Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Barlow and Dinnsen have another paper, "Asymmetrical cluster development in a disordered system," which has been accepted for publication in Language Acquisition. Dinnsen's article "On the organization and specification of manner features" was published recently in the Journal of Linguistics. Dinnsen and one of his doctoral students, Laura McGarrity, presented their paper "Variation and emerging faithfulness in phonological acquisition" at the 23rd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development this fall. IU was well represented at that conference with other presentations by our faculty, students and alumni, including Judith Gierut (Speech & Hearing Sciences), Laurent Dekydtspotter (FRIT), Rex Sprouse (Germanic Studies), Jessica Barlow (Ph.D. '97), Katherine Demuth (Ph.D. '83), Kim Swanson (FRIT) and Rachel Thyre (FRIT).


Steven Franks gave an invited talk in Groningen at the Center for Language and Cognition's mini-symposium on syntax. The talk was entitled "Optimizing Linear Order and South Slavic Clitics." Franks will also present two talks at LSA in January--"The analysis of Polish PNs as inflection" and "Clitic second as verb second," the latter with Ljiljana Progovac (Wayne State University). He recently published "The syntax of adverbial participles in Russian revisited" in Slavic and East European Journal (with Len Babby, Princeton University).


Michael Gasser's paper with Linda B. Smith (IU Psychology), "Learning nouns and adjectives: a connectionist account" appeared during the summer in Language and Cognitive Processes. Gasser organized a successful workshop on "Grounding Word Meaning: Data and Models" at the Conference of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence in July. Gasser's poster with Eliana Colunga (IU Ph.D. student in Computer Science and Cognitive Science) was presented at the Cognitive Science Conference in August.


Paul Newman was an invited participant in the symposium "The Linguistics Sciences in a Changing Context," held at the University of Illinois in October. His paper, which dealt with the problem of endangered languages, was, "We has seen the enemy and it is us." During the spring semester he will be on sabbatical leave working on a book on linguistic fieldwork. His travels during this period will take him to London, Cologne, Los Angeles, and Canberra.


Roxana Ma Newman (International Programs) and Alhaji Maina Gimba (UCLA) published a pedagogical manual entitled Hausa a Dace: A Guide to Functional Hausa (IU Program in African Languages and Linguistics & Institute for the Study of Nigerian Languages and Cultures, 1998).


Samuel Obeng presented "No condition is permanent: textuality, contextuality, and intertextuality in some Ghanaian English 'autonyms'" at African Studies Noon Talks, Indiana University. On November 6-7, he presented two papers, "Intertextuality in Ghanaian English" and "West Africanisms in Limonese English Creole" (with Elizabeth Winkler) at the International Association of World Englishes Conference, Urbana-Champaign. His article "Akan death-prevention names: a pragmatic and structural analysis" was published in The Journal of Onomastics, vol. 46, issue 3.


Robert Port organized a Special Session at the joint meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and the International Congress on Acoustics in Seattle in June 1998. The session was co-chaired by Port and IU alumnus Devin McAuley on the topic "Rhythm in Music and Speech." Speakers included Port, McAuley, Keiichi Tajima, Mari Jones (OSU), Edward Large (Florida Atlantic University), Fred Cummins (IU linguistics Ph.D.), and Bill Baird (Berkeley). Port was an invited speaker at the "Conference on Biosemiotics and Cognitive Semiotics" in Brazil at the Catholic University of Sao Paolo. He presented a paper entitled "Implications of the dynamical approach to cognition for language." In late October, he was the keynote speaker at Ohio State's daylong CogFest, sponsored by the Center for Cognitive Science. His talk was "Mind as motion: Language from a dynamical perspective." While there, he met with several IU alumni, including Marios Fourakis (Ph.D. in linguistics, 1984) and Cathy Rogers (Ph.D. in linguistics, 1997), who is at OSU as a postdoctoral fellow in Speech and Hearing Science.


Natsuko Tsujimura (East Asian Languages & Cultures) presented a paper entitled "Lexical semantic roles in stative verbs" at the International Conference on Practical Linguistics of Japanese, held at San Francisco State University in May. Her book review of Masayo Iida's Context and Binding in Japanese will appear in Lingua and Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese. She gave an all-day lecture on "Lexical semantics and its role in Japanese linguistics" at Kobe University, Japan, on August 5, 1998. She received an NEAC Japan Studies Grant to conduct her research on the transitivity of Japanese verbs at the National Language Research Institute in August. Her paper with Masayo Iida (Xerox Inxight Software), "Deverbal nominals and telicity in Japanese," has been accepted for publication in Journal of East Asian Linguistics. She will present a paper on "New Perspectives on Transitivity" panel in the forthcoming meeting of Association of Asian Studies in March.


Albert Valdman was awarded the prestigious 1998 American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages Florence Steiner award for Distinguished Service to Foreign Language Teaching at the Postsecondary level. The Executive Director of the American Association of Teachers of French stated, "Both directly and indirectly, as a foreign language educator, he has probably influenced more French students in the U.S. than any other individual alive today." Valdman was invited as plenary speaker at a conference at Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco, Sept. 22-28. The conference, sponsored by the Francophone University Agency, focused on macrosociolinguistic factors in the contacts between French and other languages worldwide. The Indiana University Press has just published A Dictionary of Louisiana Creole authored by Valdman and several collaborators, including recent IU Ph.D.'s Tom Klingler (associate professor, Tulane) and Kevin Rottet (assistant professor, Wisconsin-Whitewater). The 655-page dictionary is the culmination of several years of work.



Student News

Llorenc Comajoan presented a paper at the 18th Second Language Research Forum at the University of Hawaii at Manoa , October 15-18. The title was "Lexical aspect and discourse grounding in L2 Catalan verbal morphology."


Chin Wan Chung presented "Vowel harmony in Korean: An optimality-theoretic approach" at the 51st Annual Kentucky Foreign Language Conference at the University of Kentucky, April 16-18, 1998. He presented "Fixed segmentism in Korean partial reduplication: Three instances of the emergence of the unmarked" at the 11th International Conference on Korean linguistics at the University of Hawaii, July 6-9, 1998. This paper appeared in The Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Korean Linguistics. Chung also presented "Reconsidering weight complementarity in Korean partial reduplication" at the Western Conference on Linguistics, Arizona State University, October 9-11. His "A constraint-based approach to reduplication of non-ideophonic words in Korean" was presented at the Mid-America Linguistics Conference, Southern Illinois University, October 23-24.


Minkyung Lee presented "Phonology of Javanese affixation: an OT approach" at the Mid-Continental Workshop on Phonology (MCWOP) 4, Ann Arbor, Michigan, October 16-18.


Keiichi Tajima successfully defended his doctoral dissertation on September 18, 1998, entitled "Speech Rhythm in English and Japanese: Experiments in Speech Cycling." He has since accepted a postdoctoral research position at ATR (a largely government funded research company) in Kyoto. He will begin work there with Dr. Reiko Akahane Yamada before the first of next year.


Betsy McCall presented "Restrictions on stop-stop clusters in Ancient Greek: Implications for alignment" at MCWOP 4.


Elizabeth Winkler presented "West Africanisms in Limonese Creole English" with Professor Samuel Obeng at the November 1998 5th International Conference on World Englishes, Urbana, Illinois.


Bushra Adnan Zawaydeh (with Stuart Davis) will present "Arabic hypocoristics and their implications" at the annual Meeting of the LSA in Los Angeles in January. Zawaydeh (with Keiichi Tajima and Mafuyu Kitahara) presented "Rhythmic structure in Arabic: A comparison with English and Japanese through a speech cycling task" at MCWOP 4. She presented "The Interaction of the Phonetics and Phonology of Gutturals" at the Sixth Conference on Laboratory Phonology, July 2-4.



Alumni News

Jessica Barlow's paper (with Dan Dinnsen) "On the characterization of a chain shift in normal and delayed phonological acquisition" appeared this summer in the Journal of Child Language. "Root and manner feature faithfulness" (also with Dinnsen) was published in the Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Barlow and Dinnsen's "Asymmetrical cluster development in a disordered system," has been accepted for publication in Language Acquisition. Barlow presented another paper at the BU Conference on Language Development.


Fred Cummins recently moved to Switzerland after a year as Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Northwestern University. He is now studying prosody using neural networks at the Istituto Dalle Molle di Studie Sull'Intelligenza Artificiale in beautiful Lugano, Switzerland, working in the lab of Juergen Schmidhuber.


Thomas Ernst (Rutgers U/Temple U) will present his paper entitled, "Adjunct evidence for rightward movement" at the January LSA meeting.


Jon Franco (U Deust-Bilbao) will attend the 1999 LSA meeting, where he will present "Small clauses & predicate raising."


Ken Hale (MIT) will present "Carl & Florence Voegelin" at the symposium "Field work & linguistic theory: American Indianists in the development of American linguistics" at the annual meeting of the LSA.


Craige Roberts (OSU) will present "Increasing enrollments in the linguistics major at a large land grant institution" at the 1999 meeting of the LSA.


Kevin J. Rottet (U WI-Whitewater) will present "The lexicon of Louisiana French Creole & the creole continuum" at the annual LSA meeting.