Koontz-Garboden in York

Colleague Andrew Koontz-Garboden is giving an invited seminar talk at the York linguistics department on Monday.  His talk is based on joint work with Itamar Francez (U of Chicago) and is entitled “Possession as predication in Ulwa and beyond.”

Two departmental colleagues nominated for teaching awards

Via the school newsletter:

Three members of staff in LLC [two of them in our department!--Manchet] have been nominated for the University’s prestigious Teaching Excellence Awards. Rob Drummond, a GTF in Linguistics and English Language who taught for many years in the University Language Centre, was nominated by students on the Level 1 Sounds of English course. The students wrote ‘he is entertaining, engaging and teaches us in an interesting way, because of this everyone loves the module!’ Nuria Yáñez-Bouza, a probationary lecturer who only joined the School in 2007, was nominated for her consistently high scores in University Evaluation Questionnaires and for her pioneering use of Turning Point voting pads.

Well done, Rob and Nuria!

Hoffman in London at LDLT2

PhD student Dorothea Hoffman was one among a star-studded cast of linguists in London two weeks ago at the second conference on “Language documentation and linguistic theory“, held at SOAS.  Her talk was entitled Orientation or Location? A Case-Study of Jaminjung and Kriol.”

Manchet understands that Dorothea also joined other Manchester colleagues in Leuven shortly thereafter for the 6th Australianist workshop (though no cyber-trail seems to have been left.)

Bentley at Cambridge Italian Dialect Syntax Meeting

Italian department colleague Delia Bentley has been announced as an invited speaker at this coming summer’s Cambridge Italian Dialect Syntax meeting, which, in actual fact, will not be taking place in Cambridge, but Berlin.  The keynote speaker list also features PhD alum Adam Ledgeway (Cambridge).  Get all the details here.

Payne in Transactions

The most recent issue of Transactions of the Philological Society features “The English genitive and double case” by colleague John Payne.  Check it out here.

Zara awarded CEEBL funding

Manchet has received word that Maya Zara, a third-year undergrad in our department, has been awarded a grant by the Centre for Excellence in Enquiry-based Learning to support a research project on space metaphors.  These CEEBL projects are independent of coursework and dissertations, and driven completely by students’ own curiosity and initiative.  She’ll be supervised by colleague Martina Faller.  Congrats, Maya!

Bermudez-Otero on Cyclicity on lingbuzz

Check out Ricardo’s recent paper on Cyclicity on lingbuzz and marvel at his number 2 status on the ‘top recent downloads’ chart!

Kim at CILLA 4

Colleague Yuni Kim represented the Manchester Latin Americanists at the 4th meeting of the Conference on Indigenous Languages of Latin America at UT Austin this past week with a talk entitled “Alternancias causativas en el huave de San Francisco del Mar.”

Phonologists in Nice

The program for the 7th Old World Conference in Phonology is out, boasting talks by two Manchester phonologists:  Yuni Kim on Diphthongization and contrast realization in Huave [pdf] and Patrycja Strycharczuk on Persistence vs. improvement in prosodic opacity [pdf].

Manchester linguists at “Variation and Change in Argument Realization”

The upcoming workshop ‘Variation and Change in Argument Realization,’ organized by Jóhanna Barðdal (University of Bergen) and Michela Cennamo (University of Naples) in May 2010, looks to be something of a Manchester affair, being co-organized by alum Cennamo, and with two of the five invited speakers by Manchester linguists, colleague Nigel Vincent and PhD alum Adam Ledgeway (now, Cambridge).  Get all the other details here.