Morphosyntactic categories and the expression of possession

The Germanic possessive –s project (PIs Kersti Börjars and David Denison; Postdoc researcher Alan Scott) is hosting a workshop on 3–4 April on “Morphosyntactic categories and the expression of possession.”  Among the distinguished list of invited speakers is one of own noun phrase gurus John Payne.  All the details below the fold (via the LAGB list).

Vincent in Cyprus

Colleague Nigel Vincent, apparently jealous of all the sun John Payne will be soaking up in Spain, has one-upped him, having accepted an invitation to give a talk in September at the 7th Mediterranean Morphology Meeting in Nicosia, Cyprus.  Details here.

Vincent in Cambridge

Colleague Nigel Vincent is an invited speaker at the 4th Cambridge Italian Dialect Syntax Meeting being held in late June in, well, Cambridge (where else?).  Details (including the call for papers), via the Linguist List, below the fold.

Payne in Spain!

But no need to call the GP or apply plasters!  It’s our own John Payne as an invited speaker at a conference in Vigo, Spain on “The Structure of the Noun Phrase in English” in October.  Check out the call for papers on the Linguist List here and the conference website here.

Welcome Erik and Yuni!

Manchet returns from its (overindulgent!) holiday hiatus with a welcome to two new permanent members of academic staff, who have joined us effective the first of January.  Erik Schleef (PhD, U. of Michigan, 2005) joins us via the Linguistics and English Language Department at Edinburgh as our new Sociolinguist/English Language specialist.  Yuni Kim (PhD, U. of California, Berkeley, 2008 ) is our new phonologist/phonetician, joining us from UC Berkeley, where she’s just finished her PhD.  No word yet on what offices they’ll occupy, so, unfortunately, Manchet can’t give them a proper welcome outside their office door.  In lieu of this, Manchet is donning his e-bard hat and offering the traditional Mancunian ballad below in their honor.

(Note:  Manchet, being keenly aware of Gricean subtleties in his posts, appreciates that the idea of “improvement” might imply a relatively low beginning.  Manchet hereby wishes to cancel that implicature, asserting, as evidenced by our smashing RAE results, that we start from an already extraordinarily high mark, and that the addition of Erik and Yuni only makes us stronger.)

Eighteenth Century English Grammars Project

A new project website has been launched for colleague Nuria Yáñez-Bouza’s British Academy project with María Esther Rodríguez-Gil on Eighteenth Century English Grammars.  Check out the details here.

Wegener PhD defense!

Eva reports that postdoc colleague Claudia Wegener successfully defended her PhD on 15 December in Nijmegen.  Details:

She very calmly (or so it seemed from the outside at least) answered questions from the “corona” of examiners which included Leon Stassen, Bernard Comrie, Nikolaus Himmelmann, Laurence de Vries, and Kees Hengeveld, and was awarded a “cum laude” i.e. a distinction, which is relatively rare in the Netherlands, for her Grammar of Savosavo. And we had a great party too.

Well done, Claudia!