Linguistics News and Events RSS

Linguistics Department to hold graduate recognition ceremony
The Department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado at Boulder will hold a graduate recognition ceremony on Friday, May 11 at 11:00 AM, following the university ceremony, in Hellems 252. A reception in an adjacent room will follow. Department chair Dr. Zygmunt Frajzyngier will preside as Department faculty honor 22 BA graduates, one BA/MA graduate, 15 MA graduates and 4 doctoral (PhD) graduates. Faculty advisors will be on hand to describe the BA Honors theses, MA thesis and doctoral dissertations completed by Linguistics graduates. Family and friends of graduating students are strongly encouraged to attend as the Department celebrates the achievements of one of its largest graduating classes.

CU Linguistics ranked by NRC in top 15 of US linguistics programs
In its 2010 survey of American doctoral programs, the National Research Council has placed the Department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado at Boulder in the top quarter of American linguistics programs. Based on an overall measure of excellence that combines factors like publication rates, faculty honors and PhD graduation rates, CU Linguistics was ranked thirteenth out of 52 linguistics programs in the country. CU Linguistics is one of only 2 units in the CU Social Sciences division to rank in the top 20 in their respective disciplines. The NRC operates under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine. The NRC study of doctoral programs at more than 200 US universities is considered the gold standard of rating systems by the academic community: it offers a much more detailed and comprehensive assessment of PhD programs than do popular ranking systems.

Colorado Linguistics to participate in Western Regional Graduate Program
The Colorado Linguistics graduate program has recently been selected for inclusion in the Western Regional Graduate Program (WRGP). Through WRGP, graduate students who are residents of 15 participating states may enroll in select programs at public institutions like Colorado Linguistics on an in-state resident tuition basis. The following states currently participate in the WRGP: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. If you are currently a non-resident of Colorado, believe you are eligible and would like to apply for the WRGP benefit, contact Sally Ingraham, Tuition Classification Officer, at sally.ingraham@colorado.edu or (303) 492-0907.

CU Doctoral Student Jenny Davis wins Cloud Fellowship at Yale
Colorado Linguistics doctoral student Jenny L. Davis, a member of the Chickasaw nation of south-central Oklahoma, has been awarded the Henry Roe Cloud Dissertation Writing Fellowship at Yale University. The fellowship is provided through the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in conjunction with the Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders. Davis will be spending the academic year at Yale next year, with the support of a full annual stipend, full access to Yale facilities and her own office space. In making the decision, the committee reviewed a preliminary chapter of Davis''''''''s dissertation, one of her forthcoming publications and other supporting materials. The Henry Roe Cloud Fellowship honors the legacy of Henry Roe Cloud, a member of the Winnebago Nation of Nebraska and graduate of Yale College, 1910. Cloud was a tireless critic of federal Indian assimilation programs and a vocal proponent of increased educational opportunities for Native Americans.

CU Doctoral student Nicholas Williams wins Fulbright Award
Colorado Linguistics PhD student Nicholas Williams has been awarded a 2011-2012 Fulbright research grant to conduct 10 months of dissertation fieldwork in eastern Indonesia, on the island of Alor. Williams will be documenting Kula, an endangered Papuan language. Kula is one of about 20 Papuan languages spoken on Alor and the neighboring islands of Pantar and Timor. Spoken some 1,000 miles from mainland Papua, these languages comprise the proposed Timor-Alor-Pantar language family, claimed to be a branch of Trans New-Guinea. Outside of basic grammatical descriptions and dictionaries, little previous work has targeted these languages. Williams''''''''''''''''s work aims to provide both a good basic description and a culturally informed record of the Kula language by focusing on language use in everyday interaction. The goals of the project include developing a corpus of annotated video documents, a grammatical description and lexicon based on these documents, and a deeper look at particular topics related to Kula language use in interaction (deixis, turn taking, etc.).

Kira Hall wins 2010 Provost Faculty Achievement Award
Linguistics Associate Professor Kira Hall was selected by a campus committee of faculty colleagues to receive a Provost Faculty Achievement Award. Her nomination originated in the Linguistics department and was forwarded to the campus committee by the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. In selecting Prof. Hall for this award, the faculty committee noted that she had completed a body of important work on the subject of language and identity. The award letter states, "Working with your collaborator, Professor Mary Bucholtz of the University of California, Santa Barbara, you have charted a course for sociocultural linguistics and helped us understand how identity arises within linguistic interactions". Dr. Hall received the award from Interim Provost Russell L. Moore at the Fall Convocation event on October 15, 2010.

Martha Palmer wins 2010 Boulder Faculty Assembly Research Award
Martha Palmer, CU Professor of Linguistics and Computer Science, has won a 2010 Boulder Faculty Assembly award for excellence in research. The award recognizes Professor Palmers stature as one of the foremost computational linguists in the world, and a preeminent figure in the field of computational semantics. Dr. Palmers research concerns the representation, acquisition, and use of semantic information in computer systems that process language, with a particular focus on the role of verb semantics in such systems. Dr. Palmer has been actively involved in research in natural language processing and knowledge representation for over 20 years, beginning with her pioneering doctoral work at the University of Edinburgh on the use of lexical conceptual structures for driving the semantic interpretation process. This work provided the basis for the highly successful text-processing system, Pundit, built at Unisys during the 1980s and funded by the government agency DARPA. This system combined semantic and pragmatic processing in innovative ways that enabled sophisticated reference resolution and temporal analysis, and led to insights into the use of computational semantics that have continued to inform her research at the University of Colorado. Since her arrival at CU, Dr. Palmers research has been funded by a wide array of grants from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense and industry sources. She currently has five grants in force, totaling approximately $2 million. The Boulder Faculty Assembly represents the faculty on the Boulder Campus. It presents up to four faculty awards annually in each of three areas teaching, research and service.

Lise Menn publishes new psycholinguistics textbook
Lise Menn, Professor Emerita of Linguistics, has published a new textbook, Psycholinguistics: Introduction and Applications, available from Plural Publishing. The book provides an introduction to current thinking on how our brains process language in speaking, understanding and reading. It is a completely integrated, self-contained account of psycholinguistics and its clinical and pedagogical applications, set in a unifying framework of the constant interplay of bottom-up and top-down processing across all language uses and modalities. The book also includes a multimedia CD with audio files illustrating phenomena like categorical perception and the ‘phoneme restoration effect', an x-ray video of normal speech, audio files of dialect variation, audio samples of several kinds of disordered language, and a video interview with aphasic speaker Shirley Kleinman.

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.

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.