LGCU Welcome Workshop

The LGCU hosted its second annual Welcome Workshop, an informal conference that enables participating new students in particular to introduce themselves and share a bit of their research in a 15-minute talk.

Half of the new MA students opted to take part, along with Ph.D. students Ross Krekoski, Will Oxford, and LeAnn Brown. The presentations were interspersed with coffee, cheese, and pastries; and then followed by leftovers and an impressively lengthy period of standing around in the room and talking.

Qapirangajuq: Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change

This is a photo taken Oct. 21, 2010 after a private screening of the new movie "Qapirangajuq: Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change" at U of T before its official premiere Sat. Oct. 23. The movie screening was sponsored by the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation as part of a new series of events on the topic of northern security .

The photo shows the ABS 231 Inuktitut class which is being taught by Alana Johns and Saila Michael standing with the famous Inuit director Zacharias Kunuk (who co-directed this movie with Ian Mauro) in the middle. At least two of these students are undergraduate linguistics students: Michelle Yuan and Paul King.

Diane's visit to New Zealand

I am now in New Zealand as a visiting Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury, teaching syntax, meeting students, and taking part in field methods (Kiribati is the language and it has fascinating directional constructions and mysterious verbal suffixes). Plus meeting members of the Niuean community and doing a little field work on Vagahau Niue (Niuean). It has been an interesting time, with 348 earthquakes since I got here on Sept 14th (out of a total of 1448) until today, Oct 4th, 8 pm. It has been great to see a second Spring this year! I went to Wellington to give a talk too, where I saw Naomi and Jack's pictures in the Sociolinguistics Hall of Fame. Here is a picture of me with Ofania Ikiua, consultant extraordinaire for Vagahau Niue, and my co-author for two papers on Niuean. She is a senior analyst with the NZ Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs. During my time here, I have found out interesting things about Niuean cognate object constructions, focus, causatives and a little bit about pro-drop.