Congratulations to faculty member Mary Beckman, who was awarded the 2015 ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement for her contributions in phonological acquisition and her leadership in the Association for Laboratory Phonology. [link to interview]
Congratulations to faculty member Judith Tonhauser, who has been selected to receive the Linguistic Society of America (LSA)'s Early Career Award for 2016 for her outstanding contributions to the field of linguistics, including the inspirational standard of her fieldwork, her theoretical contributions and her publications. The award will be presented at the Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., in January.
Faculty member William Schuler’s project, "EAGER: Incremental Semantic Sentence Processing Models," has been funded by a two-year $116,601 award from the National Science Foundation - Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS): Core Programs. Schuler, with colleagues (Lane Schwartz (UIUC), Timothy Miller (Harvard, Boston Children's Hospital), and Finale Doshi-Velez (Harvard)) also had the project, "Low Resource Languages for Emergent Incidents (LORELEI)," funded by DARPA at the Phase 1/Base level of $449,847 in the first year, with options for $55,316 in subsequent years. This computational linguistics project aims to enable rapid, low-cost development of the means to translate information from any language in support of emergent missions such as humanitarian assistance/disaster relief, peacekeeping or infectious disease response.
Graduate student David Mitchell (advisor: Brian Joseph) has been awarded $15,080 from the National Science Foundation for the project: Doctoral Dissertation Research: Aspect vs. affect in African American Vernacular English.
Faculty members Judith Tonhauser and Craige Roberts, with their colleagues Mandi Simons (UT Austin) and David Beaver (CMU), have been awarded $273,062 from NSF for their continuing collaborative research project, "What's the question? A cross-linguistic investigation into compositional and pragmatic constraints on the question under discussion."
Graduate student Jefferson Barlew won a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award from the National Science Foundation (PI Judith Tonhauser) for his dissertation project, “The interpretation of perspectival expressions in Bulu.”
Graduate student Rachel Burdin also won a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award from the National Science Foundation (PI Brian Joseph) for her dissertation project, “Changes in Intonation: Perception and Production.”
Undergraduate Rachel Castle won a Research Scholar Award of $1,000 for her proposed honors thesis, "Linguistic and cultural changes relating to kinship in the Columbus Somali community," advised by Professor Don Winford.
Undergraduate Andrew McInnerney also won a Research Scholar Award of $1,500 for his proposed honors thesis project, "Syntactic Survey of Parenthetical Topics in English,” advised by Professor Peter Culicover.
Congratulations to graduate student Tsz-Him Tsui and his wife Sandy Tam who welcomed their newest son, Luka Lokhei Tsui (徐樂曦) on September 1st.
Graduate student Murat Yasavul was awarded a Presidential Fellowship to pursue his dissertation research on the semantics of explicit questions and their answers in the understudied language K'iche' Mayan, using data collected through his fieldwork in Guatemala. Murat is advised by Carl Pollard and Judith Tonhauser. Murat joins fellow PhD students in the entering 2009 cohort, Cindy Johnson, Jane Mitsch and Rory Turnbull as recipients of this fellowship, the most prestigious scholarly award from Ohio State’s Graduate School.
Post-doc Bridget Smith (PhD, ’13) received a Book Launch award from the Office of Distance Education and eLearning (ODEE) for her forthcoming digital book project, “Analyzing the Sounds of Languages.” A Book Launch team from ODEE will provide five months of support and training in book project management for Ohio State authors as they write, design and create their highly interactive, digital books. Books will be ready for classroom use in autumn 2016.
Faculty members Kathryn Campbell-Kibler and Brian Joseph each won a 2015-16 Larger Grant Award from the College of Arts and Sciences, sponsored by the Office of Research. Word has it that the competition this year was "fierce." Brian will receive $9,000 for "The Herodotos Project: Towards an Ethnohistory of Ancient Peoples", and Kathryn $7,500 for the project 'See Your Speech: Cultivating Sociolinguistic Literacies."
An article about faculty member Micha Elsner's 'Where's Waldo' paper in Frontiers in Psychology with Alisdair Clarke (University of Aberdeen) and Hannah Rohde (University of Edinburgh) was recently published in the New York Times. The paper, about the use of landmarks in giving directions, has collected a press following in the United States and United Kingdom (23 articles and counting this month). [link to article]
Faculty Marie-Catherine de Marneffe and Lauren Squires (Department of English) have been awarded one of this year's five interdisciplinary team-teaching grants for their proposed course, English and Linguistics 5804, “Analyzing Language in Social Media.” From their course description: “The course gives students experience analyzing language in social media, covers theoretical issues arising in digital communication and provides hands-on practice at computational data analysis, applicable across fields. Students will gain an understanding of the sociolinguistic dynamics of online communication and the technical skills to conduct research on them.”
Congratulations to our Autumn 2015 PhD graduates! Jane Mitsch successfully defended Bordering on National Language Varieties: Political and linguistic borders in the Wolof of Senegal and The Gambia (Advisor: Brian Joseph; Committee members: Cynthia Clopper, Mark Moritz, Don Winford, Fiona McLaughlin (University of Florida)). Chris Worth successfully defended English Coordination in Linear Categorial Grammar (Co-Advisors: Carl Pollard, Bob Levine; Committee member: William Schuler)
