August 29, 2013

Congratulations, Dr. Clarke!

Congratulations to Sarah Clarke, who recently defended her thesis entitled "Aspectual Scope and Contrast in English and Japanese"! Sarah was supervised by Elizabeth Cowper, and her committee consisted of Susana Béjar, Robert Binnick, Daniel Currie-Hall, Alana Johns, Diane Massam, and external examiner Michiya Kawai (UWO). Celebrations included a party hosted by Elizabeth, with music provided by F-Zero.

Congratulations, Sarah!

L to R: Elizabeth Cowper, Sarah Clarke, and Michiya Kawai

A toast to the new doctor

Sarah with a subset of her committee
(Photos courtesy of Eugenia Suh)

Summer Workshops 2013

Following tradition, we held two informal (phonetics/phonology and syntax) summer workshops which both took place on Aug. 15 this year. The CRC-Sponsored Summer Phonetics/Phonology Workshop was organized by Yoonjung Kang, Alexei Kochetov, and Keren Rice, and included many interesting talks by members of our faculty, graduate students, and alumni. The program included the following talks:

  • Avery Ozburn & Alexei Kochetov: Long-distance and positional constraints in Lezgian laryngeal harmony
  • Peter Jurgec & Tina Razboršek: Opaque interactions in Šmartno Slovenian
  • Christopher Spahr: Confronting the European Portuguese low vowel distinction
  • Phil Howson: An EMA examination of the Czech trill-fricative
  • George Nagy & Naomi Nagy: What R we hearing?
  • Marisa Brook: Intersecting phonotactic restrictions and their perceptual effects
  • Yu-Leng Lin: Nasal harmony with opaque segments
  • Vincent DeCaen: Coffee tomorrow?: A Generative-Masoretic approach to Tiberian gutturals and sonority
  • Joanna Chociej: The role of sonority in Polish vowel‐zero alternations
The talks were held in BA 1220, and lunch was served in the lounge.

(Photo credit: Eugenia Suh)

Break time
(Photo credit: Emily Clare)

The second workshop was Two BE (or not two BE), a follow-up to the Practical BE-Keeping (BE-lated) workshop which took place in March. This workshop followed the same structure as the first one, where attendees came up with questions, broke off into groups to discuss the questions that interested them the most, and then came back together to present a review of what was discussed.



(Photos courtesy of Kenji Oda)

Thank you to all of the organizers and attendees for making both workshops a success!