Linguistics News and Events RSS

Kira Hall wins 2009 Boulder Faculty Assembly Award
CU Linguistics associate professor Kira Hall has won a 2009 Boulder Faculty Assembly award for teaching excellence. Prof. Hall, who also holds an appointment in the CU Anthropology department, specializes in sociolinguistics, with a focus on the role of language in the construction of identity. Her research focuses on gender and sexuality, bilingualism and the role of language in nationalism and globalization. Her research activities include extensive fieldwork among liminal communities in Northern India. In addition to teaching the highly popular undergraduate courses Language and US Society and Language and Gender, she teaches graduate courses in sociolinguistics, advises a large body of doctoral students and serves as program director of the Graduate Certificate Program in Culture, Language, and Social Practice (CLASP). The Boulder Faculty Assembly, the representative body of faculty on the Boulder Campus, presents up to four faculty awards annually in each of three areas teaching, research and service.

CU Linguistics doctoral student Richard Sandoval wins Ford Foundation fellowship
CU Linguistics MA student Richard A. Sandoval has been awarded a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Diversity Fellowship. The Fellowship provides awards at the predoctoral, dissertation and postdoctoral levels to students who demonstrate excellence, a commitment to diversity and a desire to enter the professoriate. Sandoval will begin the CU doctoral program in Linguistics in the Fall of 2009. In his doctoral work, he will use computational linguistics, theories of second language acquisition and sociolinguistics to model the English-language development of Spanish speakers attending Southwestern urban high schools. Says Sandoval, "the rich sociocultural and linguistic [backgrounds] of the students makes such schools prime locations for the social construction of English structures that differ from the language variety known as Standard English".

CU Linguistics doctoral student Michael Thomas wins National Science Foundation grant
CU Linguistics doctoral student Michael F. Thomas has been awarded a National Science Foundation doctoral dissertation improvement grant for a project entitled, 'A Reference Grammar of Sakun'. The award will fund Thomas during five months of fieldwork in northeastern Nigeria. The Sakun language documentation project will produce a grammar of this endangered and undocumented Chadic language, which is spoken by approximately 15,000 people at the Sukur Cultural Landscape, a UNESCO World Heritage site. The Chadic language family constitutes over half the languages of the Afroasiatic phylum, but it is the least studied. Many members of this family, including Sakun, are threatened as Hausa gains currency in the region. Thomas anticipates that the project will build important institutional connections between the Sakun Development Association, the University of Colorado, Nigeria's National Commission on Museums and Monuments, UNESCO and the University of Maiduguri.

Andrew Cowell publishes first grammar of the Arapaho language
CU Linguistics Professor of French and Linguistics, Andrew J. Cowell, along with native Arapaho speaker Alonzo Moss, Sr., has published the first grammar of the Arapaho language, with University Press of Colorado. Arapaho is an Algonquian language, related to Cheyenne, Cree, Ojibwe, Massachusett and several other languages, but it has evolved in highly unusual directions since splitting off from the larger Algonquian group, both in its sound system and grammatical structure. The grammar provides documentation of these changes, which raise important general questions for the evolution of languages. The grammar complements an earlier collection of Arapaho texts published by Cowell.

Chad Nilep wins NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant for sociolinguistic research in US and Japan
CU Linguistics doctoral student Chad D. Nilep has won a two-year National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement grant for his dissertation project, "Hippo FamilyClub Language Learners in Japan and the USA", directed by Professor Kira Hall. The project is an ethnographic analysis of Hippo Family Club, an international foreign-language learning group. Using discourse analysis and fieldwork in Japan and the USA, Nilep will explore issues of identity in these unusual communities, which are defined by a shared dedication to multilingualism.

CU linguists win National Science grant for new-generation Hindi/Urdu Lexicon
CU Linguistics professors Martha Palmer and Bhuvana Narasimhan have been awarded a National Science Foundation grant, Collaborative Research: A Multi-Representational and Multi-Layered Treebank for Hindi/Urdu, to develop linguistic annotation for these two closely related languages of India/Pakistan. The project is a collaborative effort involving researchers at the India Institute of Technology in Hyderabad, India, the Universities of Washington and Massachusetts and Columbia University. It will produce a database of close to a million words of Hindi and Urdu annotated with syntactic structure (both dependency structure and phrase structure) and semantic-role labels (PropBank). The researchers will also create a process for automatically converting between the different representations. The first project meeting is scheduled for January 2009 in Hyderabad, India. Such efforts have led to significant advances in the efficacy of natural-language processing by providing training data for supervised machine-learning algorithms.

Martha Palmer receives new DARPA grants for research in computational semantics
Martha Palmer, CU associate professor of Linguistics and Computer Science, has received two new grants from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to perform semantic annotation of large language databases for machine translation and other natural-language processing applications. The aim of the first project is to expand Prof. Palmer's Propbank database for English and Chinese; the aim of the second is to build a pilot Propbank database for Arabic. The Arabic Propbank pilot project involves researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University, as well as CU Linguistics PhD student Aous Mansouri, who is serving as a research assistant on the project.

CU Linguistics faculty featured in CU Boulder news podcasts on world's vanishing languages
CU Linguistics professors Andrew Cowell, David Rood and Zygmunt Frajzyngier are featured in new CU podcasts. The CU Boulder podcast channel features official news and feature stories from the University of Colorado at Boulder. In the podcasts, the three researchers describe their work with endangered languages in Oklahoma (Wichita), Wyoming (Arapaho) and in Africa (Gidar). They explain the role of language documentation in the preservation of vanishing knowledge systems and cultures.

David Rood receives National Science Foundation grant for Lakota documentation
David S. Rood, CU Professor of Linguistics, has received a National Science Foundation grant that will underwrite large-scale video documentation of Lakota, an indigenous language of the northern plains with approximately 8,000-9,000 living speakers. The grant will provide full support to three Lakota speakers for three years each, starting in the Fall of 2007. The support packages will enable these students to earn the MA degree in Linguistics while assisting in the video documentation of everyday Lakota conversation. The Lakota documentation effort will join an array of research and outreach projects already underway at CU's Center for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the West.

Colorado Linguistics hosts Conference on Culture, Language and Social Practice
The program in Culture, Language and Social Practice at the University of Colorado at Boulder hosted the biannual CLASP Conference October 2-4, 2009. The conference featured workshops on conversation analysis, ethnography and the connection between sociolinguistic and sociological theory. Plenary speakers included CU professors Kira Hall and Bob Craig, as well as Makoto Hayashi of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and Christine Mallinson of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. The CLASP Program at the University of Colorado is an interdisciplinary forum for scholars who focus on the sociocultural and sociopolitical analysis of language. The CLASP Conference, now in its second year, is organized by graduate students in the CLASP program.