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NEWSLETTER — DECEMBER 2000
In this issue:
Dear friends of the Linguistics Department,
It is finally spring in Wisconsin… despite snow on April 11th. The
department has had an eventful semester, with numerous talks and the hiring
of two (count them, two!) new faculty members. Details on the talks and
so forth appear below. Our two new hires are both phonologists: Marie
Hélène Côté, from MIT, and Tom
Purnell, from the University of Delaware (and who has been teaching
here in our department for the last two and a half years). In the fall
issue of the newsletter we will give you more details on both of these
wonderful people. In the meantime just let me say how excited we are to
have them joining our faculty.
I also want to take this chance to thank the generous people who have
sent in donations for our colloquia and other activities (including this
newsletter). If you're interested in emulating them, the address is: University
of Wisconsin Foundation, 1848 University Avenue, PO Box 8860, Madison,
WI, 53708-8860. Specify the Linguistics Department fund #12540435.
Thanks, and have a good summer. We'll be sending out another (longer)
newsletter during the fall semester.
Monica Macaulay, Chair
News and Notes
- Our undergraduate program continues to grow… we now have 31 Linguistics
majors! This is-as far as we know-a departmental record. And they are
an interesting bunch of people. Of the 31, 17 are female and 14 are
male. Ten of them are double (or triple!) majors, with second fields
like German, French, Computer Science, Communicative Disorders, Scandanavian
Studies, and Psychology. And they are a smart bunch, too, with above-average
GPAs. (But what else do you expect???)
- Congratulations to Yafei Li for receiving
a Vilas Associate Award. This award will give him two years of summer
support, plus a generous research allowance for two years.
- Monica Macaulay and three undergraduates
have been awarded a Wisconsin Idea Fellowship (a fellowship for outreach
projects). They will produce a pedagogical videotape on the Menominee
language using the annual pow-wow as a topic. The undergrads are April
Winecke (a Linguistics and Anthropology double major), and Rian
McSwain and Zach Brott (both in Communication
Arts).
Faculty Profiles: Matt Pearson
Matt Pearson is a graduate student from UCLA and a visiting lecturer
in the department for the 1999-2000 academic year. He normally resides
in West Hollywood, California, where he has been working for the last
couple of years on his soon-to-be-completed ("I swear!") dissertation
on word order and morphology in Malagasy. His interests include syntactic
theory (especially phrase structure), event structure and theta-role mapping,
word order typology, topic/focus structure, Austronesian morphosyntax,
and the morphology-syntax interface. He also dabbles in phonology and
morphological theory, and is keen to explore the field of child language
acquisition (in particular, the acquisition of word order and functional
structure) when he has some time to spare. Although his graduate work
has mostly been theoretical in nature-involving various attempts to apply
Richard Kayne's Antisymmetry Hypothesis to Malagasy clause structure-his
first love is fieldwork and 'wallowing in data' from 'exotic' languages.
His ambition is to write a reference grammar of an endangered language
when he grows up.
Matt has given invited talks here at the University of Wisconsin, as
well as at MIT, Cornell, and the University of Tromsoe in Norway, and
will be giving a paper in May at the Workshop on Antisymmetry Theory (Cortona,
Italy), sponsored by the University of Pisa. Recent publications include
"Two Types of VO Languages" (to be published by John Benjamins
in the volume The Derivation of VO and OV, edited by Peter Svenonius);
"Tense-marking on Malagasy Obliques and the Syntax of Telic Events"
(to be published by Kluwer in the proceedings of the 6th annual Austronesian
Formal Linguistics Association Conference, edited by Carol Smallwood and
Katharine Kitto); and "Feature Inheritance and Remnant Movement:
Deriving SOV Order Under the LCA" (published in Syntax at Sunset
2: UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics #3, edited by Gianluca Storto).
Talks
On March 9th, John Baugh of Stanford University
gave the Hilldale Lecture in the Humanities. His talk was titled "Linguistic
Discrimination and the Quest for Fair Housing." Jenny
Saffran of the Psychology Department gave a talk on March 21st
on "Language Acquisition: The Role of Constrained Statistical Learning."
Marlys Macken is organizing the Southeast Asian
Linguistics Conference for May 5-7 (we'll have her write up a report on
that for the next newsletter). And finally, a talk by Visiting Professor
of German Thomas Becker is planned for mid-May.
The LSO
The Linguistics Student Organization is putting together a volume of
working papers, which will contain six articles by Linguistics Department
graduate students. Contents and an order form will be available in the
fall newsletter.
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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