Matras to advise Swedes on quality teaching

Colleague Yaron Matras travels to the University of Linköping, Sweden, tomorrow, by invitation of the Graduate School for European Languages and Cultures. The School is setting up a graduate programme in Romani studies, and has invited Matras to advise the Swedish colleagues on aspects of curriculum design and delivery. Here in Manchester, Matras has been directing a course unit on Romani Linguistics for over twelve years now. The course unit has been praised both by students and by external examiners for its innovative and quality design. Students taking Romani Linguistics are involved in fieldwork and make use of, and contribute to, the audio visual and online database resources developed by the Romani Project. In Linköping, Matras will present a Swedish-language version of the Project’s teaching and learning DVD-ROM on the Romani language. He will also give two lectures, one on Language Contact and the other on English Romani, the topic of his most recent book that is due to appear later this year.

Löwenadler on Swedish adjectives in Morphology

Postdoc John Löwenadler has a new paper entitled “Restrictions on productivity: defectiveness in Swedish adjective paradigms” in the journal Morphology.  You can download the paper here and take a look at the abstract below the fold.

Yáñez-Bouza in Paderborn

Colleague Nuria Yáñez-Bouza will be visiting Paderborn University (and previous visiting colleague Eva Berlage) on the 26th of January to give a talk on “Grammar Myths. Prescriptive Traditions in English.”  Details here!

Yáñez-Bouza, teaching technology expert!

Check out colleague Nuria Yáñez-Bouza on “Turning Point”, here!

Revealed! Head of department on snow day!

Manchet is happy to publish the following photo, just acquired at a bargain basement price from a paparazza (one who moonlights as the head of school), of our head of department enjoying a university sanctioned snow day!

Manchester’s postgrad phonologists go places!

Manchet is reliably informed that Manchester’s postgrad phonologists will be busy strutting their stuff all over the world in 2010.

One of them is Helen Buckler. Helen graduated this autumn with an MA in Languages and Linguistics. She wrote her dissertation under Ricardo’s supervision on ‘The phonology of word-level suffixes in German and Dutch’; this, we gather, is soon to be released on the ROA.  Helen has now gone to the Max Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics at Nijmegen, where she is pursuing a doctorate with a full scholarship. Manchet has heard
gossip that Helen enjoys a plush office all to herself at that high-powered institution!

This month, AHRC-award- and Walters-Scholarship-holder Patrycja Strycharczuk, who joined us last September fresh from an MPhil in phonology at the University of Tromsø, will be busy crisscrossing the Atlantic. Having presented a paper at the CUNY conference on the foot last January, Patrycja will return to New York next week to give a talk on ‘Word-boundary effects in Polish laryngeal neutralisation’ at the CUNY conference on the prosodic word. When she’s back on this side of the pond, Patrycja will be off to Nice for a presentation on ‘Persistence vs improvement in prosodic opacity’ at the Old World Conference in Phonology 7. There she will be joined by our colleague Yuni Kim, who will be talking about ‘Diphthongization and contrast realization in Huave’.

Finally, Manchet has just heard that fellow AHRC-award holder Michael Ramsammy will also be crossing the pond in March: he’ll be giving a talk entitled ‘Place of articulation effects in Spanish nasal codas: An experimental approach’ at the 40th Linguistics Symposium on Romance Languages in Washington.

This is not all: we have it on good authority that further papers at major international conferences (not least our very own Manchester Phonology Meeting) are being planned. Manchet will keep you posted!

Richard Hogg prize

[Lovingly pinched from the Linguist List here.]

Richard M. Hogg Prize 2010

The International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE) offers an
annual Richard M. Hogg Prize for a paper on any research-related topic in
English language or English linguistics. The closing date for 2010
submissions is 31 March 2010.

Richard M. Hogg:

Richard Hogg was Smith Professor of English Language and Medieval
Literature at the University of Manchester from 1980 until his death in
2007. He was the General Editor of The Cambridge History of the English
Language (6 vols, 1992-2001), one of the founding editors of the journal
English Language and Linguistics, and well known for his work on Old
English, on phonology, and on English dialects. A list of Professor Hogg’s
publications is accessible from this database at the University of Manchester:

http://publications.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/ViewAuthorDetails.aspx?UserKey=4153|SSL

It is hoped that his History of English dialectology and Grammar of Old
English, 2, Morphology will be completed by friends and colleagues.

Kim in Baltimore

Colleague Yuni Kim is representing our department at this year’s Linguistic Society of America meeting in Baltimore, giving a presentation at the concurrent meeting of SSILA (Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas) on “Comparing Mesoamerican areal features in two varieties of Huave.”  You can read her abstract, along with all the others at this year’s LSA in the meeting handbook, here.

Atintono awarded ELDP grant

Manchet received word over the holiday break that PhD student Sam Atintono has been awarded an ELDP grant to carry out fieldwork on Gurene, an endangered Gur language spoken in Ghana, where he hails from.  Word has it that he’ll be leaving at the end of this month, returning to Manchester in the autumn.  Congratulations, Sam!

You can read about this, and other ELDP grantees, in the 2009 newsletter, here.

Guy Deutscher makes Manchester academic home

Manchet is happy to report that Dr Guy Deutscher has joined the department as Honorary Research Fellow. Guy is a historical linguist and language typologist who has been working on various aspects of syntactic change, complexity in morpho-syntax, as well as language and culture. He is a specialist in Akkadian, which is the topic of his first book, and has extended his international reputation to the popular community of readers through his book The unfolding of language. His latest book, Through the language glass, is about to be released.