End of Term Parties!

Last week we celebrated the end of another successful term and year! This year has been a particularly busy year, so we had lots to celebrate! Tanya Slavin, Bettina Spreng, Elham Rohany Rahbar, Monica Irimia, and Anne St. Amand successfully defended their theses, and will be convocating in June.

We successfully hosted NELS 42 and MOT 2012 (as well as TULCon, which was hosted by SLUGS).

In mid-December, Alana Johns led a transcribing workshop in Nain Nunatsiavut (link to blog here: http://ukausivut.wordpress.com/), which was funded by her SSHRC research grant for "Beyond the Word".

Several of our graduate students and faculty members gave talks and presented posters at various conferences. Some of these include:

New Perspectives on Language Creativity: Composition and Recursion at UQAM in late September: Kenji Oda (who presented joint work with Alex Motut)

The Minimalist Program: Quo Vadis? - Newborn, Reborn, or Stillborn? at the University of Potsdam in early October: Alex Motut (who presented joint work with Kenji Oda)

The annual meeting of the LSA in Portland, Oregon in January: Radu Craioveanu, Elan Dresher, Monica Irimia, Yoonjung Kang (who presented joint work with Alexei Kochetov and two other collaborators outside of U of T), Andreea Kosa, Beth MacLeod, Naomi Nagy (who presented joint work with Joanna Chociej), Sali Tagliamonte (who presented joint work), and Keren Rice

OCP 9 at ZAS in Berlin, Germany in mid-January: Christopher Spahr

ACAL 43 at Tulane University, New Orleans in mid-March: Radu Craioveanu and Ross Godfrey

WSCLA 17 at the University of Chicago in mid-March: Richard Compton and Tanya Slavin

In December, our Christmas party featured "the largest permutation of F-Zero" (Cowper, pc), led and conducted by Elan Dresher, who led a two-hour sing-along.


This year's F-Zero included:

Elan Dresher: guitar, banjitar, harmonica, recorder, percussion,
Susana Béjar: violin,
Erin Brassel: trombone,
Sarah Clarke: violin,
Elizabeth Cowper: keyboard, classical guitar,
Daniel Currie Hall: bass guitar, cello,
Derek Denis: electric guitar,
Bobby Hsu: flute,
Bridget Jankowski: French horn,
Christina Kramer: clarinet, recorder,
Christopher Spahr: bass guitar, and
Michael Szamosi: percussion.

Congratulations to everyone on a successful year!

Photo credits: Christopher Spahr and Eugenia Suh