The Department of Linguistics & TESOL at UT Arlington

Academic Year 2011-2012

Dr. Jeff Witzel and Dr. Naoko Witzel had a book chapter published on the processing of Japanese control sentences. In March Dr. Witzel and Michael Mansbridge (BA, 2011) presented a poster presentation on “Bind accessibility and online anaphora processing” at the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing.
In September, Dr. Jerold Edmondson was recognized as a Professor Emeritus at UT Arlington.
Dr. David Silva and six students from his Research Methods class had an article published in American Speech on variant pronunciations of "Iraq". In October, Dr. Silva was nominated for an Alicia Wilkerson Smotherman Faculty Award for this work with graduate students.
Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald and Oklahoma University's Dr. Mary Linn were interviewed on KERA 90.1 's "Think" with Krys Boyd on the topics of the Oklahoma Breath of Life Project, Native American languages and language endangerment. (streaming audio). In September, Dr. Fitzgerald gave an invited talk at the University of California, Santa Barbara on "Community-Based Language Research: Case Studies from the American Southwest". In October, she also gave a talk on "The Multicultural Language(s) of Texas and Oklahoma”. See the coverage in the Shorthorn. She also gave two talks at conferences in Australia in December: "Investigating Connected Speech from Tohono O'odham Digitized Legacy Data," at the University of Melbourne, and "Service-Learning and Community-based Research with Indigenous Language Communities," at La Trobe University. She co-presented with Phillip Miguel, of Tohono O’odham Community College, on the Mathiot Dictionary project at a conference hosted by the Tohono O’odham Nation. In April, Fitzgerald gave an invited talk in Ottawa, Canada at Carleton University on “Prosodic Documentation of Endangered Languages: Case Studies from the American Southwest.”
Dr. Cynthia Kilpatrick, Lori McLain Pierce, and Justin Fuller presented, "Focused Instruction: Syllabification and Diphthongization in Spanish" at the 2012 conference on Current Approaches to Spanish and Portuguese Second Language Phonology (CASPSLaP 2012), held at the University of South Carolina in February.
Dr. Laurel Smith Stvan presented “Take it with a Pinch of Salt: Polysemy in Vernacular Discussion of Salt” at the 7th Interdisciplinary and Multicultural Conference on Food Representation in Literature, Film and the Other Arts at UT San Antonio in February. This summer she was in residence as a visting researcher at the University of Birmingham in the UK, as a recipient of a CARE Fellowship through the Center for Advanced Research in English. In June, she gave an invited talk "Compound Interest: The use of compound words containing “literacy” in a book title corpus" at the summer symposium sponsored by the Centre for Advanced Research in English (CARE) and the Centre for Corpus Research (CCR) at the University of Birmingham. In July she also presented a paper on "Metonymy-driven Polysemy in Health Discourse" at the Researching and Applying Metaphor conference at Lancaster University.
Six UTA faculty members presented at the Linguistic Society of America and its affiliated organizations in Portland, Oregon in January 2012: Colleen M. Fitzgerald and Lori Mclain Pierce, "Narrative and prosodic phrasing in Tohono O'odham"; Colleen Fitzgerald and Phillip Miguel, "Breathing new life into Tohono O'odham documentation: The Mathiot Dictionary Project"; Cindy Kilpatrick, "Phonological change in Maya K’iche’: Glottalization and uvulars"; Andrew McKenzie, "Context types for elicitation of topically-based judgments"; Joey Sabbagh, "Specificity and objecthood in Tagalog"; Ben Slade, "Sinhala epistemic indefinites"; Laurel Smith Stvan, "The need for enhancing technology use in the graduate curriculum" and Jeff Witzel, "Statistics for linguists, these latter two part of a panel presentation "Tech Tools: Increasing Technology Training in the Curriculum of Graduate Students in Linguistics."

Academic Year 2010-2011

Dr. Laurel Smith Stvan attended an interdisciplinary "unconference" on tools in the digital humanities in Houston in April. She contributed her reflections on the event to a post at the ProfHacker blog in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Dr. Laurel Smith Stvan is presenting a paper on "The Influence of Lexical Conflation on Beliefs about Causation" at the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE) at Boston University, on June 20, 2011.
Dr. Laurel Smith Stvan presented a paper titled “Go to Jail, Go Directly to Jail: Exploiting the Marked Aspects of English Bare Singular Noun Forms” at the Centre for Advanced Research in English at the University of Birmingham, UK, on July 11, 2011.
Dr. Laurel Smith Stvan presented a poster "Sugar Makes You Sweet: Polysemy and Cultural Beliefs about Causation" at the Corpus Linguistics 2011: Discourse and Corpus Linguistics conference, at the International Convention Centre in Birmingham, UK, July 21, 2011.
Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald is presenting a talk on "Revitalizing Native American Languages through Service-Learning" from 9:30-10:00am at Service-Learning for Sustainability and Social Justice, a conference at TCU (April 1). Immediately after her talk (10-10:30am), Dr. Fitzgerald discusses how to design reflection prompts for service-learning students.
Five UT Arlington Linguistics faculty and students are presenting at the Oklahoma Workshop on Native American Languages (OWNAL), April 16-17: Dr. Cynthia Kilpatrick and Derrick Jackman (MA Linguistics), "Language loss and language change: three generations of Maya K'iche'"; Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald and Lori McLain Pierce (PhD Linguistics), "Tohono O'odham prosodic phrasing: a view from narrative"; and Andrew McKenzie, "Default aspect in Kiowa."
Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald will be part of the team teaching at the Language Revitalization Workshop that precedes OWNAL. The theme this year is "Agreeing to Agree: How Words are Linked Together?" The Revitalization Workshop includes Native American community members and language teachers from Oklahoma, as well as all over the United States and even Canada. Speakers from each language represented at the workshop will get a chance to explore ways nouns and verbs go together in their language and report back to the main group. The afternoon session at this workshop involves the development of teaching materials that the participants can use to help their learners to acquire noun-verb agreement in their heritage language.
Dr. Jeffrey Witzel and Dr. Naoko Witzel have co-authored a paper (along with Dr. Janet Nicol) that is forthcoming in Applied Psycholinguistics, "Deeper than shallow: Evidence for structure-based parsing biases in L2 sentence processing."
Dr. Naoko Witzel has co-authored a paper with Xiaomei Qiao and Kenneth Forster forthcoming in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance entitled "Transposed letter priming with horizontal and vertical text in Japanese and English readers."
Dr. Laurel Smith Stvan has been invited by the Centre for Advanced Research in English at the University of Birmingham for a six-week visit. The focus of this visit is to work on a joint project and to explore possibilities of future collaborative research between UT Arlington and the University of Birmingham. After a successful application to the North American Fund, Stvan will continue her work on bare nominals in English and develop the pedagogical applications of this research to second language learning.
Dr. Joey Sabbagh presented a conference talk, "Word order and prosodic structure constraints in Tagalog," at the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association conference.
Dr. Cindy Kilpatrick, Dr. Joey Sabbagh, and Dr. David Silva, were all named a "Phi Kappa Phi Recognized Professor" by students initiated to the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society this past fall.
Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald presented a poster on "Community-Based Approaches to Student Training: Service-Learning in a Language Revitalization Course," at the the 2nd International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation, University of Hawai'i, Honolulu, February 2011.
Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald has a refereed book chapter that appeared in late 2010. The article, "Language Documentation in the Tohono O'odham Community," is in Language Documentation: Theory, Practice and Values, edited by L. Furbee and L. Grenoble (from John Benjamins).
Dr. Jeffrey Witzel and Dr. Naoko Witzel have co-authored an article on "The processing of Japanese control sentences" for Processing and producing head-final structures, edited by H. Yamashita, J. Packard and Y. Hirose and published by Springer. The e-book is already out and the print version is forthcoming in 2011.
In October, the edited collection, Sociophonetics: A Student's Guide, was published by Routledge; this volume contains a paper by Dr. Jerold Edmondson and a co-author on "Acoustical Analysis of Voice Quality for Sociophonetic Purposes."
Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald is an organizer and presenter for a symposium entitled "Documenting Endangered Languages: NSF-NEH Del Projects in Honor of the 20th Anniversary of the LSA Panel on Endangered Languages" (Thursday evening of the Annual Meeting, session 12). More details are available at the Annual Meeting Preliminary Program.
Two faculty members gave talks at the 2nd Annual DFW Metroplex Linguistics Converence, hosted in Dallas: Dr. Laurel Smith Stvan presented "Catching Your Death of Cold: The Influence of Lexical Conflation on Beliefs about Causation"; Dr. Jeffrey D. Witzel presented "The processing of forward and backward anaphora: Evidence from event-related potentials (ERPs)."

Academic Year 2009-2010

Dr. Laurel Smith Stvan has been awarded a Faculty Development Leave for next year to support her research.
Dr. Cynthia Kilpatrick was awarded a Research Enhancement Program Grant for her proposal, "Bilingual and Heritage Speech Production in Maya K'iche."
Dr. Laurel Smith Stvan will be presenting a paper entitled "Stress Management: Corpus-based insights into Vernacular Interpretations of Stress" at the Eighth Interdisciplinary Conference on Communication, Medicine and Ethics (COMET), Boston University School of Public Health in June of 2010.
In addition to continuing his work as Vice Provost for Academic Affairs for UT Arlington, Dr. David Silva has continued to contribute to scholarship and training in the field of linguistics. During the current academic year, he has completed two invited articles and has delivered keynote presentations at several events, including the Seventh Conference on Portuguese Language Education, the University of Massachusetts — Dartmouth, the annual meeting of TexTESOL Region 5 at Brookhaven College, and the annual meeting of Tennessee TESOL at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga.
Dr. Jerold A. Edmondson is recently returned from a research leave in Taiwan, where he worked on the Monsoon Asia Project as a research fellow. Dr. Edmondson and his fellow researchers spent this time investigating a number of Asian languages in terms of their phonetic realization of consonants, using innovative technology with transnasal laryngoscopy. The videos taken during speech production have resulted in increased understanding of how these languages, including Taiwanese, Vietnamese, and some Formosan languages use differing lower throat structures like epiglottal elements. The team (Dr. Edmondson and Taiwanese colleages Yueh-chin Celine Chang, Hui-chuan Jennifer Huang, Feng-fan Hsieh and Yuren Peng MD) has produced results that will be presented in a poster at the 12th Conference on Laboratory Phonology this summer in Albuquerque. The poster is on "Voiceless applosive finals in Taiwanese and other East and Southeast Asian Languages: laryngoscopic case studies."
Dr. Edmondson has also been invited to give a colloquium talk at Cornell University in early March on "Voiced and Voiceless consonants in Taiwanese, Vietnamese, and some Formosan languages: laryngoscopic case studies", again based on his team's research as part of the Monsoon in Asia project.
Drs. Cynthia Kilpatrick and Colleen Fitzgerald will also be presenting a poster at the 12th Conference on Laboratory Phonology this summer in Albuquerque, based on research being done in the Speech Sounds Lab, under Dr. Kilpatrick's direction. The poster, "The Contrast System in Tohono O'odham Stops," presents findings from an archival phonetics investigation using recordings from the 1970s of the Native American language Tohono O'odham. Tohono O'odham has a rare phonetic feature, pre-aspiration, in its consonant system.
Dr. Cynthia Kilpatrick is also a co-author with Daniel Scarpace for a conference talk being presented this week at Current Approaches to Spanish & Portuguese Second Language Phonology 2010, held at the University of Florida. The talk is on "L2 Spanish speakers and the perception of 'exceptional' hiatus."
Dr. Laurel Smith Stvan will be presenting a paper entitled "Catching Cold: Polysemous Reinforcment of Beliefs about Causation" at the 3rd UK Cognitive Linguistics Conference, University of Hertfordshire on July 6, 2010.
Dr. Joseph Sabbagh's paper on "Existential sentences in Tagalog" just appeared in the journal Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, in a special edited volume focusing on Comparative Syntax of Austronesian Languages. This journal is one of the top peer-reviewed journals in the field of linguistics.
Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald was awarded an Intellectual Engagement ("I Engage") Seed Grant from the UT Arlington Graduate School for LING 6390 Linguistics Seminar: Sustainability & Language Endangerment. I Engage Grants are offered each year to graduate faculty at UT Arlington to develop or modify graduate courses to include an intellectual engagement component.
Dr. Donald A. Burquest, Dr. David Silva, and Dr. Laurel Smith Stvan have each been named "Phi Kappa Phi Recognized Professor" by their students. The members of the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi were asked to provide "the name of a professor who had made the most important, lasting contribution to their own intellectual and academic development."
Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald is delivering a keynote at the 3rd Annual Oklahoma Workshop on Native American Languages.
As part of his 2009 fieldwork in Taiwan, Dr. Jerold A. Edmondson has been using transnasal laryngoscopy to investigate the glottal states of Taiwanese speakers when they produce voiced plosives.
Dr. David Silva, Professor of Linguistics and Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, is one of nine UT Arlington faculty members to be selected as an inaugural recipient of the UT System Board of Regents' Outstanding Teaching Awards. The awards honor "exceptional faculty who care about their educational mission."
Dr. Laurel Smith Stvan has been selected as a recipient of the Alicia Wilkerson Smotherman Faculty Award, in recognition of research expertise and teaching abilities that have inspired students to create work of exceptional merit, in conjunction with her supervision of Katie Welch's dissertation on the acquisition Spanish pragmatic softeners.
"The Kháng Language of Vietnam in Comparison to Ksingmul (Xinh-mun)" by Dr. Jerold A. Edmondson will be appearing in A Mosaic of Languages and Cultures: Studies in Celebration of the Academic Career of Karl J. Franklin, from SIL.
Dr. Cynthia Kilpatrick is presenting "How exceptional are exceptional forms? Perception of hiatus in Spanish" (with co-author Daniel Scarpace of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America.
Also at the 2010 LSA Annual Meeting, Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald is delivering a paper entitled "Developing Language Empowerment Projects with Diverse Communities" as part of an invited panel on service-learning sponsored by the American Dialect Society. The panel session is titled "Cultivating Socially Minded Linguists: Service Learning and Engaged Scholarship in Linguistics and Education."
A paper by Dr. Jerold A. Edmondson, Dr. David J. Silva, and Mary S. Willis (University of Nebraska, Lincoln) entitled "The Impact of Anterior Dental Extraction and Restoration on the Articulation of Affricates by Dinka Refugees in Nebraska" has been accepted to the journal Anthropological Linguistics.
Dr. Laurel Smith Stvan is presenting "Where Are They Bare? The Frequency and Distribution of Bare Nouns in American English" at the American Association for Corpus Linguistics (AACL 2009), University of Alberta, Edmonton, Oct. 10, 2009.
"Correspondences between Articulation and Acoustics for the Feature [ATR]: The Case of Two Tibeto-Burman Languages and Two African Languages" by Dr. Jerold A. Edmondson is appearing in 2009 in Frontiers in Phonetics and Speech Science, from Commercial Press (Beijing).
Dr. Laurel Smith Stvan has a review appearing in September of the book, Corpora for University Language Teachers, by Carol Taylor Torsello, Katherine Ackerley, & Erik Castello (eds) (2008) in TESL-EJ.
Dr. Jerold A. Edmondson is presenting at the 4th International Conference on Austro-Asiatic Linguistics in Bangkok Oct 29-30, 2009 a paper entitled, "The North Bahnaric Clade: A comparison of phylogenetic techniques" (with kenneth J. Gregerson and Paul Sidwell).
Dr. Laurel Smith Stvan has published a review of Pragmatics: A Multidisciplinary Perspective, by Louise Cummings (2005), for the International Cognitive Linguistics Association (http://www.cognitivelinguistics.org/Reviews/cummings).
From July 2009 to January 2010, Dr. Jerold A. Edmondson is on a sabbatical from his teaching duties at UT Arlington while he conducts research at the Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, National Tsing Hua University, Hsin Chu Taiwan. During his time in Taiwan, Dr. Edmondson plans to use video imaging with transnasal laryngoscopy to investigate the lower throat sounds in some of Taiwan's endangered Austronesian languages. He also has plans for other fieldwork and research projects.

Academic Year 2008-2009

Dr. Eunjin Park has been named a "Phi Kappa Phi Recognized Professor" by Reem Soliman, (MA TESOL student). The members of the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi were asked to provide "the name of a professor who had made the most important, lasting contribution to their own intellectual and academic development."
Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald is presenting "Finding and using legacy/archival materials for community projects" at the 2nd Oklahoma Workshop on Native American Languages (April 18), and she is delivering a paper "Proliferating prosodies in Tohono O'odham reduplication(s)" at the 17th Manchester Phonology Meeting (May 28-30).
In July 2009 Dr. Laurel Stvan presents "Learning English Bare Singulars: Corpus Approaches for the L2 Classroom" at the 5th Corpus Linguistics Conference at the University of Liverpool.
On March 14, Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald presented at the 1st International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation (ICLDC) at the University of Hawai'i. Her paper was titled, "Pathways for Accessing Legacy Materials in Tohono O'odham" (abstract here).
Dr. Laurel Stvan has received an Honorable Mention this year for UT Arlington's Outstanding Academic Advisor Award. She's been a nominee for two consecutive years prior, as well.
The Routledge Language Family Series has published The Tai-Kadai Languages (2008), edited by Anthony V. N. Diller, Dr. Jerold A. Edmondson, and Luo Yongxian. Within the collection, Dr. Edmondson authored chapter 5 "Shan and other Northern Tier Southeast Tai languages of Myanmar and China: Themes and Variations," chapter 23 "Kra or Kadai Languages," and chapter 23 (co-authored with Tongyin Yang) "Kam."
On Friday, November 14, Dr. David Silva was given the Excellence in Board Leadership Award as part of the 2008 Awards of Excellence, presented by the Center for Nonprofit Management. (Dr. Silva and other award winners with listed in the Dallas Morning News.)
In mid-October, Dr. Jerold A. Edmondson was in Taiwan, where he presented "Hybrid Alphabets and Legalized Letters: Case studies from Asia" as the plenary address at the 2008 International Conference on Taiwanese Literature, National Cheng Kang University, Tainan, Taiwan. While there, Dr. Edmondson also presented "Sounds of the Throat and their functioning: laryngscopic case studies" at the Linguistic Colloquium of National Tsing Hua University, Hsin Chu, Taiwan.
On October 10 Dr. David Silva gave a talk entitled "Communities Divided, Communities Connected: How Emigration Creates New Ways of Speaking" as part of UT Arlington's OneBook Conversations series.
Two articles on service learning by our Chair, Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald, are scheduled to appear: "Developing a Service-Learning Curriculum for Linguistics" in Language and Linguistics Compass, and "Language and Community Using Service-Learning to Reconfigure the Multicultural Classroom" in Language & Education.
Dr. Laurel Smith Stvan has two articles and a book review appearing this year:"Semantic Incorporation as an Account for Some Bare Singular Count Noun Uses in English" in the journal Lingua; "'Health Literacy': A Single Meaning or Three Senses Conflated?" in The Language of Health Care: Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Language and Health Care (IULMA: University of Alicante, Spain); and "Review of Advice Online: Advice-giving in an American Internet Health Column by Miriam A. Locher (2006)," in the journal Language in Society (37.5: 765).
Korean as a Heritage Language, a special issue of Heritage Language Journal is publishing Dr. Eunjin Park's "Intergenerational Transmission of Morality in Korean American Families."
Dr. Jerold A. Edmondson's "The Kháng language of Vietnam in comparison to Ksingmul (Xinh-mun)" is appearing in 2009 in Festschift for Dr. Karl Franklin (ed. by Kenneth McElhanon), Pacific Linguistics Series: Canberra. Also appearing this year is Dr. Edmondson's "Correspondences between articulation and acoustics for the feature [ATR]: the case of two Tibeto-Burman languages and two African languages" in Festschift for Prof. Wu Zongji, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Institute for Phonetics (ed. by Gunnar Fant, Hiroya Fujisaki, and Shen Jiaxuan), The Commercial Press: Beijing (title not yet decided).
Dr. Mark Ouellette has two articles in press: "Weaving Strands of Writer Identity: Self-as-Author and the NNES 'Plagiarist'" in the Journal of Second Language Writing, and "'Benefit of the Doubt': Negotiating Discourses on Plagiarism" in Teacher and Teacher Education.
"The Persistence of Stereotyped Dialect Features among Portuguese-American Immigrants from São Miguel, Azores," by Dr. David Silva, has been accepted to appear in the Journal of Portuguese Linguistics.
Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald was invited to write a chapter ("Contemporary Storytelling in Tohono O'odham," co-authored with Phillip Miguel of the Tohono O'odham Nation) for the book Inside Dazzling Mountains: Contemporary Translations of Southwest Native Verbal Arts, ed. by David Kozak, scheduled for publication later this year by University of Nebraska Press.
Dr. Jerold A. Edmondson and Dr. John Esling (University of Victoria) are presenting their co-authored "Voice Quality" on November 6, 2008, in a workshop entitled Towards Best Practices in Sociophonetics, part of NWAV 37, Rice University and University of Texas at San Antonio.

Academic Year 2007-2008

Dr. Jerold A. Edmondson has been selected as a recipient of the Alicia Wilkerson Smotherman Faculty Award, in recognition of research expertise and teaching abilities that have inspired students to create work of exceptional merit. (The Shorthorn's article on the award is here.)
Dr. Mark Ouellette presented "Making TIME Work for You: Changing Perspective on College Study Skills" for Invited Talks at Weingarten Learning Resources Center, University of Pennsylvania on July 1, 2008.
Dr. Eunjin Park presented the paper "Korean-American families' use of the evidential verb-suffix – tay: Keeping distance from knowledge" at the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL), Washington D.C., held March 29 - April 1, 2008.
In April, Dr. Laurel Smith Stvan, Dr. David Silva and alumna Dr. Sarah Fauzi gave a panel presentation in Fort Worth on "Linguistic Aspects of Cross-Cultural Health Discussions" for the Texas Association of Healthcare Interpreters and Translators.
Dr. Laurel Smith Stvan presented "Fat and Health Literacy: Two Revealing Terms in CADOH (Corpus of American Discourses on Health)," at the American Association for Corpus Linguistics (AACL 2008), Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, March 15, 2008.
The International Journal of the Sociology of Language published Dr. David Silva's "Missionary Contributions toward the Revaluation of Han’geul in Late 19th Century Korea."
Two articles by Dr. Donald A. Burquest (co-authored with E. Lou Hohulin) have been published: "Morphophonology in Tuwali Ifugao" in the Philippine Journal of Linguistics 38(1), and "Verbal Morphology, Cross-referencing and NP Positioning in Tuwali Ifugao" in Piakandatu ami Dr. Howard P. McKaughan, edited by Loren Billings and Nelleke Goudswaard (published by the Linguistic Society of Philippines and SIL Philippines, 2007).

And more

Read about other great faculty research in our department in this interview with Dr. David Silva in UT Arlington's Research Magazine.