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NEWSLETTER — DECEMBER 1999
In this issue:
Greetings from the 11th floor of Van Hise Hall!
I'd like to welcome you to the rebirth of the UW-Madison Linguistics
department newsletter. We're going to try to put the newsletter out twice
a year, but at the very least annually. I know: promises, promises...
but we are in fact going to try to keep it going this time.
Now, some of our alumni may be wondering, "Who is this person writing
this column?" The reason you may be wondering is that I'm just starting
my fourth year in the department (and my first year as chair)—so
those of you who graduated before Fall of 1996 will not know me. (You
can learn more about me by seeing the faculty section
below.)
There have been many other changes in the department as well since the
last newsletter. We were greatly saddened in 1996 by the losses of Professor
Valdis Zeps and Professor Peter
Schreiber. Professor Emeritus Murray Fowler
also passed away this last winter. But on a happier note, we have enjoyed
the presence of several visitors: Thomas Purnell
has been with us for the last two years, and this year we have Hooi
Ling Soh and Matthew Pearson teaching
for us.
We have many projects underway in the department this year. Among other
things, we're writing a graduate manual, considering significant changes
to our undergraduate major, continuing our series of colloquia and conferences,
and of course bringing back the newsletter. One of my goals as chair is
to make this department a bustling, active, exciting place to be. The
revitalization of the LSO has already done a lot to
make this happen—it's provided a wonderful sense of community to
the graduate students, and its numerous committees function to make sure
that students' voices are heard in the running of the department. Many
thanks to the students who have been organizing it.
In our last newsletter we asked you to help us out with donations to the
University specifically earmarked for the department. The response was
overwhelming and very gratifying. The funds have been used (and are still
being used) to sponsor talks, colloquia, and conferences, as well as for
other purposes (see the list of our activities and
the names of donors). We are grateful to all of
you for your past support and hope that you will continue to consider
giving to the Linguistics Department. Your gift does make a difference
in these times of financial hardship for public institutions. Every gift,
whatever its size, is needed and appreciated.
Donations can be made out to the University of Wisconsin Foundation, specifying
the Linguistics Department Fund #12540435, and sent to:
University of Wisconsin Foundation
1848 University Avenue
P.O. Box 8860
Madison, WI 53708?8860
Thank you again for all you've done for us. We wish you a happy, successful,
and prosperous new year—and may the Y2K bug not bite you!
Yours,
Monica Macaulay, Chair
on behalf of the Linguistics Department faculty
Faculty Profiles
Following you'll find descriptions of some of our current faculty. Sketches
of other faculty members will appear in future issues.
Hooi Ling Soh: Dr. Soh came to the Linguistics
Department in August 1999 as a visiting Assistant Professor. She received
her doctorate from the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT.
Her areas of interest include syntax, the phonology-syntax interface and
the syntax-semantics interface, and she works on Chinese dialects (Mandarin,
Hokkien and Shanghai) and Malay. Her recent publications include: Object
Scrambling in Chinese, Ph.D. dissertation, MIT (distributed by MIT Working
Papers in Linguistics, 1998); "Object scrambling in Chinese: A closer
look at post-duration/frequency phrase position," in Proceedings
of North Eastern Linguistic Society 28 (1998); and "Scrambling in
double complement constructions," in Proceedings of the Western Conference
of Linguistics (to appear).
Sheldon Klein: Dr. Klein has been a Professor
of Computer Sciences and Linguistics since 1973 (Ph.D. Linguistics, UC-Berkeley,
1963. B.A. Anthropology, UC-Berkeley, 1956.) He has numerous research
projects, and experience including: Artificial Intelligence Research Group,
System Development Corporation,1961-64; Research Investigator for Zellig
Harris (Transformations and Discourse Analysis Project), Linguistics Department,
University of Pennsylvania, 1959. He has done linguistic fieldwork with
the Kawaiisu Indians, 1958 (University of CA Survey of California Indian
Languages), and 1981-86 (Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research).
His most recent publication (Invited Plenary Paper) is "The Analogical
Foundations of Creativity in Language, Culture and the Arts: the Upper
Paleolithic to 2100CE," in Proceedings of The Eighth International
Workshop on the Cognitive Science of Natural Language Processing (1999),
edited by Paul McKevitt et al., Information Technology Centre, National
University of Ireland, Galway, pp. 20-32. For related details & other
references see: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~sklein/sklein.html.
Monica Macaulay: Dr. Macaulay joined the faculty
here at the UW in Fall of 1996. She got her degree at the University of
California-Berkeley, and spent seven long years teaching at Purdue University.
Her areas of specialization are morphology and American Indian languages,
and she is currently working on the Algonquian language Menominee with
a wonderful team consisting of two graduate students and five undergraduates.
J. Randolph Valentine: Dr. Valentine's professional
interests are in the study and promotion of Native American languages,
particularly the Algonquian languages of the Great Lakes region. His dissertation
was an extensive dialectological study of Ojibwe, involving the collection
of field data and the development of computer programs for analyzing and
presenting the materials he gathered. He has recently completed an extensive
grammar of a dialect of Ojibwe spoken along the shores of Lake Huron.
Recent work also includes assistance in the editing of a dictionary of
Northern Ojibwe for Ojibwe-speaking schoolchildren in northern Ontario,
and he is presently providing lexicographical assistance to another Ojibwe
dictionary project. He has also developed novel approaches to the presentation
of Algonquian textual materials, including computer programs for generating
inflectional concordances of richly inflected languages, and has published
a collection of annotated Ojibwe stories originally transcribed by Leonard
Bloomfield. He also has an avid interest in Algonquian ethnopoetics, particularly
the rhetorical structures associated with oral traditional myths, legends,
and historical accounts. "I consider it a great privilege to do the
work I do, and very much enjoy being a part of the scholarly community
here at the University of Wisconsin."
Recently Retired
Two of our faculty retired at the end of last year: Don
Becker and Andrew Sihler. Manindra
Verma will retire as of January, 2000. Here, Professors Becker
and Sihler discuss their retirement plans; we'll get Professor Verma to
write us something for a future issue.
Don Becker: Dr. Becker's main scholarly project
at the moment is working on his book on old German script, which is designed
to familiarize students of German with various styles of handwriting used
from the late 18th through the early 20th century. The samples in the
book will be printed with computer fonts that he has created based on
old documents. The book will be useful to students of German literature
who need to read correspondences as well as to Americans of German ancestry
who are researching their family trees and need to decipher handwritten
family records. Otherwise, his retirement plans include working on his
Spanish so that he can help his wife Carolyn with her book project. (They
went back to Argentina for a couple of weeks at the end of October.) They
now have four satellite dishes for pulling in foreign-language TV and
radio broadcasts which they are using to improve their comprehension skills.
He also hopes at some point to get back to writing computer programs for
teaching foreign languages. On the lighter side, he's playing accordion
with the University's Russian Folk Orchestra. Thus far he has been using
his trusty old piano accordion that he has had for nearly 50 years, but
he is trying to learn to play a "bayan" (technically, a b-system
chromatic accordion) which is more often used in Russian music.
Andrew Sihler: [editor's note: we feel that
this must be reproduced in first person, as Professor Sihler wrote it.
The prose so captures the essence of the man that we cannot bear to tamper
with it.] I arrived in Madison in late May of 1967, a Yale sheepskin (still
warm) in my white-knuckled grip. At that point I was younger than a number
of our graduate students. My part in the great scheme of things was to
teach general and diachronic linguistics and, upon his retirement, inherit
the mantle of Indo-Europeanist of Record from Murray Fowler.
My publications, which are not notable for their number, are largely
in Indo-European linguistics, starting with two long articles based on
my dissertation. More accurately, they are how I would have written the
dissertation if I had known, when I started it, what I knew when I finished.
In the process, I wound up being the world's greatest expert on Sievers-Edgerton's
phenomena. That is too bad, as there is little demand for such expertise;
and worse, in my (exceedingly well-informed) opinion, there never were
any such Indo-European phenomena in the first place.
Having Warren Cowgill as a teacher did not inspire self-confidence. He
was a mild and kindly man, but had a knack for making one feel ignorant
and foolish. His standards were high, his knowledge immense. (It didn't
get that way by accident. I remember him at a party, whether bored or
neglected I don't know, standing in a corner flipping through a deck of
Lithuanian vocabulary flash-cards which he had in his pocket for just
such emergencies.) It was only with his premature death, in fact, that
I felt enough confidence to tackle a really major project I had been considering
for a while, namely revising C.D. Buck's Comparative Grammar of Greek
and Latin. In the end, though, the 'revision' was so extensive that the
publisher thought the book was a tub on its own bottom. It is currently
in its sixth printing, I believe. (A fact which would be more flattering
if the printings weren't so small.)
I have a contract with John Benjamins to publish a sort of short crash
course in historical linguistics aimed at students in language departments
who find themselves studying (being made to study, actually) such subjects
as the comparative grammar of Greek and Latin or the history of German
or of English, but who have no linguistic background, syn- or diachronic.
It therefore presumes nothing on the part of a reader but interest, intelligence,
and a modicum of sophistication (but not about linguistics). I am currently
working on revisions.
In 1997-98 Ranko Matasovic, precocious occupant of the Indo-European
chair at the University of Zagreb, came to Madison on a Fulbright with
the object of 'studying' with me, a misconception since he is more knowledgeable
about the subject, despite his youth, than I am. But the association was
a wholly agreeable one, and on the basis of my handouts for Linguistics
777 and 778 Prof. Matasovic suggested that we collaborate on an unorthodox
sort of Introduction to Indo-European, consisting of brief historical
sketches and sample texts with fairly detailed syn- and diachronic commentary.
That is still very much in the works.
The two major events in my personal life since coming to Madison, I suppose,
were meeting John Tallman in late 1980, an attorney for the University
of Wisconsin System Administration; and buying a historic 'Prairie School'
house with him in 1984. We both like to cook. We both like cats. John
gardens, and the lovely grounds around our house are the product of his
imagination and hard work. (I pull weeds.) In addition to us two, our
household has included from time to time Harriet, Dudley, Leland, Dexter,
Anabel, Christian, Matthew, and Leigh. The first five are cats (or were;
only the last two are still alive), the last three are John's children.
Graduate Students
Our graduate students continue to present and publish up a storm...
Sang-Geun (Sky) Lee: "On The Relevance
of Mental Factors for Two Types of Noncausative Psych-verbs in Korean
and Their Reflection in Syntax and Semantics," The First International
Conference on the Mental Lexicon, September 1998; "Event NPs and
Perception Verb Complements in English and Korean," Mid-America Linguistics
Conference, October 1998, paper published in proceedings; "Two Types
of Noncausative Psych-verbs in Korean and Functional/ Postpositional Case
Particles," Southeastern Conference on Linguistics, November 1998;
"Causativity and two types of noncausative psych-verbs in Korean
and Japanese," Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference, August 1999,
paper to appear in Japanese/ Korean Linguistics Vol. 9; "Relativized
Mapping Hypothesis and the Interpretation of Indefinites," Western
Conference on Linguistics, October 1999, paper to be published in proceedings.
Marianne Milligan: "Menominee Vowel Harmony:
A Feature Geometric Analysis," Society for the Study of the Indigenous
Languages of the Americas summer meeting, Urbana, IL, July, 1999; "A
New Look at Menominee Vowel Harmony," 31st Algonquian Conference,
West Lafayette, IN, October, 1999. Miae Park: "Evidence for Phonological
Derivations: A Case of Opacity in Lushootseed," Mid-America Linguistics
Conference, October 1999, to appear in conference proceedings; "Evidence
for Derivations: A Case of Cyclicity and a Case of Opacity in Klamath,"
Eastern States Conference on Linguistics, November 1999, to appear in
conference proceedings. Jason Roberts: "Linguistically
Relevant Algorithms in Dutch and German Speech Recognition," Wisconsin
German Graduate Student Conference, Madison, March 1999; Review of: Klein,
Henny, 1998, Adverbs of Degree in Dutch and Related Languages, John Benjamins:
Amsterdam (to appear, Fall 1999, American Association of Netherlandic
Studies Newsletter); Other professional activities: (a) In addition to
fieldwork on Marshallese (phonology and morphology) I am working with
the Marshallese Language Commission of the Republic of the Marshall Islands
on a project which encompasses a Marshallese/ English dictionary, a Marshallese
dictionary, and implementation of a new orthography; (b) Organizer of
Pacific Islands Research Forum (PIRF), a study group of individuals from
various University departments with academic interests in Oceania. Gwangrak
Son: "Wh-movement and Specificity," Mid-America Linguistics
Conference, Lawrence, KS, October, 1999, to appear in conference proceedings;
"The Contrastive Study of Monomorphemic Reflexives: Japanese Zibun
and Korean Casin," to appear 1999 in MITWPL, Vol. 27; "Structures
of Reflexives," to appear 1999 in Harvard Studies of Korean Linguistics;
"Clausal Adjuncts Occurring Higher than NegP," 1998, International
Circle of Korean Linguistics Vol. 11, pp. 716?725; "Feature Geometrical
Rule Applications in Chaha," Linguistics Associations of Canada and
the United States XXV, 1998. Philipp Strazny:
"Phonologized Phonetics: Tonal Depression in Zulu," Holland
Institute of Linguistics, January, 1999, to appear in HILP 4 conference
proceedings as "Depression in Zulu: Tonal Effects of Segmental Features."
The LSO
After a year without any elected LSO officers, the linguistics graduate
students met during the summer of 1998 to draft a constitution for the
LSO. The new constitution created seven committees: Colloquium, Curriculum
and Instruction, Degree Programs, Library, Phonetics Lab, Student Relations,
and Information Technology. As well as two elected committee chairs for
each committee, the constitution created four more elected positions:
two co-presidents, a scribe, and a treasurer. Students volunteered to
fill these positions in 1998-1999, and then in the Spring of 1999 elections
were held for 1999-2000. The new constitution and the involvement of about
half of the graduate student body quickly showed results. During 1998-1999
several students and professors from the department gave talks as part
of the LSO Colloquia series. An LSO web page was designed. Many social
activities were planned that increased student involvement and increased
the opportunities to share ideas and discuss frustrations with fellow
students. Student representatives also gave input to the department in
regard to courses offered, the structure of the program and much more.
The LSO has much planned for the 1999-2000 academic year. We are proud
to have helped sponsor the visit by Morris Halle
in November and are currently working to bring other speakers to the UW.
There will be a working papers volume published in the Spring. As well
as several social activities, the Student Relations Committee will be
working on a tutoring list for lower level classes as well as study groups.
Recent Ph.D.s
Congratulations to our recently-minted Doctors of Philosophy:
1997
Naceur Amakhmakh
Jean Demerit
Bozena Tieszen
Sang-Hun Yoon
Leyla Zidani-Eroglu
1998
Charles Schleicher
1999
Kyung-Rahn Kim
Ahmad Sakarna
Kyung Sik Shin
The Main Office
Jackie Drummy continues to be the omniscient
one. Here's a message from her: Yes, yes it's true I am still here and
although many changes have taken place—some good, some bad—this
office remains the same. Many of the postcards and treasures you have
given me throughout the years still adorn the room and probably in the
same spot! I look at them and picture the individual that gave it to me
and wonder how you are doing. Many of you have kept in touch and it's
always great hearing from you. I apologize here if I haven't been so faithful
but since email is so readily available these days, I will leave my address
at the end of this message. I hope I will be around long enough to see
your offspring walk though these doors (whether they do linguistics or
not) and introduce themselves, and we can talk about the days their parents
were in school. I hope life has been good to all of you and please do
keep in touch. (email: jjdrummy@facstaff.wisc.edu—I'll
be waiting!!!!)
Talks & Colloquia
Thanks in large part to your generous donations, we have been able to
sponsor a number of speakers over the last several years, both from outside
the University and from within. These speakers have included:
- Noriko Akatsuka
- Emmon Bach
- Noam Chomsky
- Bjarke Frellesvig
- Morris Halle
- Sam Mchombo
- Tom Stroik
- Gabriella Vigliocco
In addition, in March of 1999, we had a memorial lecture for Professor
Valdis J. Zeps, given by Dell
Hymes. In November of this year we have had two big events: first,
a panel on the topic of linguistic fieldwork at which seven graduate students
(from Linguistics: Rebecca Kavanagh, Marianne Milligan,
Jason Roberts, Randi Stebbins, and John Taylor;
from German: Mike Lind; and from French and
Italian: Jim Schwarten) discussed their field
experiences. Second, we cosponsored (with the German Department) a phonology
roundtable on "The Representation-Rule Constraint Confluence."
This included talks by Musaed Bin-Muqbil, Fred
Eckman & Gregory Iverson, David Holsinger,
Paul Houseman, William Idsardi,
and Thomas Purnell. And finally, in early December,
Matt Pearson gave the first LSO faculty colloquium
of the year.
We thank the following alumni and other friends for their donations to
the Department of Linguistics:
Leslie Barratt
Carol Christensen
Anne Currier
Lisa Ganguly
David Gleekel
Michael Henderson
Honeywell Foundation
Rosella Howe
Lawrence Iaquinta
Brian Larson
Lucent Technologies
Alice Mathis
Margaret Naeser
Donna Riddel
David Schulz
Carolyn Seymour
Andrew Sihler
Debby Thyssen
Theodore Voth, Jr.
Betty Zeps
MADISON TALKS is a newsletter published twice a year by
the Department of Linguistics at UW-Madison.
This issue edited by Monica
Macaulay.
Send address changes and corrections to Jackie
Drummy.
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Questions
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