Hail to the Chief!

Manchet can now report that our own Kersti Börjars, who currently serves as Associate Dean of the Faculty of Humanities (not to mention President of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain), has been appointed the new Head of the School of Languages, Linguistics, and Cultures, the larger entity within which the Department of Linguistics & English Language is housed. God bless the Queen!

Schultze-Berndt and Hildebrandt edit new Mouton series

Manchet has recently learned that colleagues Eva Schultze-Berndt and Kristine Hildebrandt have become the editors of a new book series in linguistic typology with Mouton de Gruyter, joining colleague Yaron Matras, already an editor of the Mouton series Empirical Approaches to Language Typology. The new series is entitled Languages of the World, and will have its first book appear in mid-2008.

Delia Bentley promoted

We received word this semester that Delia Bentley, a linguist in the Italian Studies Department who shares close ties with Linguistics & English Language (including having earned her PhD in this department), has been promoted to Senior Lecturer. (For those on the other side of the Atlantic, this is akin to promotion from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor in North American universities.) This comes on the heels of the publication late last year of her magnum opus, Split intransitivity in Italian. Congratulations, Delia!

17th Postgraduate Linguistics Conference

The 17th annual Postgraduate Linguistics Conference (7–8 Feb 2008) is taking shape and it’s looking very exciting! The schedule and abstracts are now up on the website, along with plans for a number of excursions, both in Manchester and outside of it. We’ll look forward to seeing you there!

Mycock’s Robins Prize paper appears in print

PhD alum and current British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in our Department, Louise Mycock, has recently had her paper “Constituent Question Formation and Focus: a new typological perspective” appear in print in Transactions of the Philological Society 105.2. This is the paper for which she was awarded the Philological Society’s R.H. Robins prize when she was a PhD student in the Department. Check out the paper here. Congratulations Louise!

Coling 2008 quickly approaching!

The 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics, to be held here in Manchester this August in the University’s snazzy new conference venue, University Place, is quickly approaching. The local organizer for the event is a fresh new member of the Department (if a seasoned face around the University, coming to us from the now defunct School of Informatics), Harold Somers. Check out the official countdown clock, along with other pertinent announcements here.

Richard Hogg Prize

The International Society for the Linguistics of English , of which our own David Denison is the incoming president, has set up an an annual essay prize named in honor of our deceased colleague Richard Hogg “for a paper on any research-related topic in English language or English linguistics.”

Zwicky on Denison on “substitute”

In the Language Log, here.

Workshop on affixes, clitics, and possessives

A workshop on affixes, clitics, and possessives in association with Kersti Börjars and David Denison’s AHRC grant on the topic has just been announced, and includes an all-star cast of speakers, including Cynthia Allen, Stephen Anderson, Liliane Haegeman, Dick Hudson, Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Benedikt Szmrecsanyi, Arnold Zwicky, and our own John Payne. Check out the linguistlist announcement or the associated school website.

Call out for 16th Annual Manchester Phonology Meeting

See here for details on this year’s get-together of the 24-hour party phonologists, which includes a special session on “Phonology and the mental lexicon.”