Summer announcements!

Congratulations all around!

• Congratulations to the fellowship recipients: Heeju Hwang, Yi-Hsien Liu, and Bin Yin for being awarded a USC Graduate School Dissertation Completion Fellowship; To Yu-Chi Huang for being awarded the the Morkovin/Manning Fellowship; to Hector Velasquez for being awarded a Del Amo Foundation Research Award from USC Dornsife College for 2011-2012; to Ben Parrell, Sergio Robles-Puente, Barbara Tomascewicz, Erika Varis, and Hector Velasquez, for receiving a Del Amo Foundation Research Award from USC Dornsife College for Summer 2011; to Katy McKinney-Bock for being awarded a Gold Family Graduate Fellowship from USC Dornsife College for Summer 2011; and to Sarah Ouwayda for being awarded the Middle Eastern Studies Program Summer Language Scholarship for Summer 2011.
• Congratulations to Erika Varis for giving birth to Remington Dean Doggett was born on April 20, 2011 at 6:21am. He weighed 5 lbs 13 oz (he's already at 6 lbs 1oz now!) and was 19 inches long.

Summer talks and travel:
Roumyana Pancheva gave an invited talk on "More on Than" on May 27th, in the linguistics colloquium at the University of California in Santa Cruz.

Priyanka Biswas, Mythili Menon, Syed Saurov, and Andrew Simpson are giving talks at FiSAL (Finiteness in South Asian Languages) on June 9-10, 2011, Tromsø, Norway:

• "Participial clauses in Bangla: an alternative account" Priyanka Biswas
• "Revisiting infinitives: the need for tense in Malayalam" Mythili Menon
• "Finiteness, negation, and the directionality of headedness in Bangla" Andrew Simpson and Saurov Syed

Parallel Domains: Workshop in Honor of Professor Jean-Roger Vergnaud

Thanks to Katy and everyone who helped, Parallel Domains was a great success. Current students, alumni, friends, and family, also gathered at the memorial on Sunday.

Good April News!

Congratulations to Ellen O'Connor for winning a 3-year fellowship from the National Science Graduate Research Fellowship Program!


Also congratulations to the second year cohort for submitting their first screening papers!

Spring Travel and Talks

Christina Hagedorn is presenting at the International Seminar on Speech Production in Montreal in June. She is also going to a summer school for robust methods in statistics in Bertinoro, Italy in july.

Hector Velazquez presented a talk at the 14th Annual Spanish Graduate Conference at Arizona State University, in Tempe, AZ. His talk (in Spanish) had the title "Elisión de un verbum dicendi como expresión sintáctica de un presupuesto pragmático en español"

Priyanka Biswas, Arunima Choudhury, Mythili Menon, and Syed Saurov all gave talks at the UMass South Asian Syntax and Semantics Workshop in March.

The crowd at UMass!

Hagit Borer spent the month of February traveling across South America, besides getting stranded in Buenos Aires, she taught a crash course in Curitiba, and spent a week in Rio de Janeiro. She is now home in Paris for the month before she goes to the Netherlands for three months... She took these pictures in Brazil:

Funky plant! (Brazil)

Tree with football sized fruit growing directly from the trunk (Brazil)

Roumyana Pancheva recently gave an invited talk on "Comparative Illusions" in March in the linguistics seminar/cognitive science series at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. She also gave an invited talk at the Cornell Linguistics Colloquium.

Human and bird homes near UIUC

Elsi Kaiser gave an invited talk on what hands and eyes can tell us about discourse representations in Language & Cognition at Harvard University.

Elena Guerzoni is giving an invited talk at the Generative Linguistics in the Old World in the University of Vienna in April.

Sarah Ouwayda is spending the semester as a visiting student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In April, she is giving a talk entitled "Cardinals Without Plurality" in the LFRG meeting at MIT, and a talk entitled "Agreement, Plurality, and the Structure of the DP" at Ling-Lunch at MIT.

Visiting Scholar: Sofiana Chiriacescu

We have a visiting scholar, Sofiana Chiriacescu, from the University of Stuttgart, Germany spending the Spring Semester 2011 at our department, working on an experiment in the language processing lab coordinated by Elsi Kaiser.

Sofiana is a Ph.D. Fellow and a researcher at the University of Stuttgart. Her main research interests are in semantics, pragmatics and psycholinguistics. She currently investigates the discourse structuring potential of indefinite noun phrases in Romanian, German and English. Sofiana graduated with an M.A. in German and English Linguistics and Literature from the University of Stuttgart in 2007 and a Diploma in German, English and Sociology form the University “Lucian Blaga”, Sibiu, Romania in 2003.

When not working, the things Sofiana enjoys most are outdoor activities (skiing, hiking, biking, playing tennis, gardening), spending time with her friends and family and cooking.