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| Dr. Paul Newman: "It is satisfying to help people. My approach to administration is to say 'yes' if I can." |
Linguistics Department student Jeff Grote and professor Albert Valdman both were honored at the 1998 Indiana University Founders Day Ceremony in March for outstanding achievements. Grote, a Ph.D. student and Spanish Department associate instructor, received a Lieber Associate Instructor Award, the most prestigious university award conferred upon an associate instructor. Grote was also awarded the 1997 Department of Spanish and Portuguese Associate Instructor Teaching Award. Rudy Professor Valdman, who has a joint teaching appointment in Linguistics and in French and Italian, was awarded the 1998 John W. Ryan Award for Distinguished Contributions to International Programs and Studies.
Eight linguistics students volunteered their time and savvy at the College of Arts and Sciences EXPO, held in the IMU Frangipani Room on Feb. 25. Under the direction of Professor Yoshihisa Kitagawa, linguistics students Masa Deguchi, Laura Knudsen, Bushra Zawaydeh, Debbie Burleson, Betsy McCall, Nicole Evans, Ji-Yung Kim, and Liz Peterson supervised shifts at the EXPO, an event designed to help undergraduate students become familiar with prospective majors. Linguistics volunteers answered questions concerning linguistics careers and education.
Professor Linda J. Schwartz, a mainstay of the Linguistics Department for the past 25 years, has announced plans for early retirement at the end of this academic year. Schwartz, a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota (major, linguistics; minor, Spanish) joined the faculty of IU in 1973. In addition to her appointment in linguistics, she has also been a member of the Center for Carribean and Latin American Studies and the African Studies Program. She served on several occasions as acting chair of the Linguistics Department and was a constructive member of a number of important university-wide committees. She is highly regarded as a classroom teacher at both graduate and undergraduate levels, and is frequently sought after for dissertation supervision. She has served on more than 50 Ph.D. committees, in many instances as thesis director.
Slate of Activities Planned for Coming Year
Supporters of the Indiana University Linguistics Club turned out in record numbers in January to vote for the 1998 club officers. In a run-off election, the following were appointed: president, Laura Knudsen; vice president, Karen Baertsch; secretary, Ji-Yung Kim; student-faculty liaison, Debbie Burleson, library coordinator, Mafuyu Kitahara; activities coordinator, Liz Peterson. Other linguistics students Nicole Evans, Masa Deguchi, Betsy McCall, and Bushra Zawaydeh were selected to form an activities committee to help plan social events and other functions for the club. All officers welcome suggestions and input from club members.
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| Top row. Karen Baertsch, Vice President; Liz Peterson,
Activities Coordinator; Laura Knudsen, President Bottom row. Ji-Yung Kim, Secretary; Debbie Burleson, Faculty-Student Liaison; Mafuyu Kitahara, Library Coordinator |
Students Practice Presenting Papers
This semester the IULC organized the "Linglunch" talk series for a second time. The purpose of the series is to give graduate students an opportunity to present their work that has been accepted at a conference or is going to be submitted for publication. The lunch talks provide a friendly but professional atmosphere where students get useful feedback from peers and faculty. The presentations have covered a wide range of topics from both general and applied linguistics. The series offers an excellent opportunity for students to practice presenting for audiences in a conference-like format.
The series this semester has included (or will include) the following:
- Feb. 2, Don Salting "Discussion: The Nested Subregister Model of Vowel Height"
- Feb. 9, Mai Kuha "Speakers' Intentions: Implications for Coding Procedures"
- Feb. 9, Laura Knudsen, Adam Leary, Ahmar Mahboob, Mimoza Rista "Role-play as a Means of Collecting Production Data"
- Feb. 16, Corey Muench, Silvia Rodriguez, and Jiyoung Yoon "Beyond a Reasonable Doubt: Replicating and Revising ILP Judgment Tasks"
- Feb. 23, Yi Yuan "Presenting Oral DCT: An Inquiry into Data-Gathering Methods for Pragmatics Research"
- March 2, Ji-Yung Kim "Parts of Speech"
- March 9, Kenneth de Jong and Bushra Zawaydeh "A Sketch of Arabic Stress and Durational Structure"
- March 23, Karen Baertsch "Onset Sonority Distance Constraints Through Local Conjunction"
- April 6, Robert Port and Kenneth de Jong, Parts of videotapes distributed by the Acoustic Sociey of America, featuring different ways of measuring speech production, such as endoscopy, stroboscopy, transillumination, MRI, ultrasound, EMG, EMMA.
- April 13, Mafuyu Kitahara "Lexical Stratification and Ranking Invariance in Constraint-based Grammars"
- April 27, Bushra Zawaydeh and Stuart Davis "Hypocoristic Formation in Ammani-Jordanian Arabic"
Studies in Second Language Acquisition will celebrate its 20th anniversary with a one-day symposium April 23. Susan Gass, Patsy Lightbown, John Schumann, and Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig will address issues in SLA. Professor Gass will address current approaches to SLA. Professor Schumann will look at future perspectives on SLA as they relate to cognitive theories. Professor Bardovi-Harlig will discuss future perspectives on SLA in relation to interlanguage pragmatics. Professor Lightbown will address the topic of classroom research and the relationship between research and pedagogy. The symposium will be held from 2:30-6:30 in Woodburn Hall 111. Contact Elizabeth Winkler for more information.
Professor Daniel Dinnsen and Judith Gierut (SPHS) were awarded a $1.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to continue their joint interdisciplinary research on phonological development and disorders. This grant provides an additional five years of support to their prior 13 continuous years of funding. A hallmark of their work has been its appeal to the latest developments in phonological theory as a means for understanding the acquisition process. The insights afforded by current theory serve as the basis of descriptive and experimental studies. The results from these studies are brought to bear on the evaluation of theoretical proposals and routinely reveal new and more efficacious clinical treatments for children with phonological disorders.
Professors Stuart Davis and Paul Newman and Graduate Student Assistant Instructor Moreena Tiede have been selected to receive Teaching Excellence Recognition Awards. The TERA awards were established by the Indiana University Board of Trustees to encourage high quality, effective teaching at IU.
Four papers will be presented by IU faculty and students at the Sixth Conference on Laboratory Phonology at the University of York in July. Professor Kenneth de Jong will present "Temporal Constraints and Characterizing Syllable Structure." Bushra Zawaydeh will present "The Interaction of the Phonetics and Phonology of Gutterals." Keiichi Tajima and Professor Robert Port will present "Speech Rhythm in English and Japanese." Richard Wright (Psychology) will present "Factors of Lexical Competition in Vowel Articulation."
Studies in African Linguistics, one of the leading journals on African linguistics in the world, and the only one published in North America, is moving to Indiana University beginning with the first issue of 1998. Professor Robert Botne, who has been editor of the journal since 1992, will now also assume responsibility for production and distribution. Dr. Botne directs the operation of the journal with the assistance of graduate students Elizabeth Peterson, editorial assistant, and John Roleke, managing editor.
The IULC hosted several social functions this semester, as well as lending financial and planning support to educational functions. The first social function this semester, the IULC Spring Open House, held March 6 at the IULC Clubhouse, was an opportunity for members and faculty to meet the new IULC officers. Approximately 30 guests shared afternoon tea and sandwiches prepared by the IULC Activities Committee. Debra Hardison, associate editor for IULC publications, made a presentation about the IULC's publishing history. Dr. Robert Botne won a free publication for correctly answering a linguistics "trivia" question.
On behalf of last year's IULC, I would like to thank all students and faculty who expressed their interest in this year's IULC elections, both the first time and in the run-offs in January. We have experienced an increase in the participation in IULC-related activities and we hope that this will be reflected in a growing membership. The IULC is a non-profit organization. Your membership fees are used to support the club activities. Students who become active members of the club can have a greater influence on its future development.
Andrea Juhasz
IULC President, 1997
This coming fall, the Department will be welcoming its first Chancellor's fellowship student. Jennifer Moless, who in four years will have completed both a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Chicago, has chosen IU to pursue her Ph.D. Her primary interest is in African linguistics, particularly concerning Bantu languages of southern Africa. Although figures are still preliminary, it appears that in this fall's incoming graduate class, Jennifer will be joined by a dozen new students, coming from all over the U.S. and abroad.
Visiting speakers and colloquia presenters during spring semester included:
- Jan. 30, Mark Baker, McGill University, presenting "Empty Objects: Serialization, Donkey Anaphora, and Extraction"
- Jan. 30, Fred Cummins, Northwestern University, presenting "Rate, Rhythm, and Pauses: The Temporal Macrostructure of Speech"
- Feb. 27, Ronald P. Schaefer, Southern Illinois University, presenting "On the Typological Properties of Possessor Positioning"
- March 11-13, a visit by Nikolai Dobronravin, Department of African Studies, St. Petersburg University, Russia
- April 6, Phil Lesourd, IU, (Anthropology) presenting "Derivation from Inflected Forms in Two Eastern Algonquian Languages"
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.
Stuart Davis
Steven Franks
Frances Ingemann
Recipients of Householder awards are:
- Tiffany Lynne Kershner for research in Malawi on ChiSukwa
- Maureen Bek-Ng Lee for research in Vancouver on Teochew tone and intonation
- Elizabeth Grace Winkler for research on Limon Creole (Costa Rica)
- Emmanuel Koffi Yankey for research on Nzema address forms
- HOT OFF THE PRESS! COAS Outstanding Teacher/Scholar Fellowships for the 1998 summer sessions: Keiichi Tajima, Hans-Joerge Tiede, Bushra Zawaydeh
- The Linguistics Department is pleased to announce that the Trustees of Indiana University have approved the promotion of Yoshihisa Kitagawa to Associate Professor with tenure.
- Congratulations to Hae-Kyung Wee, whose second daughter, Liana Song, was born Jan. 1.
Ph.D. degrees were awarded to the following students during the past six months:
- Jane Elizabeth Hardy, "Perceptions of Linguistic and Extra-Linguistics Skills of Non-native Speakers of English: A Study of University Faculty Attitudes" (Director: Harry Gradman)
- Youngchul Jun, "The Syntax-Semantics Interface of Genericity" (Director: Alice ter Meulen)
- Jae-Ick Park, "Minimal Word Effects with Special Reference to Swahili" (Director: Stuart Davis)
The following student defended his Ph.D. dissertation this semester:
- Donald Salting, "The Nested Subregister Model of Vowel Height" (Director: Stuart Davis)
M.A. degrees were awarded to the following students:
General Linguistics
- Emmanuel Koffi Yankey
- Susanna M. Behr
- Jeong-Hyun Choi
- Virginia Emily Ho
- Darcy W. Paquet
- Nancy Vander Kuyl
- Mark E. Vanest
- Andrea Gail Word
- Mary Ann Zolis
B.A. degrees with a major in Linguistics were awarded to the following students:
- Yoko Iizuka
- Chad Thomas Langford
- Valerie Ann Martinez
- Rolf David Rockliff
Robert Botne presented "Cognitive Schemas and Motion Verbs: 'Come' and 'Go' in Eastern Bantu" at the 29th Annual Conference on African Linguistics at Yale.
Stuart Davis and student Bushra Zawaydeh presented a joint paper on Arabic hypocoristics at the Symposium for Arabic Linguistics at the University of Illinois.
Ken de Jong and Anna Bosch (University of Kentucky) published their findings about the phonetics of stress in Barra Gaelic in an article titled "The Prosody of Barra Gaelic Epenthetic Vowels" in Studies in the Linguistic Sciences. De Jong also presented the results of pilot experimental work into the relationship between speech timing and syllable structure at the Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in San Diego. Also this spring, he presented two colloquia for the Department of Linguistics at the University of Illinois, one exploring the linguistic implications of his work on syllables, the second exploring functional factors evident in his work on secondary articulations in Twi, done jointly with Samuel Obeng.
Michael Gasser's paper with Linda B. Smith, "Learning Nouns and Adjectives: A Connectionist Account," will appear this spring in Language and Cognitive Processes.
Steve Franks coedited a book published by Michigan Slavic Materials, Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics: The Connecticut Meeting.
Yoshihisa Kitagawa presented a paper titled "Excorporation Revisited" in February at the University of Pennsylvania. In his syntax seminar this semester, he has been presenting his works exploring some possible future extension of the minimalist program.
Paul Newman wrote the overview article on "African Language Classification" in The Encyclopedia of Sub-Saharan Africa, edited by John Middleton, 1997. He and Martha Ratliff (Wayne State University) have received a contract from Cambridge University Press to edit a volume on fieldwork in linguistics.
Samuel Obeng's "An Analysis of the Linguistic Situation in Ghana" was published in African Languages and Cultures. Also by Obeng was "Indirectness in Proniminal Usage in Akan Discourse," in Journal of Language and Social Psychology. Obeng was a discussant at Preserving Ghana's Oral Heritage: A Personal Pathway Leading to the Global Network of Indigenous Knowledge Resource Centers, African Studies Program, IU. He presented "Language and Ethnic Identity in Sub-Saharan Africa" at the same conference. He was an invited speaker at Wars and Words: Political Change and Language Use in Africa, a special symposium held at Yale, and also presented "Language, Ethnic Identity, and the National Language Question in Ghana: An Analysis of Some Prejudicial/Stereotypical Stings in the Graffiti on Legon Walls" at the 29th Annual Conference on African Linguistics at Yale.
In March, Robert Port was a guest lecturer for a minicourse at Interdiziplinäres Kolleg-98, an interdisciplinary conference for artificial intelligence researchers held at Günne am Möhnesee, Germany. He gave a course of four lectures on rhythm, speech, and human cognition. He also gave a plenary lecture to all participants, "The Dynamical View of Cognition: Language and Other Temporal Structures." In addition, he gave lectures at both The German National Research Center for Information Technology and at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research at University of Zurich, Switzerland.
Natsuko Tsujimura has been editing The Handbook of Japanese Linguistics, partially funded by the East Asian Studies Center. It will be published this spring by Basil Blackwell. She wrote a chapter on lexical semantics for the handbook. Tsujimura received a grant from the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies to conduct research on "Causative Alternation and Lexical Semantics in Japanese." She just completed her third progress report as a research consultant for the MIT-Fujitsu Project, for which she has been a research consultant for two years.
Two faculty members will be on sabbatical leave for one semester each
during the next academic year. Yoshihisa Kitagawa will be away during the
fall semester. He plans to spend his leave in Japan. Paul Newman will be
away during the spring semester. He plans to spend this time in England,
with shorter periods in Holland and Germany.
Karen Baertsch presented "Onset Sonority Distance Constraints Through Local Conjunction" at the annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society.
Laura Knudsen, Adam Leary, Ahmar Mahboob, Mimoza Rista, and Sarah Sherry presented "Role Play as a Means of Collecting Production Data" at the 12th International Conference of Pragmatics and Language Learning, University of Illinois.
Mai Kuha presented her paper "Speakers' Intentions: Implications for Coding Procedures" at the International Conference of Pragmatics. Her paper "Competing Motivations for NP Order in Kenyan English" is being published in the journal World Englishes, vol. 17.
Corey Muench, Silvia Rodriquez (Spanish and Portuguese), and Jiyoung Yoon (Spanish and Portuguese) presented a paper "Beyond a Reasonable Doubt: Replicating and Revising Interlanguage Pragmatic Judgment Tasks" at the International Conference of Pragmatics.
Hae-Kyung Wee presented "Island Insensitivity of Focus and Wh-phrase" at the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics 17 at the University of British Columbia.
Elizabeth Winkler presented "Lexical and Morphological Borrowing in Limon Creole" at the American Association for Applied Linguistics in Seattle. Her paper "El cambio de codigos en el criollo limonense" (Codeswitching in Limon Creole) was accepted by The Journal of Linguistics and Literature.
Andrea Word and Kris Coburn (French and Italian) presented a paper "Assessing Interlanguage Pragmatics Comprehension: If the Data Fit, Question Them" at the International Conference of Pragmatics.
Bushra Zawaydeh presented "The Nature of Uvularization in Ammani Arabic" at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in New York City. With Stephan Frisch (Speech and Hearing) she presented "The Psychological Reality of Phonotactic Constraints" at the same conference. She presented "The Natural Class 'Guttural': Endoscopic and Acoustic Evidence," at the 1998 Conference of the Texas Linguistics Society: Exploring the Boundaries Between Phonetics and Phonology. At the same conference, she presented "A Sketch of Arabic Stress and Durational Structure" with Professor Ken de Jong. With Professor Stuart Davis, Zawaydeh presented "Hypocoristic Formation in Ammani-Jordanian Arabic" at the 12th Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics at the University of Illinois.