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

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.”

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].

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.

Seminar organizers Elke Philburn, Silke Scheible and Michael Ramsammy have worked out a cracking schedule for the seminar this year.  Manchet has been in the field, and delinquent in posting and attending, but you shouldn’t be—get all the details of upcoming seminars here.  The next one on 11 November features Manchester emigre Dan Everett (now of Illinois State) on “Non-endocentricity.”

Don’t miss colleague Yaron Matras’ upcoming seminar this week.  At 4.15,  on Thursday 5 Nov, you can find him in the “Transnationalism and the Politics of Language in Russia, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe” seminar series in Samuel Alexander A101 talking about “The role of language in the formation of a trans-national identity among the Roma.”

Manchester linguistics had a great representation at the 38th annual meeting of New Ways of Analyzing Variation, held this year in Ottawa, 22-25 October.  NWAVers were treated to talks by:  Erik Schleef (with Edinburgh colleagues Miriam Meyerhoff and Lynn Clark) on Sociolinguistics and immigration: linguistic variation among Scottish-born and Polish-born adolescents in Edinburgh; Elke Philburn on Analyzing patterns of glottalization in German stops; and Maciej Baranowski on On the role of social factors in the loss of phonemic distinctions.

A number of Manchester linguists are back from Edinburgh, where they participated in the 50th anniversary of the LAGB.  If you’d have been there, you’d have seen colleagues Serge Sagna, Nigel Vincent, Andrew Koontz-Garboden, and in the chair, Kersti Borjars, current LAGB president.  Manchester also had a good alumni representation.  This reporter spied at least Olly Bond, Louise Mycock, and Willem Hollmann.

Colleague Martina Faller is an invited speaker at Chronos 9 in Paris, going on right now.  The title of her talk is “Illocutionary and propositional evidentials and epistemic modals in Cuzco Quechua”.  Check out the rest of the (star-studded) program here.

Colleague Yaron Matras has just had a new book entitled Language Contact appear in CUP’s red series!  Check it out (and place your order!) here.  Congrats, Yaron!