News Archive
(*Please see the front page for more recent news items.)
Invited Speech at Cultural Event
(October 19, 2012) Graduate Student Holman Tse is an invited guest speaker for the Pittsburgh Somali Bantu Cultural Celebration this Sunday, October 21st at the O'Hara Student Center (4024 O'Hara St) on campus. He will speak about his current research on Kizigua, an underdocumented language that he started working on as part of the Field Methods course taught by Dr. David Mortensen.
Presentation at SLRF
(October 9, 2012) Ph.D. student Mike Olsen will present his paper co-authored by Alan Juffs entitled "The Effect of Animacy on Pronominal Object Clitic Distinction in L2 Spanish". The presentation will take place on Sunday, October 21 at SLRF in Pittsburgh, PA.
Conference Presentation
(October 3, 2012) Ph.D. Candidate Lauren B. Collister will team up with Travis Ross from Indiana University to present their interdisciplinary paper "Social systems in virtual worlds: Using the Institutional Analysis and Design (IAD) framework to analyze raid loot behavior in World of Warcraft". The presentation will take place on Friday, October 19, at Meaningful Play 2012 in Lansing, MI.
Ling Major in SCIENCE 2012 Undergraduate Researcher Poster Reception
(September 24, 2012) Congratulations to Joseph Petrich, a linguistics junior, whose work was selected for SCIENCE 2012 Undergraduate Researcher Poster Reception. He has been working with Dr. Alan Juffs and Dr. Na-Rae Han on analyzing ELI student essays using NLP (natural language processing) technologies. The reception will be held on October 4 from 5 pm to 7 pm in Alumni Hall's Connelly Ballroom.
Upcoming Yinzling Events
(September 18, 2012) Yinzling, the undergrad club for the linguistics department, is hosting several events. The first one is a movie night on September 20 (Thu): "Motorcycle Diaries" in Spanish, at CL Room 216 starting at 8:30 PM. On September 24 (Mon), Claude Mauk will be giving a Linguistics Grad School Info Session (CL Floor 28 Conference Room at 8:30 PM). On October 3 (Wed) 1-3pm, a Yinzling coffee hour will be held at Penera on Forbes (VIP room). On October 15 (Mon), there will be a second Yinzling Meeting (CL Floor 28 Conference Room/Lobby at 8:30 PM). Everyone interested in linguistics is welcome!
Journal Publication
(September 12, 2012) Graduate student Katherine I. Martin published an article in Studies in Second Language Acquisition entitled "The roles of phonological short-term memory and working memory in L2 grammar and vocabulary learning".
Presentations of Work on Language and Social Media
(September 11, 2012) PhD students Lauren B. Collister and Fawn Draucker will present their work entitled "To RT or not to RT: Alignment and participation structures on Twitter" at Infosocial: A Media, Technology & Society Conference at Northwestern University on October 12-13. Fawn also recently presented a paper entitled "Participation structures in Twitter interaction: Arguing for the broadcaster role" at the 11th Conference of the European Society for the Study of English at Bogazici University in Istanbul, and will present "Localizing place in a global space: Ratification of audience through place on Twitter" at the 2012 Conference of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport in New Orleans, November 7-10.
Fall 2012 Colloquium Series
(September 10, 2012) A tentative schedule for the Fall colloquium series has been posted. Please note that the colloquia will be held not in CL 332, but in CL G8.
Undergrad Wins FLAS Scholarship
(July 30, 2012) Congratulations to Steve Sloto, Linguistics sophomore, for being awarded a Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) Scholarship from the Russian and Eastern European Studies Center to continue his studies in Turkish. Steve will be in his second year of study in the language. Keep up the good work, Steve!
ELI Second Language Acquisition Symposium
(June 20, 2012) 2012 ELI Second Language Acquisition Symposium will be held on Saturday, July 7, 2012 from 9:00 – 3:00. The symposium is a great opportunity to learn about the research in second language acquisition that is being done using data from the University of Pittsburgh’s English Language Institute’s ESL classes. Please see this flyer for more information.
Article by a Ph.D. Student
(June 19, 2012) Ph.D. Candidate Lauren B. Collister published an article in Discourse, Context, and Media entitled "The discourse deictics ^ and <-- in a World of Warcraft community."
New Graduates
(May 2, 2012) Congratulations to our new graduates, which include over thirty undergrads and thirteen graduate students. The linguistics faculty especially welcome eight new PhD's: Roberto Aranovich, Carrie Bonilla, Brian Brubaker, Benjamin Friedline, Chan (Derek) Ho Leung, Pei Sui (Zoe) Luk, Wendy Martelle, and Mary Lou Vercellotti.
Robert T. Henderson Award
(April 16, 2012) Congratulations to Bill Price, this year's winner of Robert T. Henderson Endowment Fund Award. Please join the department and the Henderson family for the award reception at 2:30pm on April 16 (Mon) at RHLMC.
Department to Co-Host SLRF 2012
(April 12, 2012) The department will be co-hosting this year's SLRF (Second Language Research Forum) on October 18-21, 2012. SLRF 2012 is organized by graduate students and faculty from many institutions around Pittsburgh: the Department of Linguistics, the Department of Psychology and Instruction and Learning at Pitt, as well as the Department of Modern Languages at CMU. We hope to see you all in Pittsburgh in October.
Freshman Wins Brackenridge Research Fellowship
(April 11, 2012) Congratulations to Maddie Little, Freshman at the University of Pittsburgh, who has been awarded a Brackenridge Summer Research Fellowship (2012) by the University Honors College to work on a Sociolinguistics project: the impact of computers on physician-patient conversation (Faculty Sponsor: Abdesalam Soudi).
Faculty Receives Student’s Choice Award
(April 5, 2012) Congratulations to
Grad Student Wins a Teaching Award
(April 3, 2012) The linguistics department congratulates Lauren Collister on her receipt of the A&S GSO Elizabeth Baranger Excellence in Teaching Award. Lauren is one of 7 winners selected from an initial pool of more than 100 nominees. The award celebrates the outstanding work of graduate student teachers for the past academic year.
Grad Student Wins Outstanding Presentation Award
(March 22, 2012) Holman Tse, a Ph.D. student in linguistics, won an Outstanding Prsentation Award at this year's Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences Grad Expo. His paper was entitled "Consonant and Tone Interaction in Cantonese".
Ling Major wins LearnLab Summer Internship
(March 12, 2012) Joseph Petrich, a linguistics sophomore, has won a LearnLab Summer Internship. He will work with Dr. Alan Juffs and Dr. Na-Rae Han on analyzing ELI student essays using NLP (natural language processing) technologies.
Presentation at GURT 2012
(March 6, 2012) Alan Juffs and Guillermo Rodríguez will present a paper at Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 2012 (GURT 2012) entitled "The Processing of relative clauses by spanish-speaking learners of English as a second language".
LCTL Instructor Wins a Grant
(March 5, 2012) Irish Gaelic instructor Marie Young recently received a course development grant from Pitt’s European Union Center of Excellence and European Studies Center. She will use the funds to develop a new course, Language and Traditions in Contemporary Irish Culture.
Promoting Advanced Language Proficiency and Intercultural Competency in LCTLs
Abdesalam Soudi and Claude Mauk will present a paper on “3D Second Life Communities: Teaching real languages in virtual lands” at the 15th Annual National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages on April 26-29, 2012 in Madison, WI.
Presentation at Pragmatics Festival
Abdesalam Soudi , Jeannette South-Paul (Andrew W. Mathieson UPMC Professor of Medicine and Chair) and Lauren Hasek will present a paper titled "Delicate matters in the exam room" at the Pragmatics Festival at Indiana University, Bloomington on April 19-21, 2012.
Plenary Address by Dr. Juffs
Dr. Alan Juffs will give an invited plenary address entitled "Problems and interventions in second language morphological processing" at the Michigan State University’s Annual Linguistics Symposium on February 24, 2012.
A Book Chapter on Sociolinguistics in Games
Benjamin Friedline and Lauren Collister have a chapter titled "Constructing a Powerful Identity in World of Warcraft: A Sociolinguistic Approach to MMORPGs" in the newly-published anthology from Continuum, Dungeons, Dragons, and Digital Denizens: The Digital Role-Playing Game.
Invited Talk by Dr. Shirai
Dr. Yasuhiro Shirai will give an invited talk at the Institute for Japanese Studies at Ohio State University on the topic "Second Language Acquisition Research and Second Language Instruction: A Functional Approach" on February 15.
Upcoming Presentation by a Graduate Student
Ph.D. student Nausica Marcos Miguel will be presenting a poster at the 15th International Morphology Meeting, February 9-12. The title is "An Analysis of Spanish Verb-Noun Compounds' Tolerance to Diminutives."
Upcoming Presentations for Graduate Student
Graduate student Holman Tse will present his paper on "Lexical Tone Vs F0 Effects on VOT in Cantonese" at this Friday's colloquium. He will also be presenting on this topic at the Workshop on Innovations in Cantonese Linguistics at Ohio State University on March 16, 2012 and at the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences Grad Expo on March 22, 2012.
AAAL 2012 Presentations
Two Ph.D. students will be presenting at the AAAL (American Association for Applied Linguistcs) 2012 Conference in Boston, March 24-27. Carrie Bonilla will present a paper entitled "Processability Theory in L2 Spanish: A Cross-Sectional Analysis of an Oral Corpus"; Jie Cui will be presenting her work "Adopting Kinship Address Terms in Chinese E-Commerce".
Dr. Kiesling at IRWG Panel
Dr. Scott Kiesling will participate in a panel discussion entitled "Gender and Sexuality: What's Language Got to Do with it?" at the Institute for Research on Women & Gender (IRWG), University of Michigan.
Presentation at the Fifth Summit on Communication and Sport
PhD student Fawn Draucker will present a paper on participation frameworks in social media at the Fifth Summit on Communication and Sport to be held in Peoria, IL, March 29-31, 2012. Her paper is entitled "Interaction and participation frameworks in the NHL's use of Twitter".
Colloquium Series
This Friday, Dr. David Wible of National Central University in Taiwan will give the first colloquium talk of this semester. His talk is entitled "Where Grammars Leak and Dictionaries Burst: Capturing Multiword Expressions for Language Research and Pedagogy".
Grad Student to Present at GURT 2012
Jing Wang is presenting a paper entitled "The development of third person singular present form –s: verb semantics or input frequency?" (co-authored with Yas Shirai) at the Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 2012 (GURT 2012).
Faculty Member Elected to CEA Commission
M. Christine O'Neill, an English Language Institute administrative faculty member, has been elected to the 2012-2014 CEA Commission. CEA, which stands for the Commission on English Language Program Accreditation, specializes in accrediting English language programs and institutions worldwide.
Faculty Member Appointed as Incoming Chair of TESOL PDC
Dr. Dawn E. McCormick, an English Language Institute administrative faculty member and the TESOL Certificate Advisor, has been appointed as Incoming Chair of the Professional Development Committee, a standing committee of TESOL International Association.
Faculty Presents at Ilse Lehiste Memorial Symposium
Marta Ortega-Llebaria, in collaboration with Professor Laura Bosch from University of Barcelona, presented the paper "Cross-dialect versus Cross-language Discrimination in Early Infancy: A Look at Rhythmic and Segmental Properties" at the Ilse Lehiste Memorial Symposium held on November 11-12 at Ohio State University.
Presentation at Georgetown University Round Table
Charlotte Rogers, under the supervision of Marta Ortega-Llebaria, got her paper "From Lexical Tone to Sentence Intonation: Training Mandarin Speakers of English" accepted for presentation at the Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 2012 (GURT 2012)
Presentations by Hispanic Linguistics Students and Faculty
In October, Meghan Dabkowski, Maria Laura Lenardon and Dr. Marta Ortega-Llebaria presented a poster "Investigating Vowel Length in Cordoba Spanish" at the Hispanic Linguistics Symposium 2011 at the University of Georgia. In July, Maria Laura Lenardon, Carrie Bonilla and Nausica Marcos Miguel gave a conference presentation "Consciousness Raising Tasks in L2 Spanish Instruction" at the AATSP (The American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese) 93rd Annual Conference in Washington, DC.
Publication in Hispania
Carrie L Bonilla, a PhD candidate in Hispanic Linguistics, published an article in Hispania entitled "The Conversational Historical Present in Oral Spanish Narratives".
SLRF 2011 Presentations
Two conference presentations were made by Pitt linguists at the SLRF (Second Language Research Forum) 2011 held at the Iowa State University. Katherine I. Martin & Alan Juffs presented their study entitled "Reading in English: A Comparison of Native Arabic, Native Chinese, and Native English Speakers". Jing Wang & Keiko Koda presented their study entitled "Does Partial Radical Information Help in the Learning of Chinese Characters".
Ling Graduate Publishes in Second Language Research
Willie Costello, former undergraduate major in linguistics and philosophy, published a paper in Second Language Research entitled "The Aspect Hypothesis, defective tense and obligatory contexts: Comments on Haznedar", 2007. (Costello & Shirai, 2011). This paper was written while he was taking Directed Research with Dr. Shirai under the Arts & Sciences program First Experience in Research. Currently he is a graduate student at the University of Toronto.
Invited Talks by Dr. Shirai
Dr. Yasuhiro Shirai will give invited talks at Temple University, Japan under the Distinguished Lecturer Series on the topic "Second Language Acquisition Research and Language Teaching: A Functionalist Approach" on December 10 and 11 in Tokyo, and December 17 and 18 in Osaka.
Dr. Shirai to Give a Talk at Williams College
Dr. Yasuhiro Shirai will give an invited talk entitled Second Language Acquisition Research and Second/Foreign Language Teaching at the Center for Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Williams College, on Nov. 14.
Presentation at LPTS Conference
PhD student Lauren Collister will present her work on multimodality in digital games at the Linguistic and Psycholinguistic Approaches to Text Structuring (LPTS) conference, November 16-18 in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. The title of her presentation is "Spoken and Written Linguistic Modes in Online Gaming".
Ling Major Presents her Brackenridge Fellowship Research
Nicole Corea, an anthropology and linguistics double major, presented her work at 2011 Brackenridge Fellow Presentations, entitled "The Rhetoric of the Other: The Language of Counterhegemonic Groups in the Middle East". Her faculty sponsor was Abdesalam Soudi.
Ph.D. Student Wins NSF Dissertation Grant
Christina Schoux Casey, under the supervision of advisor Dr. Scott Kiesling, received a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation. The grant will be used to study New Orleans English.
Language Learning Dissertation Grant Awarded
Congratulations to Zoe Luk who has won a Language Learning Dissertation Grant in support of her Ph.D. thesis (supervisor Yasuhiro Shirai).
ThinkSwiss Research Scholarship Awarded
Ph.D. student Nausica Marcos Miguel was awarded the ThinkSwiss Research Scholarship. She will be at the University of Bern during July and August conducting research on vocabulary instruction.
Grad Students to Present their Research
Two grad students are presenting at this year's Language in the Media Conference hosted at the University of Limerick, Ireland from 6 to 8 June 2011. Fawn Draucker will be presenting her paper titled Killing time and timing (the penalty kill): a figure-ground analysis of sports broadcast media; Kristopher Geda will be presenting his paper titled Straight Actors, Whose Voices? Actors' use and non-use of gay-sounding features in American film.
Donate for Linguistics Olympiad
Yinzling is organizing a donation effort in support of the 2011 International Linguistics Olympiad, to be held in Pittsburgh this July. Please bring your books, CDs, clothes, furniture, etc. to Towers Lobby between noon and 5pm on Monday 4/25 and Thursday 4/28. There's also a collection box on the 28th floor of CL.
Ling Major Wins Brackenridge Fellowship
Charlotte Roger, a junior linguistics major, was awarded the Brackenridge Undergraduate Summer Fellowship and the Arts and Sciences Summer Undergraduate Research Award to do research on acquisition of intonation in English by Chinese L1 speakers. She is looking forward to starting her own research this summer with the help of Dr. Marta Ortega-Llebaria.
Robert T. Henderson Award
Congratulations to Katherine I. Martin, this year's winner of Robert T. Henderson Endowment Fund Award. Please join the department and the Henderson family for the award reception at 3pm on April 11 (Mon), at CL 2816.
Ph.D. Candidate to Participate in an NSF-Funded Doctoral Symposium
Abdesalam Soudi will participate in an NSF-Funded Social-Computational Systems Doctoral Symposium. The Social-Computational Systems as in NSF solicitation seeks to develop theoretical and practical understandings of the purposeful design of systems to facilitate socially intelligent computing.
Schedule Changes to Spring 2011 Colloquium
We have colloquia most Fridays at 3pm in Cathedral of Learning Room 332. All are welcome!
Please see the pdf document for the schedule. Please note that some of the presentations have been rescheduled.
Read More (PDF) >
Note: There has been a change in schedule. Laura Lenardon will not present on April 15th.
Presentation at the Georgetown University Round Table
Ph.D. student Lauren B. Collister presented her research on multimodality in online gaming environments on March 11th at the Georgetown University Round Table. A video of her presentation is available here.
Workshop at the 45th Annual TESOL Convention and Exhibit
Dr. Dawn E. McCormick will be presenting a workshop on “Fundraising and Writing Grant Proposals” at the upcoming TESOL Convention in New Orleans. The workshop is part of the Leadership Development Certificate Program offered by TESOL.
Presentation at Southeastern Conference on Linguistics
Christina Schoux Casey will be presenting a paper at the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics in April. The title is Commodifying language and place in post-Katrina New Orleans.
Yinzling, Pitt’s Linguistics Club, brings about the first annual Language Fair
The student group hopes that undergraduates and graduate students will attend the fair to learn about the languages offered at Pitt and meet with professors who teach the languages and their students. The event will be held Wednesday, March 2 from 2:00 – 4:00 PM in the Assembly Room of the William Pitt Union. Please see this flier for more information.
Linguistics Sophomore Receives University Honors College Summer Research Abroad Award
Congratulations to Peter Cahill for winning this award. The funds will allow Peter to travel to Honduras where he will study Honduran Sign Language and how contact with American Sign Language may be shaping it.
Language Learning Dissertation Grant Awarded
Congratulations to Derek Chan who has won a Language Learning Dissertation Grant in support of his Ph.D. thesis (supervisors Yasuhiro Shirai and Charles Perfetti).
Dr. Kiesling to Speak at Ignite Pittsburgh
Dr. Scott Kiesling will speak at Ignite Pittsburgh on Thursday, Feb 10th. His segment is titled: Why Yinz Have Pittsburghese N’at.
Position Opening for Hispanic Linguistic Professor
We have an opening for a tenure-track position in Hispanic Linguistics.
Read More (PDF) >
Pitt Linguists on the Soccer Field
There's a new soccer group in the department! Please join for the first meeting this Friday (Feb 11th) at 1pm in the waiting area of the 28th floor. For more details, please contact Soudi or Nozomi.
English Language Proficiency Test
January 4, 2011 at 11am (Tuesday). Room CL 332
Please contact Betsy Davis at 412-624-6077 to schedule a test if you arrive after January 4th.
Internet Research Award 
Congratulations to Lauren Collister who has won second prize in the 2010 Carl J. Couch Internet Research Award competition. The award is a cash prize and an invitation to present her paper at the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference in Gothenburg, Sweden. Read More >
New Graduates
Congratulations to new graduates! Department graduation party is scheduled on May 1: Please join us in celebration.
Robert T. Henderson Award
Congratulations to Kirsten Sabares-Klemm, this year's Robert T. Henderson Award winner. Check out the Robert T. Henderson Center to learn more about our beloved professor.
