To make up for a longstanding failure to update this site, here are some of the developments of the last few months, all of which warrant congratulation. They are in no particular order.
I’ve no doubt forgotten something, so please don’t interpret this list as exhaustive. Corrections to follow, probably, along with apologies. But as always, congratulations all around.
- Tae Hendrik Kim successfully defended his MA thesis, On the Nature of Concessivity in Predicate Focus.
- He will begin UCLA’s doctoral program in linguistics this fall.
- Tae and Cara Feldscher presented the work on gestures that had so many of us excited over the last few months under the title ‘Semantically-constrained gestures: A case study of English yay (yea)’ at a conference at the University of Connecticut on gestures with the impressive name 'What’s the point?'.
- Haley Farkas finished her BA thesis, The Semantics of Vice Versa.
- She presented it at MSULC (the Michigan State Undergraduate Linguistics Conference). I don’t think it's an exaggeration to say hers was the only talk anyone there could possibly remember. (Is it bad to put feeble in-jokes on the website?)
- And she accepted Northwestern’s offer of admission to their doctoral linguistics program.
- Ai Kubota (e-Ai) successfully defended her dissertation, Adverbs of Evaluation in Japanese: A Conditional Account, and bid a sad adieu to her cozy Williams College job to explore greener pastures in Japan. (Correction: She will perhaps seek these greener pastures after a stint as a visiting scholar at Ohio State that begins this fall. Evidently Columbus is a sufficiently green pasture. And following the logic of this metaphor, she is apparently a grazing cow. That makes her the first of our distinguished alumni to work in this capacity.)
- Her paper on work related to her dissertation, ‘Transforming manner adverbs into subject-oriented adverbs: Evidence from Japanese’, just appeared in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, along with a reply to it by Tom Ernst.
- In the same issue of NLLT, there is a paper by Curt Anderson and some loser (‘Degrees as kinds’), along with a reply to it by Friederike Moltmann.
- Hannah Forsythe continued to tour the world with her work, this time with a poster at the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL) (‘Gradable path prepositions as measure-of-change functions’). While in Vancouver, she seems not to have encountered food items as notable as the earlier much-discussed fish soup of Tromsø (Norway).
- She also successfully defended her acquisition dissertation proposal.
- Hannah and Kali Bybel both got Dissertation Completion Fellowships from the College of Arts and Letters to help ward off starvation during the the difficult final months of dissertating.
- Ai Taniguchi (p-Ai) successfully defended her sociolinguistics comp paper on negation in Japanese (‘Investigation into the folk perception of negated tag exclamatives in Japanese’), which of course had a lot of semantically entertaining material in it despite the sociolinguistic focus.
- Gabe Roisenberg Rodrigues continued his own world tour with a talk at ConSOLE XXIII in Paris called ‘A unified analysis of at least’.
I’ve no doubt forgotten something, so please don’t interpret this list as exhaustive. Corrections to follow, probably, along with apologies. But as always, congratulations all around.
