News

---Academic Year 2017-2018---

Prep for Speech and Language Pathology

Come see how a degree in Linguistics can help you prepare for a career in speech and language pathology. Hear from a recruiter and an SLP practitioner at a free talk on Wed. Sept 20 at noon. Trimble 110. Snacks provided!

Linguist on the Radio

On Friday, Aug. 18, Dr. Laurel Stvan appeared on KERA Public Radio talking about English words containing a silent b (subtle, doubt, debt, etc.) on the show Anything You Ever Wanted to Know. You can hear the show via the audiocast link. (The language segment starts at 15:11 and goes for about 4 minutes.)

Beginning of the Year Events

Start the school year off right by taking part in the following UTA events:

---Academic Year 2016-2017---

Dissertation Defense

The public is invited to the dissertation defense of Nathan Eversole on Tuesday, August 15, at 10am in Trimble Hall 110. "Retrieval Processing in Subject-Verb Agreement Computation.”

Dissertation Defense

The public is invited to the dissertation defense of Darcey Browning on July 22 at 3pm in Trimble Hall 110. "Twitter Hashtags as Discourse Markers: A Corpora Based Study of the Pragmatics Functions of Hashtags."

UTA at LSA Institute

Three UTA doctoral students will be attending the Linguistic Society of America’s 2017 Linguistic Institute, held this summer at the University of Kentucky: Samantha Cornelius, Carly Sommerlot, and Abbey Thomas. We’re looking forward to hearing about your experiences!

New Classes coming to the Fort Worth Campus

We will be offering two undergraduate Linguistics classes at the UTA Fort Worth campus in the Fall of 2017. Check out the cool downtown location where you can learn about Language and Gender (LING 4318), or Languages of the World (LING 3301)! Call Ryan to enroll in one (or both) of these elective classes! (Flyer).

UTA Fulbrighter heads to Yucatan

Alumna Holly Hecht (MA-TESOL 2013) has been accepted by the Fulbright ETA Program. She will be teaching English at the Instituto Tecnológico Superior de Progreso in the town of Progreso in the state of Yucatán starting in September. Congrats, Holly!

UTA Big Data in Dublin

Dr. Laurel Stvan and Dr. Jacqueline Fay presented “Compiling a Thematic Diachronic Corpus: Challenges in Piloting H-CODE” at the Big Data and Medieval Studies colloquium at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland on June 28. The project, which also includes work by collaborator Dr. Sridhar Nerur, was funded by a 2016 UT Arlington Digital Arts and Humanities Institute grant. (Photo on Facebook).

Radio Q&A on grammar and usage

On June 21 Dr. Laurel Stvan took questions on perplexing issues in English usage, on Houston’s public radio show Houston Matters on KUHF. (Link to the Audio on SoundCloud).

SLA talk at TCC

On Thursday, May 18, Dr. Naoko Witzel gave a talk to English teachers at Tarrant County College on "The brain and second language acquisition." (Photo).

Spring 2017 Commencement and Hooding

Four of our department’s MAs attended the hooding ceremony on Friday, May 12. That afternoon they joined our newest BAs at the Spring College of Liberal Arts Commencement ceremony in College Park Center. (Photo album on FaceBook), (video).

Department Awards Ceremony, 2017

Come help us wind up the year at the Linguistics and TESOL Awards ceremony, on May 1, 2017. (Photo album on Facebook).

Presentation on Iranian Meter at SUNY

Doctoral student Ehsan Shafiee presented work on “Musical Rhythm in Persian Poetic Meters” at the 1st North American Conference in Iranian Linguistics (NACIL 1) on April 28-30 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. (Photo on Facebook).

Talk by Dr. Ming Xiang, April 28, 2017

Come hear how adjectives are understood, from our spring colloquium speaker, Dr. Ming Xiang (University of Chicago): "Resolving Scalar Uncertainty in Context". Friday, April 28, at 2pm in Trimble 200. (Abstract).

Linguists Win AcCOLAdes!

Linguistics major Katie Czap, and doctoral students Juliet Huynh and Suela Han were honored at this year's College of Liberal Arts acCOLAdes ceremony on April 13. (Photo).

Linguistic Analysis of the Presidential Debates

At this year’s Cultural Constructions conference on April 10, in the session on Society and Diversity: Race, Sex and Identity, doctoral students Darcey Browning and Kristen Fleckenstien presented an analysis of gender bias in the online language of the U.S. presidential debates. (Photo on FB).

Distinguished Teaching

On March 29, Dr. Jeffrey Witzel was selected as a member of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers for 2017. Member are chosen from the tenured faculty at UTA, selected for their outstanding teaching, personal commitment to students and the learning process, and the ability to inspire and motivate students. (Photo).

Student Employee Award Winner

On March 28, Linguistics major Megan Robbins won an Award of Excellence at the Student Employee Awards Reception, for her excellent performance as an office assistant in the Linguistics and TESOL main office. Congratulations, Megan! (Photos).

Linguist Wins ACES Award

Ten student researchers in Linguistics presented 8 posters this year at ACES (the Annual Celebration of Excellence by Students) held on March 22. Special congratulations go to doctoral student Seula Han, winner of the College of Liberal Arts Dean’s Award. (And to her mentor on the project, Dr. Cindy Kilpatrick!) (ACES Facebook photo album)

Submissions open for UTA's Working Papers in Linguistics

See the Call for Papers for Volume 4 of the UTA Working Papers in Lingusitics. Expressions of interest due March 10, paper submissions due April 30.

Alumna accepts job at OBU

We are delighted to announce that Dr. Jessica Rohr (Ph.D. in Linguistics 2016) has accepted a position as an Assistant Professor of English and TESOL at Oklahoma Baptist University, starting in Fall 2017. Congratulations, Jessica!

Online TESOL Courses

The Feb. 10 issue of The Shorthorn covers our online undergraduate TESOL certificate courses!

LSA Plenury Talk

Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald’s plenary from the January 2017 Linguistic Society of America meeting is now online! "The Sounds of Indigenous Language Revitalization." (Video).

The Semantics of Fruit Skins

Dr. Laurel Stvan was interviewed on “Anything You Ever Wanted to Know” (on KERA radio Dallas/Fort Worth/Denton) on Friday, January 13, discussing how borrowings affect synonyms for fruit and vegetable skins. (Audio file).

UTA at LSA

On Thursday January 4, Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald gave the opening plenury talk at the LSA in Austin: "The Sounds of Indigenous Language Revitalization." UTA alums who gave talks at the LSA this year include Jennifer “Mia” Wiegend (now at Cornell) and Kimberly Johnson (now at Umass Amherst).

Digital Humanties Project on Health Discourse

Department chair Laurel Stvan and colleagues Jacqueline Fay from the English Department and Sridhar Nerur from the College of Business are among scholars featured in an article on Digital Humanities scholarship in the December 2016 UTA Inquiry Magazine. Their project uses software to compare discussions of health and nutrition from medieval texts with those discussions in modern media such as newspapers, blogs, websites, novels, and movies.

Proposal Defense

The public is invited to attend Samantha Cornelius' dissertation proposal defense: “Prosodic Phonology in Oklahoma Cherokee” on Monday, December 19th at 11:00am in 200 Trimble Hall.

Fall 2016 Commencement

Congratulations to our graduating Linguistics majors, MAs in TESOL, MAs in Linguistics, and PhDs in Linguistics! The commencement ceremony for Liberal Arts will be held on Friday, December 16th at 3:00 p.m. View the video of the Fall commencement. (And see commencement photos in our Facebook album.)

Talk by Adam Ussishkin, Dec. 2, 2016

Our final Fall colloquium talk is by Dr. Adam Ussishkin (Univ. of Arizona), "What can auditory masked priming tell us about the role of morphology in auditory word recognition?" Friday, Dec. 2 from 3:00 to 4:00 pm in Trimble 200. (Abstract)

UTA Endangered Languages work featured

UTA researchers were featured in UTA Magazine, discussing their work with indigenous communities in Oklahoma, Mexico and other areas to help preserve languages in danger of dying out. See the coverage featuring Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald (LING), Dr. Ray Elliott (MODL), Linguistics doctoral students Samantha Cornelius and Mac Taylor, and MA alumna Kimberly Johnson.

November brownbag talk on regular expressions

Join us on Wednesday Nov. 16 for another Lunch and Learn, this time offering offering a second demo by Devin Hornick on using regular expressions! This regex presentation is great for anyone in the corpus linguistics class, or anyone dealing with searching and replacing strings from digital text files. Brought to you by LINGUA, the UTA student linguistics group!

23rd Annual UTASCILT on Nov. 4

The UTA Student Conference in Linguistics and TESOL takes place Friday, Nov. 4. Events will take place in Trimble 200. The keynote speaker is Dr. Tyler Peterson (University of Auckland) who will speak on "Evidentials & Extended Interrogatives". (Schedule) (FB photo album of the conference)

UTA Linguists at this year's Metroplex conference

Five UTA researchers will be presenting their work at the 8th Annual DFW Metroplex Conference in Linguistics in Dallas on October 21: Carly Sommerlot will present "Subject ellipsis and the left periphery in English; Dan Amy will present "On the obligatory appositive interpretation of massive pied-piping"; Kent Rasmussen will present "The functional load of tone in Bantu D30"; Daniel Scarpace will present "Re-analyzing re-syllabification: methodological concerns in eye-tracking"; and Laurel Stvan will present "Expressing causation: Using corpus data to distill connections from vernacular prose."

October brownbag talk on Nearpod software

Join us on Wednesday Oct. 19 for another Lunch and Learn, this time offering offering a demo of Nearpod, a new teaching app! This presentation is for anyone who is teaching now, or will be teaching in the future, who wants to learn to bring technology into the classroom. Brought to you by LINGUA, the UTA student linguistics group!

Digital Arts and Humanities Talk

Department chair Dr. Laurel Stvan and two UTA colleagues, Dr. Jacqueline Fay from English and Dr. Sridhar Nerur from Information Systems present an overview of their work in a talk "What's Healthy, Then and Now: Gathering Texts for the Corpus of Amercian Discourses on Health" (video) on Thursday, October 6, in the 6th floor Library Parlor at 12:30 pm. The project is funded through the Digital Arts and Humanities Initiative in the College of Liberal Arts.

UTA Linguists in El Paso

On Saturday, October 1, doctoral student Ehsan Shafiee and Assistant Professor Dr. Naoko Witzel presented their work "Processing L2 Scripts by Highly Proficient Bilinguals" at ARMADILLO (the Association for Research in Memory, Attention, Decision making, Intelligence, Language, Learning, and Organization), the Southwest Cognition conference, at the University of Texas at El Paso. (Photo).

UTA Linguist in Houston

Department chair Dr. Laurel Stvan and Digital Humanities Librarian Rafia Mirza represented UTA projects at a THATCamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp) on the Rice University campus on Saturday, September 24.

UTA Linguists in New York

On Saturday, September 24, doctoral student Juliet Huynh and Assistant Professor Dr. Naoko Witzel presented their work "How L2 words activate meaning: Evidence from false memory tasks" at the 35th Second Language Research Forum meeting at Columbia University Teachers College in New York. (Photo).

Recap of CoLang 2016

For Lingua's first event of the year, doctoral students Carly Sommerlot and Mac Taylor, two participants in COLANG2016, talk about what they learned this summer in Alaska about language documentation and revitalization. Brown bag, Wed. Sept 21, 12:15-1:15 in Trimble 014. (Flyer).

Beginning of the Year Events

Start the school year off right by taking part in the following events:

---Academic Year 2015-2016---

Dissertation Defense

The public is invited to the dissertation defense of Jessica Rohr on Aug. 15 at 1pm in Trimble Hall 200. "Acoustic and perceptual correlates of L2 fluency: The role of prolongations."

New Roles

Starting Aug. 1, 2016, Dr. Cynthia Kilpatrick will begin serving as the Associate Chair of Linguistics and TESOL, with one of her main functions being to serve as the Interim Director of the English Language Institute at UTA. (Photo from New Faculty Reception).

Alumni News

Katie Moore Welch (PhD in Linguistics, 2009) has accepted a full-time position in Fall 2016 as Lecturer in the School of Education at UNT-Dallas, where she has been teaching hybrid Linguistics classes she developed in language, culture, and social media, and on the acquisition of English as a second language. (Photo). Juyoung Lee, (PhD in Linguistics, 2016) has accepted a faculty position at International United College, Zhuhai, China. Chloe McCown (MA in TESOL, 2014) and Austin McCown (MA in TESOL, 2015) will take on new positions in the fall teaching English at Chengdu University of Technology in China.

UTASCILT Deadline Extended

The call for papers for the 23rd Annual University of Texas at Arlington Student Conference in Linguistics and TESOL has been extended! The NEW deadline for abstracts is August 15, 2016. (Submission information)

Transforming Treatment

Dr. Cynthia Kilpatrick was interviewed about her participation in UT Arlington's Fit Steps for Life program, a partnership with the Cancer Foundation for Life. Check out the cool video!

Spring 2016 Commencement

Congratulations to our graduating Linguistics majors, MAs in TESOL, MAs in Linguistics, and PhDs in Linguistics! View the video of the Spring commencement of the College of Liberal Arts Commencement, held on Friday, May 13, 2016. (And see commencement photos in our Facebook album.)

Dissertation Defense

The public is invited to the dissertation defense of Juyoung Lee "Plausability and Structural Reanalysis in Online L1 and L2 Sentence Processing" on Thursday, May 12 at 9:30 am, in Trimble Hall 014.

Proposal Defense

The public is invited to attend Nathan Eversole's dissertation proposal defense on Thursday, April 28th at 2 p.m. in 014 Trimble (the Linguistics computer lab): "Retrieval Processes in Subject-Verb Agreement Computation."

Talk by Dr. Daniel Scarpace, April 22, 2016

Our final Spring colloquium talk is by our own Dr. Daniel Scarpace: "Recognition of resyllabified words by L2 speakers of Spanish." Friday, April 22 at 2:30 pm in Trimble Hall 200. (Abstract).

Dissertation Defense

The public is invited to the dissertation defense presentation of Ms. Iya Khelm Price on Wednesday, April 20, 2015 at 9:30 a.m. in room 014 Trimble Hall on the topic "Independent Sources of Relative Clause Processing Difficulty: Evidence from Russian."

Linguists Receive acCOLAdes

Linguistics major Victor Jimenez, doctoral student Darcey Browning, and doctoral student Juliet Huynh were honored this year at the College of Liberal Arts acCOLAdes ceremony on April 14. (Photos).

Talk by Dr. David Durian, March 24, 2016

Our next colloquium talk is by David Durian (Northern Illinois University). "A New Perspective on the Interaction of Socio-Geographic Change, “Place” Ideology, and Sound Change across the Late 19th and 20th Centuries in Columbus and Chicago.” The talk will be on Thursday, March 24th from 12:00 - 1:30 in Trimble Hall room 216. (Abstract).

Faculty Member Tenured!

We are delighted to announce that Dr. Jeffrey Witzel will be granted tenure and promoted to associate professor, effective Sept 1, 2016!

Celebrating Female Scholars

Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald is featured on the NSF page: <href="http://bit.ly/1MWabvN">Celebrating Women in the Social and Behavioral Sciences in celebration of Women’s History Month.

UTA Grad Students Presenting in ACES

Four UTA linguists will present work at ACES, the Annual Celebration of Excellence by Students on Wednesday, March 23, 2016 in the University Center. Congrats to presenters Darcey Browning, Samanatha Cornelius, Juliet Huynh, and Kimberly Johnson! See the ACES oral and poster schedules here.

Talk by Youngah Do, Monday March 7, 2016

Our second spring colloquium talk is by Dr. Youngah Do (Georgetown University): "Modeling prior biases in phonological pattern learning." The talk will be on Monday, March 7th from 12:00 - 1:30 in Pickard Hall 113

Proposal Defense

The public is invited to attend Kent Rasmussen’s dissertation proposal defense: "Comparative Tone Analysis of Several Bantu D30 Languages" on Friday, March 4, 2016 at 11am in Trimble Hall 200.

Talk by Margaret Renwick, Monday, Feb. 29, 2106

Our first spring colloquium talk is by Dr. Margaret Renwick (U of Georgia): "The Manifestation of Phonological Processes in Spontaneous Speech," on Monday, Feb. 29 at noon in Trimble 200.

UTA Linguist on the Radio

Department chair Dr. Laurel Stvan was quoted in a National Public Radio show examining the use of Spanish in the Republican debates, on the Texas Standard, which aired on Feb. 25, 2016: audio clip. http://www.texasstandard.org/stories/how-the-spanish-language-went-from-a-secret-to-strategic-code-switching/

UTA Linguist in Germany

Feb 25 Doctoral student Iya Price, presented her work “Sentence complexity at the boundary of grammatical theory and processing: A special challenge for Language acquisition” at the 38th Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society in Konstanz, Germany.

UTA Linguist at TLS

Doctoral student Darcey Browning presented her work on "Hesitation via hashtag placement: Patterns of delay discourse markers in tweets and interviews by survivors of violence at the Texas Linguistics Society meeting on Feb. 19, 2016 in Austin.

UTA Linguists at BLS

Two UTA research projects will be presented at the Berkeley Linguistics Society in California this week: Kristen Fleckenstein & Suwon Yoon's, “Jespersen’s Cycle and scope of negation in American Sign Language,” and a Plenury Address by Dr. Joey Sabbagh, “Syntactic and prosodic adjunction in Tagalog”!

Linguist in The Conversation

Dr. Laurel Stvan’s wrote and article for The Jan. 11 issue of The Conversation, which looks at gender-neutral language and analyzes the issues behind such changes as this year’s selection of singular “they” as Word of the Year. "That’s what zhe said: mx-ing up the language of gender"

UTA Linguists in Washington DC

Several UT Arlington presenters were in DC in early January: Kimberly Johnson presented “The role of context in interpreting a versatile modal in Creek”; Colleen Fitzgerald and Joshua Hinson (Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program) presenting “Documentation and revitalization strategies for agglutinative languages: Lessons from Chickasaw inflectional paradigms” at SSILA; and Arum Kang (University of Chicago) and Suwon Yoon on “Two types of speaker’s ignorance over the epistemic space: Referential vagueness marker "inka" vs. epistemic subjunctive marker "nka" in Korean” at the LSA.

UTA ESL instructor in action!

Check out this video that highlights the experiences of Linguistics major Sonia Headley (BA, 2015) in teaching an adult ESL class at the Pleasant Grove Library for her TESOL internship. The internship is part of our undergraduate TESOL certificate.

Fall 2015 Commencement

Congratulations to our graduating Linguists! See the video of the College of Liberal Arts commencment ceremony from the evening of Friday, Dec. 18.

MA Hooding

MA's from the College of Liberal Arts participated in the hooding ceremony the afternoon before commmenecement, on Friday, Dec. 18. (Photo).

Proposal Defense

The public is invited to attend Darcy Browning's dissertation proposal defense on Friday, Dec. 11 at 2 p.m. in 014 Trimble (the Linguistics computer lab): Hashtags as Discourse Markers: Pragmatic Uses of Hashtags in Computer Mediated Language.

Talk on Teaching Abroad

Department Chair Dr. Laurel Stvan will is the guest speaker for the UTA Chinese Culture and Language Association (CCLA), on Dec. 4 COBA 142: "Teaching in China in the 90s and Today."

Talk by Visiting Fulbright Scholar, Thursday Dec. 3, 2015

Dr. Pius W. Akumbu (Univ of Buea), visiting research scholar at University of California, Berkeley, will give a talk on Dec. 3 on “Capturing Input and Output Relations in Babanki” taking place in the Chemistry and Physics 303 at 11:00am. Free and open to the public.Talk by Alumnus.

Talk by our first Alumnus

Michael Mansbridge, our department’s first BA in Linguistics (and now a PhD student at Nagoya University) wil give a talk on Nov. 20 in the conference room for the Language Processing Group: "Integration resources in prenominal relative clause processing."

Dissertation Defense

The public is invited to the dissertation defense presentation of Ms. JungAe Lee Allman to take place on Monday, November 16, 2015 at 10 a.m. in room 014 Trimble Hall on the topic Korean Unaccusativity from an Empirical Perspective.

That's so Texas!

Department chair Dr. Laurel Stvan provides a linguistic analysis of why Norwegians use the word "Texas" to mean “crazy”, in the Nov. 12 issue of The Conversation.

Talk by John Beavers, November 6, 2015

The keynote speaker for our fall UTASCILT will be Dr. John Beavers (UT Austin): "Roots and Templates in Verbal Meaning" The talk takes place on Friday, Nov 6 at 2:00 in Trimble 200. Open to the public.

UTASCILT offers a Grad Showcase

Our student linguistics conference has moved to the fall! Join us on Friday morning, November 6, 2015 for this year’s UTA Student Conference in Linguistics and TESOL which will highlight five student presenters in the UTA Grad Student Showcase. All talks take place in Trimble 200. Registration is free, and includes breakfast and refreshments available throughout the day in Hammond Hall, Room 132-I. Full schedule and abstracts.

Semantics of the Immigration Debate

Dr. Laurel Stvan appeared on NPR’s "The Texas Standard" on October 26, talking with host David Brown about the meaning of the word "alien," both etymologically and also in light of Congressman Joaquín Castro's proposed legislation to change "alien" to "foreign national" in legal documents. The audio clip is available on Soundcloud.

Open House for New EEG Lab

Linguistics and TESOL’s new EEG Lab began operations on October 9, with an open house that included demonstrations of the equipment led by Dr. Jeff Witzel, Dr. Naoko Witzel, and doctoral student Ehsan Shafiee Zargar. (Link to photos).

Talk by Stephen Wechsler, October 2, 2015

Our next fall colloquium speaker will be Dr. Stephen Wechsler (UT Austin): "The pronouns "you" and "I": is self-ascription special?" The talk will take place on Friday, Oct. 2 at 2:00 in Trimble 200.

Talk by Ken Forster, September 18, 2015

Come hear the first speaker in our fall colloquium series, Dr. Ken Forster (Arizona) talking on Context Effects in Visual Word Recognition: The Set Intersection Problem. Friday, Sept. 18 at 2pm in Trimble 200. (Abstract)

Lunch and Learn: Zotero, September 16, 2015

Join Lingua president Stephen Self at the semester's first Lunch and Learn session on Wed. Sept. 16 and learn about Zotero--a very handy software tool for managing citations in your papers. From noon to 1 in Trimble 202. Flyer

Doctoral Student Wins Research Award

Congratulations to doctoral student Jessica Rohr, whose presentation "Use of a learner corpus in examining non-native disfluency patterns" won first prize for the best poster by a young researcher! The presentation took place on September 12 at the 3rd International Learner Corpus Research Conference in the Netherlands.

Senior Lecturer starts in Fall 2015

The Department of Linguistics & TESOL is pleased to announce the arrival of a new Senior Lecturer who will be joining the department at the end of August: Daniel Scarpace (UIUC), will be on staff for 2015-2016, bringing expertise in phonetics, phonology, psycholinguistics, and second-language acquisition of English and Romance languages.

New ELI Director

UTA welcomes the new Director of the English Language Institute. Ms. Josiebel Sambolin joins the ELI starting on Aug. 25, 2015, filling the position held by Keith Maurice, who retires at the end of August. Sambolin brings experience as the Director of the ESL Department at the Milwaukee School of Engineering and as the Academic Director of the ELS Center at Marquette University in Milwaukee.

Beginning of the Year Events

Start the school year off right by taking part in the following events:

---Academic Year 2014-2015---

Dissertation Defense

The public is invited to the dissertation defense of Lynnelle Rhinier Brown "A Corpus Study of Requests in Naturally Occurring Spoken American English: A Context Analysis Approach," Monday, July 27 at 2pm, Trimble Hall 014: (Abstract).

UTA Linguist at the NSF

Congratulations to Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald, who has accepted a position at the National Science Foundation, in a rotator position as the new director for the agency's Documenting Endangered Languages Program. She will move to Washington, DC in mid-July to begin the year-long assignment, after which she will return to teaching. UTA News Center story

Another Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award Winner!

Dr. Jeffrey Witzel, Assistant Professor of Linguistics, is one of six UT Arlington faculty members to be selected as a recipient of the UT System Board of Regents' Outstanding Teaching Awards. The awards honor "the highest level of excellence in teaching and mentorship, and ... the tremendous commitment of faculty to the success of students and the community.” (Photo of the awards ceremony in Austin)

Department Scholars in the Media this Summer

Professor Colleen Fitzgerald wrote a June 11th Huffington Post column on the Breathe of Life programs for revitalizing languages. Meanwhile, the Fort-Worth Star-Telegram published two versions of an interview on the influence of young people on effecting language change, a June 15th video, featuring undergraduate Tristen Cardwell, department staff member Cecilia Garcia-Blizzard, and Department Chair Dr. Laurel Smith Stvan, as well as an article plus photo gallery featuing Cardwell and Stvan on June 16th.

Spring 2015 Commencement Ceremony

Congratulations to our biggest class of majors yet--20 new BAs in Linguistics! View the video of the College of Liberal Arts Commencement, held on Friday, May 15, 2015. (And see MA hooding and commencement photos in our Facebook albums.)

Linguists win Accolades in the College

Four linguists won awards at the 2015 acCOLAdes on April 16: majors Kelsey Griffith (Shirlee J. and Taylor Gandy Endowed Scholarship) and Devin Hornick (COLA Scholar); and doctoral students Ji Yea Kim (Dean’s Excellence Scholarship) and Dan Amy (COLA Scholar). (See photo from the ceremony).

Departmental Endowment Awards

At the departmental awards ceremony on May 1, a number of students were awarded research funding through the endowment set up by Professor Emeritus Jerold A. Edmondson. Winners included doctoral student Darcey Browning, for work on discourse markers Cajun English; MA student Kimberly Johnson for work on characteristics of the Muskogean languages; doctoral student Ji Yea Kim for work on the prosody of Korean; doctoral student Juyoung Lee for work on phrasal verbs in Korean; doctoral student Stephen Self for work on variable telicity in the verbs of Khmer; and doctoral student Ehsan Shafiee Zargar for work on Persian-English code switching. Funding was also awarded via the Linguistics and TESOL Alumni Endowment, established by alumna Dr. Robin Lombard, to doctoral student Ehsan Shafiee Zargar for work on transposed letter priming effects with two types of morphological structures in Persian. See photos from the ceremony The 2015 Feigenbaum award for outstanding work in TESOL was given to MA student Carrie Sullivan. Four summer dissertation fellowship winners were announced. These were won by doctoral students JungAe Lee Allman, Iya Price, Juyoung Lee and Jessica Rohr. ) Photos from the end of the year awards ceremony can be found in the department’s Facebook album.)

Recent Publications and Presentations

Dr. Joey Sabbagh, newly tenured, will be a keynote speaker at the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association conference May 21-23 at McGill University in Montreal. He will be giving a talk titled: “Prosodic evidence for the derivation of verb initial word order in Tagalog.” Sabbagh also had a paper, “Specificity and objecthood in Tagalog,” accepted to the Journal of Linguistics.

A paper, “Orthographic and phonological form interference during silent reading,” co-written by doctoral student Iya Price, Assistant Professor Naoko Witzel and Assistant Professor Jeffrey Witzel was also recently accepted for publication in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.

Moving Online

Assistant Professor Cynthia Kilpatrick and doctoral students Lori Pierce and Jessica Rohr received SLOAN Consortium scholarships to enroll in the OLC’s Online Teaching Certificate training this summer, sponsored by the Center for Distance Education.

Alumni News

Nick Matthews (BA Linguistics, ’15) has accepted a position as assistant project manager at the Teneo Linguistics Company, a translation company located in Fort Worth. …  Jessica Nordon (BA Linguistics, ’15) has set up a GoFundMe page to fund a trip in which she will volunteer in an orphanage in Nepal after graduation, according to an article in The Shorthorn. … Patricia Whitlock (BA Linguistics, ’14) was accepted to the MA program in computational linguistics at Brandeis University. … Tracy Rundstrom Williams (Ph.D. in Linguistics, ’07) created an iPhone app, Change Your LENS, an educational program that provides “a step-by-step process to examine the way you view the world, recognize cultural differences and adapt your style for more effect intercultural interactions.” ... Mohamed Mwamzandi (PhD in Linguistics, ’14) has taken a position as a Lecturer in the Department of African, African American & Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Doctoral Student Receives Two External Research Awards

Doctoral student Samantha Cornelius received a $3,000 Jacobs Research Funds Grant from the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham, Wash., who provide grants for anthropological and linguistic research working with Native American peoples. She has also received $3,500 in support from the Philips Fund Grant for Native American Research through the American Philosophical Society.

Talk by Masaya Yoshida, April 17, 2015

Our final spring Linguistics Colloquium presentation will be Dr. Masaya Yoshida (Northwestern University) on Friday, April 17. He will talk on "The Online Long-Distance Dependency Formation and Local Ambiguity Resolution."

Linguistics MA Student Wins NSF Research Award

MA student Kimberly Johnson has received a 2015 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program award that will provide her with three years of financial support on a project that will investigate language attrition in Native American communities. (See the full coverage in the College of Liberal Arts Newsroom.)

Linguistics Co-hosts Digital Humanities Conference

UTA will host the second annual Texas Digital Humanities Conference, on April 9-11 at the Central Library. The event will focus on a better understanding of the history and future of digital humanities in Texas, specifically addressing issues related to secondary and higher education. Department Chair Dr. Laurel Smith Stvan is included in the news coverage in the College of Liberal Arts news.

Talk by Nikki Adams, April 9, 2015

Our second spring Linguistics Colloquium presentation will be Dr. Nikki Adams (UMD College Park) on Thursday, April 9. She will talk on “Negation and Force in Zulu”

Talk by Rajesh Bhatt, March 20, 2015

Our first spring Linguistics Colloquium presentation will be Dr. Rajesh Bhatt (U Mass-Amherst) speaking on Friday, March 20. He will talk on "Polar Questions and Disjunction: clues from Hindi-Urdu `kyaa'."

Linguistics Welcomes Fulbright Scholar

Doctoral student Ji Yea Kim is one of four Fulbright students studying at UT Arlington this year. Check out her interivew with James Dunning from the College of Liberal Arts.

Linguist gives Library's Focus on Faculty talk, March 18

Professor Colleen Fitzgerald will be the March speaker in the UTA Library's Focus on Faculty speaker series. She will speak on "Breathing New Life into Native American Languages". The talk, co-sponored by The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi, takes place Wednesday, March 18, 2015 - 12:00pm to 1:30pm in the Sixth floor of the UTA Central Library.

22nd Annual Student Conference, Feb. 19-20, 2015

The 22nd Annual UTA Student Conference in Linguistics and TESOL will take place Thursday, Feb. 19-Friday, Feb. 20. The Keynote speaker will be Dr. Michal Temkin Martínez from Boise State University, presenting a talk entitled “Language Documentation and Resettlement: Collaborations Between New Americans and Linguist.”

February News Roundup

The Huffington Post Impact blog posted an op-ed by Professor Colleen Fitzgerald connecting Martin Luther King Junior’s call for social justice to the need for linguistic justice for Native Americans. Fitzgerald, director of the Native American Languages Lab, said: “Language is always a vehicle for social justice. Righting wrongs. Native American language revitalization sustains the life force of communities.” … Associate Professor and Department Chair Laurel Smith Stvan had a chapter published, “Truth is, sentence-initial bare shell nouns are showing up bare,” in the volume titled Complex Visibles Out There published by Palacký University. … Stvan was also quoted in a recent BuzzFeed story about 10 words and phrases you wish you used less. … Doctoral student Samantha Cornelius and graduate student Vicki Caña were each awarded $500 travel grants from UTA’s Sustainability Committee to attend the 4th International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation in Honolulu, Hawaii, Feb. 26-March 1. They will co-present on “Designing pedagogy from Cherokee language and ecological documentation” with Fitzgerald and the Cherokee Nation Language Program’s Roy Boney, John Ross and David Crawler. … The English Language Institute’s Senior Instructor Eun-Jung Brown has just published her ninth book on English for Korean learners. … ELI’s Listening-Speaking Coordinator Sally Stevens and Director Keith Maurice gave a presentation, “Teaching in English,” to a group of Korean education majors from Ewha Women’s University (South Korea) for the UTA-EWA Teacher Internship Program on Jan. 21. … Linguistics major Gabrielle Johnson accepted a part-time position teaching ESOL at Tarrant County College District, Southeast campus, while three other Linguistics students will be gaining experience in the field by supporting the ESOL program at TCCD SE campus as volunteer tutors: Linguistics majors David Beard and Thuy Nguyen Jesus, and Linguistic minor Omar Chavez. … Linguistics minor Kimberly Niestroy will take part in the International Leadership Texas program at Arlington Charter High School, shadowing a speech pathologist and communication disorders assistant. … Six Linguistics students have begun working as part-time teachers in an online program instructing students in Ceibal, Uruguay, via UTA’s Office of Enterprise and development: Linguistics majors Alberto Navarro and Rubi Orozco; Linguistics minors Paola Zuniga, Jesus Omar Chavez, Kyla Self and Jared Weide (’14).

January News Roundup

Associate Professor and Department Chair Laurel Smith Stvan and Vice-Provost for Faculty Affairs David Silva presented a paper, “Engaged Etymologies: Active Learning in the Teaching of Word Formation and Etymology,” at the Teaching with the OED roundtable at the Modern Language Association in Vancouver, British Columbia, earlier this month. … Professor Colleen Fitzgerald, director of the 2014 Institute on Collaborative Language Research, wrote a guest column about the Enduring Voices project to revitalize indigenous languages in Humanitarian News and Global Voices Online. … Doctoral student Samantha Cornelius presented a paper “Multisyllabic Rhyme in Contemporary American Hip Hop” at the Linguistic Society of America in Portland, Ore., on Jan. 9, 2015. … Two Native American Languages Lab projects were presented at SSILA (the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas), held in conjunction with the 2015 annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. Fitzgerald and Joshua Hinson (Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program) presented the paper “Narrative genres and language documentation in Chickasaw.” Fitzgerald, Jonelle Battise (Alabama-Coushatta Tribe), Hali Dardar (Houma Tribe/Louisiana State University) and doctoral student Daniel Amy presented “Community-based language projects for Alabama.” … Alumna Tracy Rundstrom Williams (Ph.D., ’07) wrote a chapter in the book Teacher, Scholar, Mother: (Re)Envisioning Motherhood in the Academy that will be published in early 2015. … Doctoral student Juyoung Lee was recognized in Who’s Who Among Students in American Colleges and Universities.

Fall 2014 Commencement Ceremony

View the video of the College of Liberal Arts Commencement, held on Friday, Dec. 12, 2014.

UTASCILT 22 Call for Papers--Extended Deadline!

The 22nd Annual University of Texas at Arlington Student Conference in Linguistics & TESOL is a student-led conference specifically designed to give graduate students a chance to present their original research. A cash prize is given for the best presentation. Papers and posters are welcome by students from any school. See the Call for Papers for details. Submissions are due December 7, 2014 at 11:59 pm.

Dissertation Proposal Defense: November 24

Juyoung Lee will be present her dissertation proposal at 9:30:00 a.m. on November 24 in Trimble Hall room 014. The title of her project is "Plausibility and online structural processing in native and nonnative speakers."

Talk by Nicole Wicha, November 21

Our fall Linguistics Colloquium presentation will be Dr. Nicole Wicha (UTSA) speaking on Friday, November 21 in Trimble 200, at 1:30pm. She will talk on "Constraining models of language comprehension with brain electrophysiology." (Abstract).

Honors Thesis in Linguistics

UTA’s first Linguistics major to present at the Honors Research Symposium (HRS) was Jared Weide, who gave an analysis of the linguistic mechanisms of his knock-knock joke corpus on Friday, Nov. 14 in College Hall 101.

Dissertation Proposal Defense: November 5

Jessica Rohr will present her dissertation proposal at 12:30 p.m. on November 5 in Trimble Hall room 200. The title of her project is "Fluency and Intelligibility in Second Language Speech.”

October News Roundup

Doctoral student Dan Amy will present a paper, “Distribution of Deictic Usages of you Expressions in Metal Gear Solid,” at the First Interdisciplinary Conference in Linguistics at the University of Georgia on Oct. 24. … Two doctoral students will present work at the Sixth Annual Metroplex Linguistics Conference at Texas A&M-Commerce in Rockwall. Ehsan Shafiee Zargar will present at paper, “Possessor Raising in Classic Persian,” and Kristen Fleckenstein will present her paper, “The Role of ASL Non-Manual Negation Markers in Sentential and Constituent Negation.” … Several faculty members took part in the Texas Chinese Teachers’ Association 2014 Conference in Denton last month, including UTA Vice Provost & Professor of Linguistics David Silva, who was the keynote speaker. Chinese instructors Neal Liang (PhD in Linguistics, ’09) and Ruby Wang (MA in TESOL and MA in Linguistics, ’10) attended. Professor Colleen Fitzgerald wrote a blog post for the Huffington Post about “The Indigenous Language Challenge,” a social media challenge being undertaken by Native American language activists, learners, or teachers to promote indigenous language. Those taking the challenge post a 10 to 15 minute video of themselves speaking their language. Assistant Professor Suwon Yoon and Masaya Yoshida (Northwestern University) will present “Two cases of incremental parsing in Korean: conditionals and relative clauses” at the 15th Texas Linguistic Society conference Oct. 24-26 at the University of Texas at Austin.

Two Books Published by Recent Graduates!

Congratulations to Dr. Josh Jensen (PhD Linguistics, 2013) on the publication of his book, Jarai Clauses and Noun Phrases: Syntactic Structures in an Austronesian Language, a revised version of his UTA dissertation, now out from DeGruyter Mouton's series on Pacific Linguistics. We’re also pleased to congratulate Dr. Vitaly Voinov (PhD Linguistics, 2013) on the publication of his book, Politeness Devices in the Tuvan Language a revised version of his UTA dissertation, now out from publisher Otto Harrassowitz’s Turcologica series.

September News Roundup

Professor Colleen Fitzgerald urged Congress to approve two vitally important bills necessary to preserving Native American languages in a Huffington Post opinion piece… Doctoral student Ehsan Shafiee Zargar, who plays traditional Iranian instruments, performed at the Association of Friends of Persian Culture meeting in Chicago last month. … Another alum has joined the Chinese teaching faculty in the Department of Modern Languages: Ruby Yi-Ping Wang (MA in Linguistics and MA in TESOL, 2010) is currently a lecturer in Chinese at UT Arlington. … Four linguists will be presenting research at the Ninth International Conference on the Mental Lexicon in Ontario, Canada, this month: Doctoral student Ehsan Shafiee Zargar and Assistant Professor Naoko Witzel will present the poster, “The timing of morphological decomposition: Evidence from inflected words,” while doctoral student Namrata Dubey, Assistant Professor Jeffrey Witzel and Assistant professor Naoko Witzel will present “Asymmetrical translation priming in highly-proficient early bilinguals.” (read more).

Beginning of the Year Events

Start the school year off right by taking part in the following events:

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Summer 2014 News Roundup

KRLD/1080 AM (CBS Radio) interviewed Professor Colleen Fitzgerald about the Institute on Collaborative Language Institute, an international gathering of the world’s top linguists focused on preserving endangered languages. “Our language is an essential part of being human and how we express our humanity,” Fitzgerald said. “We’ve lost part of ourselves if we don’t have a connection to our heritage language.” A National Science Foundation grant awarded to Fitzgerald funded last month’s conference. … CoLang 2014, the Institute on Collaborative Language Research completed a successful two weeks of workshops on June 27, and is continuing on with more four weeks of field methods classes on the UT Arlington campus. Four linguistics doctoral students — Dan Amy, Lori Pierce, Samantha Cornelius and Elizabeth Tatz — have Graduate Research Assistantships for the summer as part of the CoLang support team, sponsored by an NSF grant awarded to Fitzgerald. … Associate Professor and Department Chair Laurel Stvan presented a paper on “Linguistic Reinforcement of Beliefs about the Causes of Health and Illness” at the Communication, Medicine and Ethics (COMET) conference in Switzerland on June 27. Funded by one of the newly launched College of Liberal Arts Research Endowment Awards, she also attended a master class there on Engaging Qualitatively with Healthcare Discourse Data. … Funded from a 2013-2014 Festival of Ideas Global Research Fellowship as well as an Edmondson Endowment grant award from emeritus professor Jerry Edmondson, doctoral student Kent Rasmussen recently returned from a trip to Bunia and Nia-Nia in the Democratic Republic of Congo. There, he helped the Ndaka and Mbo communities develop draft alphabet charts and transition primers. … Doctoral student Jessica Rohr is once again teaching at Harvard University this summer, as part of the Institute for English Language Programs. … UT Arlington’s English Language Institute (ELI) has been asked again to provide instruction for the Chinese MBA English program for 3 weeks in August for UTA College of Business students. Adam Stein (MA TESOL, ’09), currently an instructor for ELI, is set to teach the program. … Adjunct instructs for ELI this summer include Iya Khelm (current doctoral student in Linguistics), Chloe Williams (M.A. Linguistics, ’14), Lana Marji (M.A TESOL, ’11) and Manar Saleh (M.A. TESOL, ’05).

Dissertation Defense

The public is invited to the dissertation defense of Ashley L. McKeever "Sonority & Weight as Organizing Principles within the Fur Language" Fri. July 18, 1pm, Trimble Hall 200: abstract

CoLang 2014

CoLang 2014: Institute on Collaborative Language Research will be held on the UTA campus from June 16-July 25, 2014, under the direction of Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald. The theme this year is Native American languages, but participants and instructors from countries all over the world are expected to attend.

May News Roundup

Assistant Professor Joey Sabbagh is one of eight invited speakers to present research at a workshop entitled “Prosodic evidence for the structure and constituency of verb-initial languages” at McGill University, in Montreal, Canada on May 8-10. … Doctoral student Lori McLain Pierce has just been awarded a $3,000 external grant from the Jacobs Research Funds, hosted by the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham, Wash. The grant will support her dissertation fieldwork on the Choctaw language. … Pierce and Assistant Professor Cynthia Kilpatrick have had an article accepted for publication in the summer issue of Foreign Language Annals; the article is entitled “Focused instruction in Spanish syllabification.” … Kilpatrick and Yujeong Choi (Ph.D., 2012) have an article coming out this summer entitled “Hypothesis Testing in Task-Based Interactions” in the journal Applied Language Learning. … Professor David Silva has been voted by national headquarters to be a distinguished member of UT Arlington’s honor society of Phi Kappa Phi for having served the society and the local chapter in an outstanding manner since its founding in 2007. … Professor Colleen Fitzgerald gave two talks last month at the Conference on Language Revitalization: Sleeping and Awakening Languages of the Gulf South at Tulane University in New Orleans. … On May 18-24, Fitzgerald and Mary Linn (University of Oklahoma) are co-directing the 2014 Oklahoma Breath of Life Workshop, funded by the National Science Foundation. A number of UT Arlington graduate and undergraduate students will be participating as mentors or as the project support team. … Associate Professor and Department Chair Laurel Smith Stvan has received funding from the University of Birmingham to continue research this summer on second language acquisition of the English article system. She will visit the Centre for Advanced Research in English (CARE) in Birmingham, England (read more).

Spring Commencement Ceremony

Download the video of the College of Libeal Arts Commencement Ceremony, held Friday, May 9, 2014.

MA Hooding Ceremony

Four graduating MA students were hooded at the May 9th Liberal Arts Hooding Ceremony: Chloe Williams (Linguistics), Lynn Vara (TESOL), Katy Matthews (TESOL), and Michelle Crabtree (TESOL).

Award Winners

This year, two research awards were distributed to linguistics students from the Edmonson Endowment grant, an award set up by Professor Emeritus Jerold Edmondson. Winners were Kent Rasmussen, for his project on languages in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Iya Khelm, for her work studying the comprehension of Russianrelative clauses by speakers in Russia. In addition, an alumni grant, established by Robin Lombard, (Ph.D., ’97), was split by two students: Libby Tatz, for work on a dialect of the native American Cree language, and Juyoung Lee for work on phrasal verbs in Korean. … Doctoral student Iya Khelm received the Burquest Award for Excellence in Teaching Linguistics, named for emeritus professor Donald A Burquest. (See department award ceremony photos).

April News Roundup

Four Linguistics and TESOL students presented work in the Annual Celebration of Excellence by Students at UT Arlington on March 26, 2014. Doctoral students Darcey Browning and Libby Tatz, and undergraduates Devin Hornick and Nicholas Matthews, each present their research. … The DFW-ASLTA (American Sign Language Association) hosted a mini-conference on the UT Arlington campus April 4-5 for 70 educators and professors from Texas and Oklahoma. Lecturer Traci Weast (Ph.D., ’08) presented “Step-by-Step With Quizstar,” on online assessments and tutorials. … Two UT Arlington linguists presented at the inaugural Texas Digital Humanities Conference at the University of Houston this week. Associate Professor and Department Chair Laurel Stvan presented a poster on “Corpus linguistics of the vernacular: ‘catching a cold’ in text types that complement Google Books data” while doctoral student Darcey Browning presented a paper on “Information Packaging with Hashtags: Repair on Twitter.” … Doctoral student Mohamed Mwamzandi will present a paper, “Swahili Demonstrative Position,” on April 17 at the 45th Annual Conference on African Linguistics at the University of Kansas. … The Language Documentation Crowd, a blog on crowd-sourcing documentation projects, covered February’s UTASCILT (UTA Student Conference in Linguistics and TESOL) event. … Wenhua Jin (Ph.D., ’08) recently received tenure at Kennesaw State University and was promoted to associate professor of Chinese (read more).

In Memoriam

We are saddened to share the news that Dr. Robert E. Longacre, emeritus professor of Linguistics at UTA, a pioneer in discourse analysis, scholar of the Triqui language of Mexico, and esteemed scholar at SIL International (formerly, the Summer Institute of Linguistics, Inc.) whose work in linguistics spanned more than half a century, passed away on April 20, 2014. Obituary.

Talk by Marcel den Dikken, April 18

Our next spring Linguistics Colloquium presentation will be Dr. Marcel den Dikken (CUNY Graduate Center) speaking on Friday, April 18th in the Chemistry and Physics Building room 303, at 3pm. He will talk on "The Attractions of Agreement" (Abstract).

Dissertation Defense

The public is invited to a dissertation defense by Mohamed Mwamzandi: "Swahili Word Order Choices: Insights from Information Structure" to be held at 1:00 p.m. on Friday, March 28, 2014 in Trimble Hall 200.

March 2014 News Roundup

Doctoral student Nathan Eversole and Assistant Professor Jeff Witzel will present a poster on “Long-distance attraction effects in subject-verb agreement processing” at the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing on March 12-15 at Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. … Doctoral student Ju-young Lee will present a poster at the American Association for Applied Linguistics Conference in Portland, Ore., on March 22-25. Assistant Professor Cynthia Kilpatrick, doctoral student Lori McLain Pierce and doctoral student Jessica Rohr will also present at the conference. … Rohr has a paper in press, “Training naïve learners to identify Chinese tone: An inductive approach” in the First Maryland International Conference on Chinese as a Second Language Conference Proceedings. … Adjunct Professor Keith Maurice, director of UT Arlington’s English Language Institute, will give an invited presentation at the 2014 TESOL Convention in Portland, Ore., on March 28. Two other ELI staff members, Vicki Sorensen and Gloria Munson, will also present at the convention. … ELI instructor Adam Stein and Sami Akkad (Taibah University) will present at the conference TESOL Arabia Conference in Dubai on March 14. … The Native American Times noted that the Oklahoma Breath of Life – Silent No More workshop is sponsored by a grant from the National Science Foundation’s Documenting Endangered Languages, the Sam Noble Museum at the University of Oklahoma and UT Arlington’s Department of Linguistics. … Professor Colleen Fitzgerald is featured in a new article on the Linguistic Society of America’s website (read more).

Alumna Receives Tenure

We are delighted to announce that alumna Dr. Wenhua Jin (Linguistics 2008) has just been tenured and promoted to Associate Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at Kennesaw State University in Georgia.

Congratulations to this year’s Nakamura winner!

The Yumi Nakamura Prize in linguistics this year went to Stephen Self (GIAL) for his talk "Fluid-S” case marking in Pomoan: A new case of a conjunct/disjunct system?" Photos from the February 28th UTASCILT 22 conference are posted on the department's Facebook page.

Talk by Anastasia Giannakidou, Feb 21

Our next colloquium speaker will be Dr. Anastasia Giannakidou (University of Chicago) speaking on "Scalar marking without scalar meaning: referentially vague polarity items in Greek and Korean". The talk will be on Friday, February 21 at 2pm in the Chemistry and Physics Building conference room.

February 2014 News Roundup

Doctoral student Iya Khelm will present a paper at the Second St. Petersburg Winter Symposium on Experimental Studies of Speech & Language, which will be held at St. Petersburg State University, Russia, on Feb. 20-March 1. … Anastasia Giannakidou (University of Chicago) will speak Feb. 21 at the Department of Linguistics and TESOL’s colloquium series. Giannakidou’s talk is titled “Scalar marking without scalar meaning: referentially vague polarity items in Greek and Korean.” … Lecturer Traci Weast (PhD, ’08) was recently named Vice President for the American Sign Language Teacher’s Association. She presented at an ASLTA workshop in last semester on student feedback, entitled “What Do you Mean by Fluency and Why Didn’t I Get an A.” … Professor Colleen Fitzgerald recently published a new article, “Training Communities, Training Graduate Students: The 2012 Oklahoma Breath of Life Workshop,” in the journal Language Documentation & Conservation. It was co-authored with Mary Linn (University of Oklahoma). … Fitzgerald lays out the advantages of attending the CoLAng 2014 Institute on Collaborative Language Research in a blogpost published by the Linguistic Society of America’s Committee on Endangered Languages and their Preservation. The event will begin in June 2014. (Originally posted in: COLA Newsroom)

January 2014 News Roundup

To accompany the publication of Assistant Professor Cynthia Kilpatrick and Dr. Jodi Tommerdahl’s recent article on the size of the language sample needed in order to draw reliable conclusions about morphological analysis, publishers Sage have also released a podcast in which the authors discuss topics related to a particular that article. … Professor Colleen Fitzgerald had a book chapter published in 2013: “Revisiting Tohono O’odham High Vowels” in Constructing the Past and Confronting the Present in the voices of Jane H. Hill (John Benjamins Press). … Adjunct Professor Keith Maurice, director of UT Arlington’s English Language Institute, will participate in a presentation at the winter meeting of UCIEP (University and College Intensive English Program consortium) in Bandera, Texas, on Feb. 7-8. … Gloria Munson, grammar/writing coordinator at the ELI, gave a presentation at the Texas TESOL 2013 state conference in Houston in the fall: “The Write Sequence: Exploring a topic through various genres.” Sally Stevens, instructor at the ELI, gave a presentation on “Presentation Tables” at the Texas TESOL 2013 state conference in Houston. … Pam Arlund (Ph.D., ’06) has a book out this month: A Chinese Tajik Reader: An Introduction to Sarikoy (Sarikol) Tajik. It’s the single largest repository in English of knowledge about Tajik’s grammar, phonetics, and phonology. … Josh Jensen’s (Ph.D. ’13) dissertation on Jarai syntax has been accepted for publication as a volume in the Mouton Pacific Linguistics series. … Vitaly Voinov‘s (Ph.D. ’13) dissertation on politeness in Tuvan has been accepted by the German publisher Harrassowitz and will be published at the end of 2014. (Originally posted in: COLA Newsroom)

December 2013 News Roundup

Assistant Professor Suwon Yoon and Masaya Yoshida (Northwestern University) will present “When are Clause-Final Verbs Facilitated in Korean?” at the Linguistic Society of America annual meeting Jan. 3, 2014, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. … Doctoral student Lori McLain Pierce will present “Vowel centralization in Choctaw” at a meeting for The Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas on Jan. 3. Professor Colleen Fitzgerald and Joshua Hinson (Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program) will present “Expressing potential and ability in Chickasaw.” (Originally posted in: COLA Newsroom)

Fall Commencement Ceremony

View the video of the College of Liberal Arts Commencement, held on Saturday, Dec. 14, 2013.

Hooding of new MAs

This year the College of Liberal Arts began a ceremony to hood MA candidates just before the college-wide commencement ceremony. This first ceremony was attended by new MAs in TESOL Holly Hecht and Dennis Park and three members of the Linguistics and TESOL faculty.

November 2013 News Roundup

As part of the Foundation for Endangered Languages Conference held in early October at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, Joshua Hinson (Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program) and Professor Colleen Fitzgerald presented a paper, “‘Ilittibaatoksali ”We are working together’: Perspectives on Our Chickasaw Tribal-Academic Collaboration.” The published paper appears in Endangered Languages Beyond Boundaries: Community Connections, Collaborative Approaches, and Cross-Disciplinary Research. … Fitzgerald was also awarded a Faculty Fellowship on Sustainability in the Curriculum from the UT Arlington’s Sustainability Committee (Originally posted in: COLA Newsroom).

Dissertation Fellowship Winners

Doctoral students Lynnelle Brown and Ashley McKeever have each been awarded a Spring 2014 Dissertation Fellowship from the Office of Graduate Studies.

UTASCILT 21 Call for Papers

The 21st Annual University of Texas at Arlington Student Conference in Linguistics & TESOL is a student-led conference specifically designed to give graduate students a chance to present their original research. Papers and posters are welcome by students from any school. See the Call for Papers for details. Submissions are due November 29, 2013.

Syntax Reading Group

The next meeting of the departmental Syntax Reading Group will be Friday, Nov. 15 at noon in the conference room. Topic: Bhatt & Walkow “Locating agreement in grammar.

Metroplex Conference

UT Arlington linguists joined scholars from UNT, GIAL, and A&M Commerce at the Fifth Metroplex Linguistics Conference in Dallas on October 26. See photos on UTA's Facebook page.

October 2013 News Roundup

Five UT Arlington linguists will present work at the fifth annual Metroplex Linguistics Conference in Dallas on Oct. 26. Assistant Professor Naoko Witzel will present a paper, “How second language words function in memory;” Assistant Professor Suwon Yoon will present a paper, “On the distribution of NPIs in clausal comparatives;” doctoral student Samantha Cornelius will present a poster on “Multisyllabic rhyme in contemporary American hip hop;” doctoral student Libby Tatz will present a poster on “Mentoring at the Oklahoma Breath of Life Workshop 2012;” and doctoral student Lori McClain Pierce will present a paper on “Vowel Centralization in Choctaw.” … An article by Associate Professor and Department Chair Laurel Smith Stvan — “Stress management: Corpus-based insights into vernacular interpretations of stress” — will appear in an upcoming issue of Communication & Medicine journal. … A joint project on child language acquisition by Assistant Professor Cindy Kilpatrick and Associate Professor Jodi Tommerdahl (Curriculum and Instruction) was covered on WAMC, an NPR radio station in Albany, N.Y (Originally posted in: COLA Newsroom).

Language Processing Group Talks

On Friday, October 11 doctoral student Nathan Eversole will be presenting data related to the processing of subject-verb agreement in English. This talk from the Language Processing Group series will take place from 12-1 in TH218. See the LPG site for the full schedule of presenters for this semester.

LSA to Sponsor CoLang

The Linguistic Society of America is an official sponsor of CoLang 2014 (the Institute on Collaborative Language Research) which will be hosted by UT Arlington in the summer of 2014. See the LSA press release.

September 2013 News Roundup

Assistant Professor Naoko Witzel, Assisant Professor Jeffrey Witzel and Dr. Yu-joung Choi (PhD, ’12) have had an article accepted for publication in the journal The Mental Lexicon. The article is “The locus of the masked onset priming effect: Evidence from Korean.” … An article, “Testing the viability of webDMDX for masked priming experiments,” by co-authors Assistant Professor Jeffrey Witzel, doctoral student Samantha Cornelius, Assistant Professor Naoko Witzel, Dr. Kenneth Forster (University of Arizona) and Jonathan Forster also have an article that was accepted by The Mental Lexicon. … Assistant Professor Suwon Yoon has just had an article published in the Journal of East Asian Linguistics. The article is entitled “Parametric Variation in Subordinate Evaluative Negation: Japanese/Korean vs. Others.” … Professor Colleen Fitzgerald and Joshua Hinson have been awarded an NSF grant, for a collaborative proposal involving both The University of Texas at Arlington and The Chickasaw Nation. Entitled “Documentation and Analysis of the Chickasaw Verb [cic],” the project, funded for $47,999, is the Chickasaw Nation’s first NSF grant. … Dr. Jeongyi Lee (MA, ’00) has accepted a tenure track position as Assistant Professor of Korean in the Department of Foreign Languages at Kennesaw State University. … Dr. Neal Liang (PhD, ’09) has accepted a tenure-track job as Assistant Professor of Chinese in the Department of Modern Languages at UT Arlington this fall (Originally posted in: COLA Newsroom).

Beginning of the Year Events

Start the school year off right by taking part in the following events:

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New Undergraduate Advisor

Join us in welcoming a new Undergraduate Advisor to the department, Mr. Armando Lujan, who will assist students in choosing classes for the BA in Linguistics, the minor in Linguistics, and the undergraduate TESOL certificate.

July 2013 News Roundup

In May, Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald (Professor) was awarded a National Science Foundation grant of $169,000 to fund CoLang, the 2014 Institute on Collaborative Language Research. She is the director of this international language documentation and revitalization institute, which will be held next summer on the UT Arlington campus. … On July 19, Dr. Laurel Smith Stvan (Associate Professor and Chair) will present at paper, “Predicates of Causation: The Influence of Polysemy Pairs in Lay Health Discourse” at CRAL 2013, the Third International Conference on Meaning Construction, Meaning Interpretation: Applications and Implications at the University of La Rioja in Logroño, Spain. In August, Stvan will join a panel discussion at the Cross Timbers Library Collaborative Conference at the University of North Texas in Denton. … In June, Dr. Naoko Witzel (Visiting Assistant Professor) gave an invited talk at the Linguistics Colloquium at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. … Dr. Jeffrey Witzel (Assistant Professor) gave an invited talk at Nagoya, Japan, including an overview of recent research taking place at UTA’s Psycholinguistics Lab in the area of second language sentence processing. … The Dallas Business Journal Executive People on the Move recognized Dr. Keith Maurice, adjunct professor and director of the English Language Institute, for his election as vice president to the board of the University and College Intensive English Program. Next May, Maurice becomes president of the national organization. … (Originally posted in: COLA Newsroom)

AFLA XX at UT Arlington

AFLA, The Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association, held their 20th meeting in May 2013 at UT Arlington, under the coordination of Dr. Joey Sabbagh. See the program, featuring invited speakers Eric Potsdam (University of Florida), Sandra Chung (UCSC) and Norvin Richards (MIT). Here is some press coverage. And check out photos from the conference in our Facebook album.

Dissertation Fellowship Winners

Mohamed Mwamzandi has been awarded a Summer 2013 Graduate School Dissertation Fellowship.

Spring Commencement

View the graduation photo album of our BA, MA, and PhD students who took part in the College of Liberal Arts Commencement on May 12, 2013.

Departmental Awards Ceremony

Students received awards for research and for service at the Departmental Awards Ceremony on May 3, 2013. Doctoral student Lori McLain Pierce was this year's winner of the Jerold A. Edmondson Research Endowment Award in Linguistics, which provided funds for her to pursue field research on the Choctaw language; doctoral student Jessica Rohr received funding through the Linguistics and TESOL Alumni Endowment grant to pursue her work on acoustic speech signals of the pronunciation of second language learners; MA TESOL Student Kathy Estell won the Mary Ridgeway Service Award, sponsored by the UTA Center for Community Service Learning. (See our Facebook album for photos from the ceremony. To donate to the endowments that fund these awards, check out our donors page).

May 2013 News Roundup

The Department of Linguistics and TESOL has eight students graduating this spring with a bachelor’s of arts degree in linguistics, the most recent degree added to the department. Kelsey Pettit (‘13) has been accepted to Georgetown University’s Ph.D. program in theoretical linguistics. … Doctoral student Lori McLain Pierce presented on “Choctaw Vowel Centralization” at the Workshop on American Indigenous Languages in Santa Barbara on April 27. … Dr. Laurel Smith Stvan (Associate Professor and Department Chair) will present a paper June 7 at the 2013 JPS Research Day, part of the Office of Human Research Protections Community Research Forum in Fort Worth. … In collaboration with researchers at the University of Maryland and the Center for Advanced Study of Language, Dr. Jeff Witzel (Assistant Professor) and Dr. Naoko Witzel (Visiting Assistant Professor) will receive an additional $15,393 in grant funding to develop web-deliverable test batteries designed to measure advanced language learners’ knowledge of specific linguistic features in four critical languages: Chinese, Persian, Russian and Spanish. The research, which will take place this summer, is an extension of the Linguistic Correlate of Proficiency grant. … Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald (Professor) is teaching a course “Creating Linguistic Products for Native American Languages” in June as part of the University of Arizona’s American Indian Language Development Institute (AILDI). The institute is the premier grassroots training institute in the U.S. designed to strengthen efforts to revitalize and promote the use of Indigenous languages. Fitzgerald is also giving two invited talks in Tucson as part of the “Re-visiting the Status of Indigenous Languages” conference put on by AILDI and sponsored by National Science Foundation. (originally posted in COLA Newsroom)

Jeffrey Witzel receives UTA Service-Learning Award

Dr. Jeff Witzel has been awarded the UT Arlington Service-Learning Award sponsored by our Center for Community Service Learning for his outstanding service to our Arlington Community for taking part in engaged scholarship that integrate service learning into the curriculum.

David Silva named to UT System Academy of Distinguished Teachers

 Linguist Dr. David Silva, currently the Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs, was one of the 12 inaugural recipients from across the UT System named to the Academy of Distinguished Teachers. (UTA News Center story)

Two new tenure-track professors join the department

The department of Linguistics and TESOL is pleased to announce the we will be joined by two new tenure-track faculty members in August of 2013.

Dr. Suwon Yoon has accepted the position in Semantics and Syntax. Dr. Yoon received her PhD from the University of Chicago. She is currently serving as a Humboldt Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal, in Germany, and previously worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Cornell University. Her research explores the interface of semantics, pragmatics, and theoretical syntax, including work on conditionals, ellipsis, case, comparatives, expletive negation, polarity, mood/modality, definiteness, relative clauses, expressives, and sentence processing.

Dr. Naoko Witzel has accepted the position in Second Language Acquisition. Dr. Witzel received her PhD from the University of Arizona, and is currently working as a Visiting Assistant Professor at UTA in our Psycholinguistics Lab. Her research examines bilingual language processing, focusing on the memory systems involved in the mental representation of L1 and L2 words, how writing systems affect how the visual presentation of words in L1 language processing, and how psycholinguistic tasks can be used for language training and language assessment.

Dissertation Defense

Sok-Hun Kim's dissertation defense, on "A Corpus-based Analysis of Discourse Anaphora in English and Korean: A Neo-Gricean Pragmatic Approach" will take place Wednesday, April 17, 2013 at noon in Science Hall 332. (Photo of Sok-Hun presenting).

Dean’s Accolade Recognizes Jeff Witzel's Impact

Lance Liguez (Communication), Dr. James Warren (English) and Dr. Jeff Witzel (Linguistics & TESOL) will each be recognized for their research expertise and teaching abilities at the 2013 acCOLAdes, a liberal arts awards ceremony Thursday, April 18 in the Irons Recital Hall.

The Dean's Accolade recognizes faculty who have inspired students to create work of exceptional merit, work that goes beyond the ordinary expectations for class assignments, said Dr. Beth Wright, Dean of Liberal Arts. These works may include creative projects, community projects and research projects at both the undergraduate and graduate level.

"The primary criterion is the connection between the faculty member's scholarly and creative abilities and their impact on the educational and professional development of students at the University of Texas at Arlington," Wright said. [...]

Witzel, Assistant Professor of Linguistics, supervises service learning and internships by the department’s graduate students. He studies bilingual sentence processing and is part of a U.S. Department of Defense grant on bilingual learning. This spring, 16 students from Witzel's linguistics course assisted 150 community members in multiple venues, including UT Arlington’s English Language Institute, Arlington Reads, UT Southwestern's International Office, literacy centers, nonprofit agencies, churches, public schools and community colleges. One of the students he supervised, Carolyn Jones, who earned her graduate certificate and MA degree in TESOL and conducted literacy classes at the Vickery Meadow learning center in Dallas, was named the 2012 Literacy Texas Volunteer of the Year.

Wright said she is proud to honor faculty members who make such an impact in the classroom.

"This award is such a powerful demonstration of the connection between the role of our faculty as disciplinary specialists and their role as gifted teachers and mentors," she said. (originally posted in COLA Newsroom)

Dissertation Defense

Vitaly Voinov’s dissertation defense, on "Politeness Devices in the Tuvan Language" will take place on Friday, April 12, 2013 at 3:00pm in Trimble 200. (Photo of Vitaly with chair Laurel Smith Stvan and external committee member David Harrison).

April 2013 News Roundup

Doctoral student Joshua Jensen will present a paper entitled “Jarai Predicates: Culmination & Scales of Change” next month at the 20th Annual Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association. The event is hosted by UT Arlington and will feature 25 speakers from around the globe, with keynote talks funded by the Festival of Ideas Global Research Institute. … Two doctoral students participated in last month’s ACES Symposium. Iya Khelm presented on “Form Interference Effects During Silent Reading” and Jessica Rohr presented on “Training naive learners to identify Chinese tone: An inductive approach.” … Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald (Professor) is one of the keynote presenters for the Symposium on the American Indian at Northeastern State University, leading the Indigenous Language Documentation and Revitalization Seminar on “Immersion for Native Languages.” It is co-sponsored by the Oklahoma Native Language Association. … UT Arlington will have two presenters at this year’s Oklahoma Workshop on Native American Languages: Doctoral candidate Elizabeth Tatz will present a poster on “Mentoring at the Oklahoma Breath of Life Workshop 2012″ and Fitzgerald will lecture on “Prosodic Documentation in Native American Languages: Methodologies and Techniques.” … Linguistics graduate students Samantha Cornelius and Ehsan Shafiee Zargar have been awarded Carrizo Oil and Gas, Inc. Graduate Research Fellowships for next year, when they will start the doctoral program in Linguistics at UT Arlington. … Dr. Jeff Witzel (Assistant Professor) has been awarded the UT Arlington Service-Learning Award for his service to the Arlington Community and taking part in engaged scholarship that integrate service learning into the curriculum. … TESOL graduate student Kathy Etsell has been awarded the Mary Ridgway Service Award sponsored by UTA’s Center for Community Service Learning to honor her commitment to the betterment of the communities and the enrichment of her learning experience inside and outside the classroom. This past year she has taught language learners at VMLC, North Dallas Shared Ministries, and the ELI’s Chinese MBA class. (originally posted in COLA Newsroom)

Dissertation Defense

Joshua Jensen's dissertation defense, on "The Structure of Clauses and Noun Phrases in Jarai" will take place on Friday March 29, at 10AM, in Trimble Hall 200. (Photo of Josh with chair Joey Sabbagh and committee members Paul Kroeger, Laurel Smith Stvan, and Jason Kandybowicz).

March 2013 News Roundup

Kari Christopherson, Linguistics minor alumna and current MA student in Spanish, presented on findings from her fall Linguistics class research March 1 in the Cultural Constructions V conference on 21st Century Pedagogies . Her paper was “Choose a Language, Choose a Message: Language Choice and Code Switching Motivations between Spanish/English Graduate Students and Professors.” … Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald (Professor) and Dr. Mary Linn (Univ. of Oklahoma) presented on “Training Communities, Training Graduate Students: The 2012 Oklahoma Breath of Life Workshop” at the 3rd International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation on the campus of University of Hawai’i earlier this month. … Senior Lecturer Dr. Benjamin Slade is presenting a conference talk this week at FASAL (Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages) on “Some epistemic indefinites in Sinhala” at the University of Southern California. … Alumna Dr. Yujeong Choi and Assistant Professor Dr. Cynthia Kilpatrick will be presenting a poster to be presented at the 2013 American Association for Applied Linguistics” Morpho-syntactic development and task-based interaction.” The conference takes place later this month in Dallas. … Doctoral student Kristopher Wright will present the poster “Processing of plurality in L2 English and applications to teaching” at the TESOL 2013 International Convention and English Language Expo in Dallas on March 20.  Also attending the TESOL convention will be seven UTA students who are sponsored by the English Language Institute and the department: MA TESOL students Debby Adams, Kathy Estell and Dennis Keunhyung Park, and Linguistics doctoral students Ju-Young Lee, Lori Mclain Pierce, Jessica Rohr and Kristopher Wright. … Several UTA scholars will present work at the 26th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing at the University of South Carolina-Columbia on March 21-23. Dr. Jeffrey Witzel and K. Forster will present a poster “The locus and nature of the object-extracted relative clause penalty.” Doctoral student Iya Khelm, with help from Drs. Naoko Witzel and Jeffrey Witzel, will present a poster titled “Form interference effects during silent reading.” … Doctoral student Mohamed Mwamzandi will present at the fifth annual Illinois Language and Linguistics Society on April 5-7 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In addition, his abstract was one of four selected to receive a Top Student Abstract award at the meeting. … Peter Twele (MA, ’88) and his self-published travel memoir, “Rubbing Shoulders in Yemen,” were featured in a Surrey Leader article last month. (originally posted in COLA Newsroom)

Congratulations to Nakamura winners!

The Yumi Nakamura Prize in linguistics was a tie this year, with awards going to Katherine Nelson (Rice University) for her talk "Variation in Nez Pearce Glottalized Sonorants" and to Marty Smith and Martha Rayas (UT El Paso) for their talk "Hidden Objects: Determining Statement Reliability via Puppets." Photos from UTASCILT 20 are on the department's Facebook page.

February 2013 News Roundup

The Department of Linguistics and TESOL rolled out their new website last month. Check out their news and events at www.uta.edu/linguistics. … The 20th annual UTA Student Conference in Linguistics and TESOL (UTASCILT) will take place Feb. 21-22. Participants are student scholars from across the globe, with monetary awards given for the best presentations, thanks to the Yumi Nakamura Memorial Endowment. This year’s keynote speaker will be Dr. Robert Fiorentino (University of Kansas). Further details of the conference can be found at http://www.uta.edu/linguistics/current-students/lingua/conference/20-utascilt-2013/index.php. … Dr. Ben Slade (Senior Lecturer) gave an invited talk at the University of Utah last week. … Dr. David Silva, Professor of Linguistics and Vice-Provost, began serving as interim Dean of the Graduate School last month. His donations to the university, and memories of his home department, are represented in a brick at the new College Park Center. … Dr. Laurel Smith Stvan, Associate Professor and department chair, will take part in a DFW-area Digital Humanities Colloquium later this month. She will present “Antconc for Humanities Students” at UT Dallas on Feb. 27. … In collaboration with two O’odham community experts, a storyteller and a language and culture teacher, Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald (Professor) had a refereed book chapter, “Contemporary Storytelling in Tohono O’odham,” appear in Inside Dazzling Mountains: Contemporary Translations of Southwest Native Verbal Arts (University of Nebraska Press). (originally posted in COLA Newsroom)

Faculty Awarded Funding

Assistant Professor Jeffrey Witzel and Visiting Assistant Professor Naoko Witzel received a $76,608 subcontract from the University of Maryland to contribute to the project “Rapid Rise, Tailored Treatments for Language Proficiency Gains: Linguistic Correlates of Proficiency”, funded by the Department of Defense.

December 2012 News Roundup

Doctoral students Lynnelle Rhinier Brown and Juyoung Lee will each present papers at the American Association of Corpus Linguistics conference at San Diego State University in January 2013. Brown’s paper is “Requesting the context: A context analysis of request and command statements in the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English” and Lee’s paper is “A Corpus-based Study on the Use of Linking Adverbials in Academic Writing by Korean EFL Learners and Native English Speakers.” … Doctoral student Mohamed Mwamzandi has a paper scheduled for publication in the next edition of Studies in the Linguistic Sciences: Illinois Working Papers. The paper is titled “The Role of Givenness in Swahili Reciprocals.” … Three UT Arlington linguists will be presenting work at The Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas conference in Boston in next month. Drs. Colleen Fitzgerald and Mary Linn (The University of Oklahoma) will present “Giving Life to Languages and Data Via the 2012 Oklahoma Breath of Life Workshop.” Fitzgerald and Joshua Hinson (Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program) will present “501 Verbs of Chickasaw: Verb 1.” Doctoral students Lori McLain Pierce and Nathan Eversole are presenting a poster at the conference: “Collaborative Databasing using FLEx: A Case Study in Choctaw.” … Fitzgerald recently gave an invited colloquium at the University of Victoria in British Columbia on “Outreach Intersecting with Research: Our Chickasaw Language Collaboration.” … A recent story on the 2012 Oklahoma Breath of Life appeared in the Nov. 22 magazine edition of “Diverse: Issues in Higher Ed,” which featured quotes from Pierce and Fitzgerald. (originally posted in COLA Newsroom)

Call for Papers for UTASCILT 20: Deadline Extended

This spring Lingua will be hosting the 20th annual UTA Student Conference in Linguistics and TESOL. The conference will be on the 21st and 22nd of February 2013. The keynote speaker will be Dr. Robert Fiorentino from the University of Kansas. Presentations are welcome from students from any school. The deadline for submissions has been extended to December 2, 2012 at 11:59PM. Read the Call for Papers and submit your abstract online here at LinguistList.

DFW Metroplex Linguistics Conference

We'll be hosting the 4th annual DFW Metroplex Linguistics Conference on Saturday, November 10, 2012. Speakers will include faculty and students from local linguistics departments throughout the Metroplex region, including UTA's. Admission is free! (Please RSVP by Wednesday, Nov. 7 to have lunch provided -- to linguistics@uta.edu). See the schedule and details at the 2012 DFW Metroplex Linguistics Conference page.

Talk by Naoko Witzel on Nov. 9

Join us for a talk on Friday, Nov. 9 by Dr. Naoko Witzel: "Unmasking Bilingual Language Processing." (abstract). Her talk takes place in Trimble Hall Room 200 at 1:30 p.m.

The Metroplex Linguistics Conference

The UT Arlington Department of Linguistics & TESOL is hosting the DFW Metroplex Linguistics Conference on Saturday, November 10, 2012. Speakers will include faculty and students from local linguistics departments in the Metroplex, including our own. Admission is free! (Please RSVP by Wednesday, Nov. 7 to have lunch provided -- to linguistics@uta.edu).See the schedule and details at the 2012 DFW Metroplex Linguistics Conference page.

Students Awarded Funding

Congratulations to doctoral student Lori McLain Pierce, the newest recipient of a $10,000 student research fellowship for 2012-13. The Jess Hay Endowment for Chancellor's Graduate Student Research Fellowships was established by former Regent Jess Hay to tie graduate education to timely and high quality research benefiting the State of Texas.

Two of our MA students have won Frankie Hansell Endowed Scholarship awards from the Alumni Association for 2012-13: Debby Adams (TESOL) & Monica Nesbitt (Linguistics).

Language Processing Group

On October 5 (Friday), the LPG will meet from 12 to 1 in Trimble Hall 01. Samantha Cornelius (MA LING) will be presenting Testing the viability of webDMDX for masked priming experiments. This presentation will be of particular interest to anyone who might like to conduct experimental linguistics studies over the internet. This research group will also meet on F 10/19, F 11/2, and F 11/16 (12-1, TH 01). Please check the LPG site for more information.

Syntax Reading Group

The next syntax reading group meet in HH 132 (Linguistics Conference Room) on Friday, September 28, at 1 pm. The reading will be Sandra Chung’s "Syntactic Identity in Sluicing: How Much, and Why".

Dissertation Defense

Please join us for the first dissertation defense of the new year, by Ms. Yujeong Choi: "Repair Negotiation of English L2 Learners." The public presentation will be on Monday, August 27 at 4:00pm in Trimble Hall 200.

New Department Chair

Read an interview in the College of Liberal Arts newsletter with Dr. Laurel Stvan, the new chair of the department.

Fall 2012 Welcome Back Events

---Academic Year 2011-2012---

Community Service Award

MA TESOL student Carolyn Jones has been selected as the 2012 Literacy Texas Volunteer of the Year. This is a state-wide honor to be announced in August at the state Literacy Texas Conference in Austin. Carolyn’s supervisor praised the “countless high-quality hours as a volunteer at VMLC,” a nonprofit organization addressing the critical community need for English literacy classes in Vickery Meadow, a high-density, low-income neighborhood in Northeast Dallas. Carolyn said the award was "a compliment to UTA’s TESOL program and the great community outreach it supports and encourages." Congratulations, Carolyn!

First BA Heads to Japan for Graduate School

We're pleased to announce that our department's first BA graduate, Michael Mansbridge (BA Linguistics, 2011), has been accepted to the Graduate Program in Comparative Studies of Language and Culture at Nagoya University, Japan, for Fall 2012!

2012 Graduates

Congratulations to our newest graduates! BA in Linguistics: Jason Holt. MAs in TESOL: Wendy Cooper, Stefani Goode, Derek Smith, Heather Song, and Kristopher Wright. MAs in Linguistics: Derrick Jackman, Amanda Reed, Fadiah Qudah, and Dusti Samples. PhDs in Linguistics: Ziwo Lama and K. Larry Rogers. Check out the video the College of Liberal Arts spring commencement that took place in the new College Park Center on May 12.

Dissertation Fellowship Winners

Doctoral students Joshua Jensen, Yujeong Choi, Sok-Hun Kim were each awarded Graduate School Dissertation Fellowships for Summer 2012.

Endowments Fund Student Research

This year saw the first recipients of two departmental endowments. Doctoral student Vitaly Voinov received the Edmondson Endowment Grant to support his fieldwork this fall on the Tuvan language. And doctoral student Natalie Carter received the Alumni Endowment Grant to fund summer training in forensic linguistics as part of the work on her dissertation.

UT Arlington faculty & students at Breath of Life 2012

Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald and 6 Ph.D. Linguistics students participated in the 2012 Oklahoma Breath of Life, Silent No More workshop held May 20-25 at the Sam Noble Museum, University of Oklahoma. Dr. Fitzgerald was one of the organizers and instructors. One student taught the language databasing portion of the workshop, and the other five students served as mentors to Native American language attendees. The workshop was sponsored by an National Science Foundation grant received by Dr. Mary Linn (U Oklahoma) and Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald. Read more here, and check out the press coverage.

Departmental Awards Cermemony, May 4

Join us for the annual Departmental Awards Ceremony, where those in Linguistics and TESOL will be recognized for their outstanding achievements from this academic year. Friday, May 4, 2012 from 12:00 to 1:30 p.m. in the sixth floor parlor of the Central Library. A light lunch with refreshments will be served following the ceremony.

Talk by Paul Kroeger, April 20

Our last colloquium speaker of the semester will be Dr. Paul Kroeger (GIAL, SIL) talking on "'Adverbial verbs' and their Kin in Kimaragang Dusun" (abstract). The talk will be Friday, April 20 at 3:00 in Chemistry and Physics Building room 303.

Linguist named Global Research Fellow

PhD Student Vitaly Voinov was named a Global Research Graduate Fellow for 2012-13. The program is a component of the Festival of Ideas/Global Resarch Program through the College of Liberal Arts, made possible through the generosity of Mr. Mustaque Ahmed’s commitment to furthering global understanding. The award will help fund Vitaly's doctoral field research on Tuvan.

Talk by Mandy Maguire, April 6

Join us for our next department colloqium on Friday, April 6 at 3:00 in Trimble 200. The speaker will be Dr. Mandy Maguire from the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at UT Dallas presenting on "Semantic and Syntactic Difficulties of Verb Learning" (abstract).

Syntax Reading Group, March 30

The Syntax Reading Group (SRG) will be meeting this Friday, March 30th from 1:30pm-2:30pm in Trimble Hall 200. The topic will be Emily Manetta's article "Reconsidering Rightward Scrambling: Postverbal Constituents in Hindi-Urdu".

Dissertation Defense, March 27

The second dissertation defense of the semester will be on Tuesday, March 27 at 2:30 pm in COBA 154: room changed to Social Work 107B. Larry Rogers will present his work on "American Sign Language Verb Categories in Constructed Action." (abstract).

Talk by Keren Rice, March 23

Join us for our next colloquium talk on March 23. Dr. Keren Rice (University Professor and Canada Research Chair in Linguistics and Aboriginal Studies at the University of Toronto and current President of the Linguistic Society of America) will be speaking at 3:00 pm in University Hall room 011 on “Affix ordering in the Athabaskan verb: an interactive model (abstract).” (Funding for the event is sponsored by the Office of the Provost and the Festival of Ideas Global Research Institute.) Later that evening, Lingua will be hosting a potluck dinner in her honor.

Dissertation defense, March 8

Ziwo Lama will defend his dissertation on Thursday, March 8, 1pm, 200 Trimble: Subgrouping of Nisoic (Yi) Languages, a Phylogentic Estimation. (abstract)

Alumnus Receives Grant

Alumnus Neal Liang (PhD Linguistics, 2009) has been awarded a $100,000 national grant for “UTA Student STARTALK,” a program that trains teachers as Chinese language instructors for at least 80 students in school districts in Dallas-Fort Worth. The grant was established by National Security Agency and is managed by the National Foreign Language Center at the University of Maryland.

UTASCILT 2012: Student Linguistics Conference, March 1 and 2

The schedule (pdf) is up for the 19th Annual UT Arlington Student Conference in Lingustics and TESOL. Join us on March 1 and 2 for papers, posters and workshops! Keynote by Dr. Mike Hammond (Arizona).

New Reading Group

A new Native American languages reading group is starting up on, starting Feb. 20. They'll meet Mondays from 9:30-10:30am in 132J Hammond Hall. Contact Lori Pierce for the current reading.

Fitzgerald quoted in National Geographic

Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald was quoted in a National Geographic article on online dictionaries of endangered languages: (link w/ audio clips).

Grad Students Present on their Research

Join us for the semester's first colloquium, a panel of three PhD students discussing their data-gathering methodologies: Lynnelle Brown, Yujeong Choi, and Josh Jensen will describe the methods they're using in their dissertation work. Friday, Feb. 3 from 11-noon, 215 Trimble Hall.

Department Open House

Directly after the colloquium, join the students of Lingua for a lunchtime meet-and-greet from 12:00-2:00 in the Speech Sounds Lab, 301 Trimble, to catch up with old and new members of the department.

Syntax Reading Group

The next meeting of the Syntax Reading Group (SRG) will be Friday, February 17th. in Trimble Hall 200 from 1:30-2:30. The topic of discussion will be Emily Elfner’s paper, “The Interaction of Linearization and Prosody: Evidence from Pronoun Postposing in Irish”

Talk by Jim McClosky: Feb 17

Following the reading group, at 3pm, Dr. Jim McCloskey (UCSC) will be our guest speaker, talking on "Lightest to the Right: An Anomalous Displacement in Irish." (abstract). His talk will take place in the Chemistry and Physics Building, room 303.

Mavericks presenting at LSA in 2012

8 UTA faculty members and students--and one alumnus--presented at the Linguistic Society of America and its affiliated organizations in Portland, Oregon in January: (Ian Connally, Colleen Fitzgerald, Cindy Kilpatrick, Andrew McKenzie, Lori McLain Pierce, Joey Sabbagh, Ben Slade, Laurel Smith Stvan, Jeff Witzel).

Poster Presentations on the Phonology of Oklahoma Languages

Posters by students in LING 3330, will be presented on Thursday, Dec. 8 from 11:00-12:30 in the San Jacinto/Neches Room (located on the upper level of the University Center). Students worked on projects on an Oklahoma language. Their posters display many intriguing features in Oklahoma languages, such as typologically unusual segment inventories, allophonic processes, alliterative traditions, and writing systems developed by indigenous communities. Languages chosen by students include Osage, Cherokee, Caddo, Miami-Illinois, and Plains Sign Language.

The Department Has Moved

The Linguistics and TESOL Department's administrative office and those faculty offices that had been on the 4th floor of Hammond Hall relocated in November 2011 to the 1st floor of Hammond. Stop by the new main office in 132 Hammond Hall.

Oct. 31 - Nov. 5: Endangered Languages Week

Read more about the range of on-campus events at the Endangered Languages Week web page.

Welcome Back Potluck Dinner

New and returning students, faculty, and staff are invited to attend our welcome back potluck on Friday, August 26. Check with the main office for food signups and directions.

New Student Orientation

All graduate students admitted to the department for the fall 2011 semester are encouraged to attend the New Student Orientation, to be held on August 26 from 9:00-5:00 in the Chemistry and Physics building, room 303 (above the planetarium). Dr. Laurel Stvan will coordinate a series of events where you’ll learn about the different course requirements and exam formats for each program, receive a copy of the Graduate Handbook, take a walking tour of the department facilities, hear presentations by the Humanities Librarian and the members of the Institutional Review Board, and meet department faculty. Lunch is included.

Graduate Teaching Assistant Orientation

Our GTA Orientation for all incoming PhD students as well as for continuing students who have received an assistantship for Fall 2011 or Spring 2012 will be presented by Dr. Jeff Witzel. August 26 from 12:30-4:30 in the Chemistry and Physics building, room 303 (above the planetarium).

---Academic Year 2010-2011---

FLEx Workshop: May 26

A half-day workshop on beginning to use the Fieldworks Language Explorer (FLEx) software package will be held at the UT Arlington linguistics computer lab (Trimble Hall basement, room 014) on Thursday, May 26th, 2-5 p.m. The instructors will be Ph.D. students Joshua Jensen and Vitaly Voinov. Hot caffeinated beverages will be provided.

Pre-registration is required and seating is limited. It is best for workshop attendees to bring your own laptops to the workshop with FLEX 7.0.3 already installed (free downloads of the 323 Mb installation file are available at http://downloads.sil.org/fieldworks/7.0.3/SE/FW703_SE_A.exe).

If you plan to attend the workshop, please email Vitaly Voinov at vovoinov@hotmail.com and let us know whether you will be bringing your own laptop or not.

April 29 Colloquium: Gunsoo Lee

Gunsoo Lee will be giving a colloquium April 29 (Friday), 2-3:30pm, in TH 200. The title of his talk is "From Referentiality to Syntactic Dependencies." (Download abstract [pdf]) There will be a dinner outing to a Korean restaurant later that evening. Details to follow.

Jason Kandybowicz to Join Faculty in Fall

Dr. Jason Kandybowicz of Swarthmore College has officially accepted the tenure-track position of Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics and TESOL. He brings additional expertise to our Department in the areas of Language Documentation and Theoretical Linguistics, specifically, syntax. Dr. Kandybowicz joins us in Fall 2011.

Fall 2011 Course Descriptions Available

Course descriptions are now available for graduate and undergraduate courses being offered in the Fall 2011 semester.

Enhanced GTA Positions for PhD Students

The Department of Linguistics & TESOL offers a five-year package (assistantship and full tuition) to exceptional candidates who are applying to begin doctoral studies in Fall 2011. These Enhanced Graduate Teaching Assistantships are for PhD Linguistics students newly admitted for the Fall 2011 semester and have a 9-month stipend of $15,300, in addition to a Graduate Doctoral Teaching Fellowship that will cover tuition for full-time enrollment. Read more on our Financial Aid page.

Departmental Awards Ceremony

This year's Departmental Awards Ceremony will be held on Friday, April 29, from 12-1:30pm in the Central Library 6th floor parlor area. We will be recognizing students and instructors for their outstanding achievements during this academic year. Refreshments will be provided for this event; hope to see you there!

Student News

Heather Beal (PhD Linguistics) was awarded a Graduate School Dissertation Fellowship for summer 2011.

Three of our graduate students recently received funding from the College of Liberal Arts: Vitaly Voinov, Dean’s Excellence Research Travel Award; Matt Benton, Dean’s Excellence Award for Graduate Research/Creative Activity; Sok-hun Kim, Dean’s Excellence Award for Graduate Research/Creative Activity.

Seven students from the Department of Linguistics & TESOL were honored as University Scholars at the 2011 President's Convocation for Academic Excellence: Heather Beal (PhD Ling), Sean Cooper (MA TESOL), Nathan Eversole (MA Ling), Michelle Maupin (MA Ling), Sharon Peters (MA TESOL), Kristopher Wright (MA TESOL), and Roberta 'Bobbi' Ansiaux (MA TESOL).

Five UT Arlington Linguistics faculty and students are presenting at the Oklahoma Workshop on Native American Languages (OWNAL), April 16-17: Cynthia Kilpatrick and Derrick Jackman (MA Linguistics), "Language loss and language change: three generations of Maya K'iche'"; Colleen Fitzgerald and Lori McLain Pierce (PhD Linguistics), "Tohono O'odham prosodic phrasing: a view from narrative"; and Andrew McKenzie, "Default aspect in Kiowa."

Ph.D. candidate Joshua Jensen was recently awarded an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant to support his research on clauses and serial verb constructions in Jarai, an understudied Austronesian language of Vietnam and Cambodia. Jensen's work was featured in a story at the College of Liberal Arts news blog.

Ph.D. student Mohamed Mwamzandi has had a paper accepted for presentation at the third annual meeting of the Illinois Language and Linguistics Society, which is meeting in April at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The following students are presenting at UT Arlington's 2011 ACES symposium: Ashley Lober Mckeever (San Saba, 3pm); Vitaly Voinov (San Saba, 3:20pm); Sean Cooper and Lori McLain Pierce (Palo Duro Lounge, Poster #42, 10am-1pm Posters available for public viewing; 2:30 - 3:30 students available with posters). More details at the ACES page.

Faculty News

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. 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. 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.

UT Arlington Alumni Career News

Congratulations to the following alumni: Stephen George (MA, 2010) has been accepted to the PhD program in Higher Education at the University of North Texas; Jeff Hobbie (MA, 2010) has accepted a full-time ESL teaching position in the Intensive English Program at Southern Methodist University; Micah Rejcek (MA, 2010) has a position as adjunct faculty at McLennan Community College in Waco; Dr. Wenhua Jin (Ph.D. Linguistics 2008) has accepted a tenure-track position starting this fall as Assistant Professor of Chinese in the Department of Foreign Languages at Kennesaw State University.

March 25 Colloquium: Andrew McKenzie on Kiowa Reference Tracking

On Friday, March 25, Andrew McKenzie (UT Arlington) will be presenting a talk entitled "Reference-tracking in the absence of reference." The Colloquium will be held from 2-3:30pm in Trimble Hall, Room 216.

Psycholinguistics Lab Open House, March 25

The Psycholinguistics Lab (Hammond Hall 130) in the Department of Linguistics and TESOL will hold an open house 3:30-4:30 on Friday March 25. Please come by to check out the lab facilities and some of the different types of experiments we will be running. (The Psycholinguists Lab was recently featured in an article at the CoLA News Site.)

Tenure-Track Position in Language Documentation

The Department of Linguistics and TESOL at The University of Texas at Arlington invites applications for a tenure-track position at the rank of Assistant Professor in Language Documentation, to begin in fall 2011. Read the full job posting here (pdf).

Linguistics B.A. in the News

The department's new B.A. in Linguistics was recently featured in a Shorthorn article, in the College of Liberal Arts Newsroom, and the MavTrak Newsletter (3rd article). Read the degree requirements in the Undergraduate Catalog.

LaTeX Workshop: Mar. 9 (Wednesday)

The department is holding two workshops teaching the basics of LaTeX, a typesetting system used by many linguists to prepare documents. LaTeX is particularly ideal for tasks such as creating interlinears and drawing tree diagrams. The workshop times will be as follows:

Please email andrew.mckenzie@uta.edu or joshua.jensen@mavs.uta.edu if you plan to come (or think you might). We will be using the lab computers, so there's no need to bring your own. However, if you wish to install LaTeX on your computer before the workshop, email us for instructions.

2011 Student Linguistics Conference

Lingua, UT Arlington's Student Linguistics Organization, is holding its annual Student Conference in Linguistics March 3-4 (Thursday-Friday). In addition to student research presentations (talks and posters), there will be a keynote from Dr. Grant Goodall and a discussion panel on grants. There is no cost to attend. Find out more and view the schedule at the UTASCILT 18 page.

Language Documentation Job Talks

The Language Documentation Search Committee is pleased to be putting forward three candidates for the Language Documentation professorship. These candidates will be coming for on-site visits and lectures. Lori Pierce is the student representative on the Lang. Doc. search committee; please give her your feedback about candidates

December Commencement

Linguistics & TESOL graduates participating in the December Commencement exercises will be part of the College of Liberal Arts ceremony on Saturday December 18 at 7:00 p.m. More details are available at the College of Liberal Arts Commencement page.

Dissertation Proposal Defense: December 14

On Tuesday, December 14, 2010, Sok-Hun Kim will defend his dissertation proposal, "A Corpus-based Analysis of Discourse Anaphora in English and Korean: A Neo-Gricean Pragmatic Approach." The defense will be held in room 218 Trimble Hall at 1 pm.

Dissertation Proposal Defense: November 15

Yu Jeong Choi will be having her dissertation proposal defense at 10:00am on November 15 in Trimble Hall room 115. The title of her proposal is "Repair Negotiation of English L2 Learners."

Abstract Writing Workshop: Friday, November 12

Dr. Joseph Sabbagh and Dr. Laurel Stvan will be running an abstract writing workshop on Friday, November 12 from 2:00-3:30 pm in room 218 Trimble Hall. The workshop will discuss how to put together a conference abstract. MA and PhD students welcome.

Praat Workshop: Postponed

Dr. Nancy Caplow from UNT will give a tutorial on using text grids and scripting in Praat (Location: TH 014, the Linguistics Lab). For the half-hour before the workshop (9-9:30am), Dr. Cindy Kilpatrick will answer questions about Praat basics. Once the workshop has been rescheduled, the new date will be posted online.

October Events: Reading Circle & Colloquium with Dr. Maria Polinsky

Reading Circle (Articles by Dr. Maria Polinsky)

On October 22 (Friday), at 2:00 pm, Lingua is holding a Reading Circle to discuss two articles by Dr. Maria Polinsky (our Colloquim speaker on October 29; see next item). We will discuss the articles "Why bother with Heritage Speakers" (2010) and "Gender under Imcomplete Acquisition: Heritage Speakers' Knowledge of Noun Categorization" (2008).

October Colloquium: Dr. Maria Polinsky

On October 29 (Friday), 2:00 - 3:30 pm, Dr. Maria Polinsky of Harvard University will be delivering a lecture as part of our department's Colloquium series. The lecture, entitled "Asymmetries in nominal and verbal morphology in heritage Languages," will be held in Chemistry and Physics Building room 303. Topic TBA. A dinner with Dr. Polinsky will be held later in the evening. Contact a Lingua officer for more details.

Call for Papers Extended: 2011 Student Linguistics Conference

Lingua, UT Arlington's Student Linguistics Organization, has extended its Call for Papers for UTASCILT 18 (pdf). The call deadline is now 29 November 2010. Read more about the annual student-run UT Arlington Student Conference in Linguistics & TESOL (to be held March 3-4) at the UTASCILT 18 page.

November Colloquium & Ultrasound Workshop with Dr. Jeff Mielke

The Department has recently acquired a GE Logiq portable ultrasound for phonetic research. Dr. Jeff Mielke from the University of Ottawa will be coming to UT Arlington to help train our department faculty and students to learn how to use this tool. There are two events associated with this: a research presentation, and a hands-on workshop. The workshop requires advance registration due to limited space. Priority will go to the members of the UTA Linguistics and TESOL Department.

Colloquium

3 November, from 9:00–11:0am (Chemistry & Physics Building, room 303). This event is open to all. Lunch will be provided by the Linguistics Department immediately following the colloquium.

Ultrasound Workshop

3 November, from 1:30–5:30pm (Chemistry & Physics Building, room 303). Advance registration required, limited to 10 participants. Reserve your spot by emailing linguistics@uta.edu. The workshop will begin with familiarization with the ultrasound machine and recording of data — those who attended the previous ultrasound workshop may choose to join us at 2:30 when we begin the analysis session.

Our Department in the News

Vitaly Voinov, a PhD student in the department, was interviewed for an article in the UT Arlington Magazine. The article discusses Vitaly's work with the Tuvan language. (The section featuring Vitaly can also be read at The College of Liberal Arts News Blog.)

Language revitalization work undertaken by PhD student Lori McLain Pierce and other students under the direction of Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald was recently featured in the 2010 College of Liberal Arts Report. The report also highlights Dr. Jerold Edmondson's work in Monsoon Asia and service learning partnerships in the TESOL program.

UT Arlington Linguists at the 2011 LSA Annual Meeting

The Linguistic Society of America accepted PhD student Joshua Jensen's abstract to present at the 2011 Annual Meeting. Joshua will give a talk on "Jarai wh-questions: Pseudo-clefting, wh-raising, & clause structure." Additionally, Joshua's abstract won the Student Abstract Award, given to the best abstract submitted by a student for a paper or poster presentation at the 2011 Annual Meeting.

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.

MA Linguistics Comprehensive Exam (fall 2010)

The date of the Linguistics exam will be Friday, November 12 (a week after the Metroplex conference). Contact the graduate advisor if you plan to take the exam this semester.

2nd Metroplex Linguistics Conference

The 2nd Metroplex Linguistics Conference is to be held November 6 (Saturday) on the campus of GIAL, 8:30 am - 6 pm. Lunch will be provided. Presenters will include Dr. Laurel Stvan ("Catching Your Death of Cold: The Influence of Lexical Conflation on Beliefs about Causation"), Dr. Jeffrey D. Witzel ("The processing of forward and backward anaphora: Evidence from event-related potentials (ERPs)"), and Joshua Jensen ("Pseudocleft questions and wh-movement in Jarai"). Confirm your attendance (for lunch meal count) by Nov. 2 by emailing linguistics@uta.edu.

2011 Student Conference in Linguistics & TESOL

Mark your calendar with the dates for the 2011 UTASCILT: March 3-4 (Thursday & Friday). More details to follow.

FLEx Workshop Events

On September 24 (Friday), Beth Bryson of SIL will be conducting an all-day workshop (9:30 am – 4:30 pm) on using the Fieldworks Language Explorer software for linguistic data management. The workshop will be in the Linguistics Lab, Trimble Hall 014. There will be a lunch break; bring your own lunch.

The workshop will introduce participants to the SIL FLEX software – Fieldworks Language Explorer Software, which is used by many language documentation projects to organize lexical materials (dictionary-making), run concordances, help with morphological analysis, and interlinearize texts in a more automated fashion.

This workshop requires advance registration (email linguistics@uta.edu) because space will be limited. In your registration email indicate the option you prefer:

If you are using your own laptop, that laptop must run Windows, and you must have FLEx version 6.0.4 installed. To install, go to http://fieldworks.sil.org/download/ and choose "Download 6.0.4 SE Full". The installation can be tricky, so to assist in the installation, you can attend a department-sponsored install session on September 17 (Friday) in the Linguistics Lab, from 12 noon to 1 pm.

September Colloquium & Ultrasound Workshop: Sonya Bird

Colloquium, Sept. 30

On September 30 (Thursday), 4:30 - 6:00 pm, Dr. Sonya Bird of the University of Victoria will be giving a talk on the use of ultrasound equipment in linguistic research. Location TBA.

Ultrasound Workshop, Oct. 1

On October 1 (Friday), Dr. Bird will present on how to use the department's new ultrasound equipment (10 am – 12 noon, location TBA), and she will follow her presentation with a demo (2:00 – 4:30 pm). Registration is required for the demo at 2:00; space is limited to 15. To register, send an email to linguistics@uta.edu.

Fall 2010 Dissertation Defenses

The following dissertation defenses in our department are scheduled for the fall 2010 semester:

The B.A. in Linguistics has arrived!

We are excited to announce that UT Arlington now offers a linguistics major! Degree requirements are available in the Undergraduate Catalog.

Beginning of Year Events

Monday, August 23, 2010

New Student Orientation
8:30 am - 4:30 pm
Location: Physics Executive Conference Room (3rd floor, above the planetarium)
The New Student Orientation is mandatory for all students admitted as a new MA or PhD student in any semester of 2010. The orientation will consist of these sessions:

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

GTA Orientation
1:00 - 5:00 pm
Location: 200 Trimble Hall
GTA Orientation is mandatory for all students who received an assistantship assignment for Fall 2010 or Spring 2011 semesters and mandatory for all incoming PhD students.

Research Profiles Workshop
5:00 - 6:00 pm
Location: 014 Trimble Hall (Linguistics Computer Lab)
Find out how to upload the syllabus for classes you are teaching as well how to list your publications and presentations. This workshop is mandatory for new PhD students. It is also open to new faculty and continuing GTAs and PhD students.

Thursday, August 26

First Day of Classes

Saturday, August 28

Welcome Back Potluck
5:30 pm
Location: Guadalupe Room, University Center (2nd floor)

New Undergraduate Certificate in TESOL

The Department of Linguistics and TESOL now offers two certificates in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages). In addition to the Graduate Certificate, starting in Fall 2010 we also provide a certificate option for students who are enrolled in an undergraduate program. Read more about it at the TESOL Undergrad Certificate page.

---Academic Year 2009-2010---

Faculty Research in Phonology

Three members of our faculty are presenting posters at LabPhon 12: Dr. Cynthia Kilpatrick and Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald's poster, "The contrast system in Tohono O’odham stops," emerges from an archival phonetics project in department's Speech Sounds Lab; Dr. Jerold Edmondson's, "Voiceless applosive finals in Taiwanese and other E & SE Asian languages: Laryngoscopic case studies," grows out of work conducted with a Taiwanese research team at the Monsoon Asia project.

Language Documentation: InField 2010

Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald is an instructor for a workshop entitled "Accessing archival materials for community-based language documentation and revitalization" at this summer's InField.

Faculty Research in Corpus Studies

Dr. Laurel Smith Stvan is presenting two corpus-based projects this summer from an ongoing work on vernacular health discourse: "Catching Cold: Polysemous Reinforcement of Beliefs about Causation," at the 3rd UK Cognitive Linguistics Conference, and "Stress Management: Corpus-based insights into Vernacular Interpretations of Stress," at the Eighth Interdisciplinary Conference on Communication, Medicine and Ethics (COMET).

April Colloquium: Dr. Matthew Juge Discusses Verb Suppletion

On April 30, 2:00-3:30 pm, Dr. Matthew Juge of Texas State University-San Marcos will be giving a talk entitled "Suppletion in verbs: Typology and diachrony" in Trimble Hall 200.

Abstract: "Suppletion has yet to be well characterized in its various manifestations, despite its long history of treatment. A thorough typology depends on reference to synchronic morphological relations and distributions as well as semantic factors involved in its development. Recent work (e.g., Veselinova 2006, Corbett 2007) have revealed important information about synchronic matters, but certain diachronic questions-which directly affect synchronic distributions-require further investigation. In this paper I review the sources of suppletion and examine the understudied phenomenon of overlapping suppletion; the relationships among suppletion, frequency, and analogy; and semantic factors, including deixis and lexicalization patterns."

Departmental Awards Ceremony

Our annual Departmental Awards Ceremony will be held April 28 (Wednesday), 4:30-6:00pm in the Concho Room at the University Center. Please plan to join us in recognizing our recent graduates, outstanding students, and instructors. (You can find a list of award recipients on this page.)

Faculty Research News

Congratulations to Dr. Laurel Smith Stvan, who has been awarded a Faculty Development Leave for next year to support her research, and Dr. Cynthia Kilpatrick, who has been awarded a Research Enhancement Program Grant for her proposal, "Bilingual and Heritage Speech Production in Maya K'iche."

Linguistics Students at ACES

This year, seven Linguistics & TESOL students whose abstracts were accepted at this year's ACES symposium: Dalal Almubayei, Yujeong Choi, Namrata Dubey, Josh Jensen, Sok-Hun Kim, Lori McLain Pierce (presentations); Vitaly Voinov (poster).

Uptdate: Congratulations to two Linguistics Ph.D. students who won awards at ACES: Vitaly Voinov (President's Poster Award) and Joshua Jensen (Provost's Award). Both awards were accompanied by cash prizes.

Summer Linguistics & TESOL Courses

The department is offering a range of courses during the summer sessions. You can see them on the Undergraduate Course Schedule and Graduate Course Schedule.

New Ph.D. Support: Full Tuition and Assistantship with Stipend

The Department of Linguistics & TESOL is pleased to announce five assistantships for new Ph.D. Linguistics students admitted for the Fall 2010 semester. These graduate teaching assistantships will have a 9-month stipend of $15,300 and cover tuition for 9 hours of coursework a semester (9 hours is a full-time load). Read more about applying to the Ph.D. program at the Prospective Students page.

Research Funding

The following research funding opportunities are available through the Dean's office (downloadable applications following names): Termini Research Travel Award (application & cover letter), Dean's Research Travel Award (application), and the Graduate Non-travel Research Award (application & cover letter). Complete applications are due in the Linguistics & TESOL Department by March 25, 2010. Please submit the applications to ling.advisor@uta.edu or drop them off in the main office.

Student Conference in Linguistics & TESOL

The schedule for the 17th annual UT Arlington Student Conference in Linguistics and TESOL (UTASCILT 17), held February 19-20, 2010 (Fri.-Sat.), is now available. Our keynote speaker will be Dr. William Croft.

UTA Working Papers in Linguistics 3 (2010) Just Published

The third volume of our department's UT Arlington Working Papers in Linguistics (2010) in Linguistics has recently been published online. Access the articles from the Working Papers 2010 page.

Job Openings and February Candidate Talks

The Department of Lingustics and TESOL announces two tenure-track job searches. Download job ads for the following expansion line openings: a position in Language Documentation and Syntax and a position in Second Language Acquisition.

SLA Job Talks (spring 2010)

Our department's Second Language Acquisition Search Committee has put forward three finalist candidates, who will very soon be coming to our department for on-site visits and lectures. Yujeong Choi is the student representative on the SLA search committee; please give her your feedback about candidates by Tuesday, Feb. 16, at 5:30 pm.

Language Documentation & Syntax Job Talks (spring 2010)

The Language Documentation & Syntax Search Committee is pleased to be putting forward three candidates for the Language Documentation & Syntax professorship. As with the SLA job search, these candidates will be coming for on-site visits and lectures. Josh Jensen is the student representative on the Lang. Doc. search committee; please give him your feedback about candidates by Tuesday, Feb. 23, at 5:30 pm.

In addition to the job talks, the Lang. Doc. candidates will be teaching a model lesson (on topics chosen by them) in LING 2301: Introduction to the Study of Human Language. More details will become available soon.

Spring 2010 Comprehensive and Diagnostic Exams

Comprehensive/Diagnostic Exam Info Session

An information session for students who will be taking the MA in Linguistics comprehensive exam or the PhD diagnostic exam this semester will be held on Friday, January 29, at 1-2 p.m. in the Linguistics Lab, Trimble Hall 014.

Exam Date

9 April (Fri.): The MA Comprehensive and PhD Diagnostic exams will take place on this day. (More information about the exams is available at Comprehensive and Diagnostic Exams in the Student Advising section of our site.)

Portfolios & Mock Interviews

Friday, April 9, portfolios for MA TESOL students will be due.

Friday, April 16 (9am-noon), Mock interviews for the MA TESOL students will be held.

Open Lab Reception for New Speech Sounds Lab

Drop by the new Speech Sounds Lab, 301 Trimble Hall, this Friday, January 29, 2-4pm, for an Open Lab Reception to celebrate the opening of the new Speech Sounds Lab.

Winter 2009 Departmental Newsletter    NEW! 

The Department of Linguistics & TESOL has just published its Winter 2009 Newsletter (pdf), Volume 1, Issue 1. Download it to read a message from the chair about recent changes in the department; profiles of Dr. Cindy Kilpatrick and Dr. Joey Sabbagh, our two newest faculty members; an overview of our upgraded computer lab and new Speech Sounds Lab; and much more.

Student Conference in Linguistics & TESOL

The 17th annual UT Arlington Student Conference in Linguistics and TESOL (UTASCILT 17) will be held February 19-20, 2010 (Fri.-Sat.). More information is available at the conference page. Our keynote speaker will be Dr. William Croft.

Dr. Christopher Stewart to Deliver Lecture on the Sociolinguistics of Parisian French

On Friday, November 20, 2009, Dr. Christopher M. Stewart of UT Arlington's Department of Modern Languages is delivering a lecture entitled "The Sociolinguistics of Parisian French: Language Attitudes and Speech Perception." More details about this Linguistics Colloquium, as well as the abstract of Dr. Stewart's talk, are available on the event page.

Two New Reading Groups

Our two newest faculty members have announced that they are forming bi-weekly reading groups. Go to our Reading Groups page for more details about the Phonetics and Phonology Reading Group (organized by Cindy Kilpatrick) and the Syntax Reading Group (organized by Joey Sabbagh).

Dissertation Proposal Defense: Natalie Raun Carter Examines Threats in a Corpus

On Thursday, November 5, 2009, 12:30-2:30pm, Natalie Raun Carter will be defending her dissertation proposal, entitled "A Corpus-Based Study of Threats," in TH 200. The presentation (approximately 12:30-2:00pm) is open to the public.

First DFW Metroplex Linguistics Conference, at UT Arlington

On Saturday, November 7, 2009, our department is hosting the first DFW Metroplex Linguistics Conference, held in cooperation with the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics and the Department of Linguistics & Technical Communication at the University of North Texas. The schedule and linked abstracts are now available at the Metroplex Conference page.

Dr. Anne H. Charity Hudley to Deliver Lecture on Service Learning

On Friday, October 30, 2-3:30pm, in Trimble Hall 200, Dr. Anne H. Charity Hudley of The College of William and Mary is delivering a lecture on service learning entitled "One Community in Multiple Voices: Engagement Scholarship in Linguistics and Education." This Festival of Ideas Global Research Institute event is presented by the Department of Linguistics & TESOL and The African American Faculty and Staff Association. A reception will follow at 3:30-5pm in Physics Conference Room (3rd Floor), Physics and Chemistry Building. More details at the event page.

UTA Linguistics PhD named Distinguished Alumni for 2009

The UT Arlington Alumni Association has honored Dr. Somsonge Burusphat (PhD in Humanities/Linguistics 1986) as a Distinguished Alumni for 2009. Dr. Burusphat has done extensive fieldwork on the languages and cultures of ethnic groups in Thailand and has written three books on the teaching of Thai.

First Colloquium talk of the Semester: Min-Joo Kim

Join us in for a departmental colloquium talk featuring Dr. Min-Joo Kim of Texas Tech University speaking on “The Variability of ‘There’-BE-Existentials with Participial Codas” (abstract): Friday, September the 25th at 2:00 p.m. in the third floor of the Physics Conference Room.

A Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award Winner!

Dr. David J. 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."

Metroplex Linguistics Conference

Our department will host the DFW Metroplex Linguistics Conference on November 7, 2009. Abstracts are due on September 15, 2009 by 11:59 pm. Download the call for papers for details.

Another Smotherman Award Winner!

Dr. Laurel Smith Stvan has been selected as a recipient of this year's Alicia Wilkerson Smotherman Faculty Award, in recognition of research expertise and teaching abilities that have inspired students to create work of exceptional merit.

UTA Linguists in the News

Our department figures prominently in the 2009 issue of UT Arlington’s Research magazine. One feature-length story contains references to and quotations by Dr. Traci Weast (PhD in Linguistics 2008), who is continuing her research on the linguistics of American Sign Language. In addition, this year’s “Alumni Profile” features the very first person to earn a doctorate in linguistics at UT Arlington, our very own Dr. Robin Lombard (PhD in Linguistics 1997).

Recent Dissertation and Thesis Defenses

24 September: Kenneth Zuercher, PhD Linguistics, (10:00 am room TH 014 -- Linguistics Lab)
"Code-switching and Code-mixing in Azerbaijan: Form, Function, and Identity"

30 June: Catharine Moore Welch, PhD Linguistics (1:00 am room TH 200)
"The Emergence of Pragmatic Softeners by Instructed Learners of Spanish in the Study Abroad and Immersion Contexts"

5 June: Neal Szu-Yen Liang, PhD Linguistics (10:30 am room TH 200)
"The Acquisition of Chinese Classifier Systems by L2 Adult Learners"

10 April: Paul Schaefer, PhD Linguistics (10:30 am, room TH 115)
"Pronominal Switch-Reference in Safaliba: Focus, Syntax, and Discourse Structure"

13 April: Brett Benham, PhD Linguistics (12 noon, room TH 200)
"A Longitudinal Analysis of the Vocalic Nucleus in Modern Russian"

20 April: Presley McFadden, MA TESOL (12 noon, room TH 200)
"Are We Speaking the Same Language?: The Use of the Mother Tongue by Native English Speaking Teachers in English as a Foreign Language Classrooms"

Two New Faculty Hires

The Department of Linguistics & TESOL is pleased to announce that two new tenure-track faculty members will be joining our department in Fall 2009:

Join us in extending a warm welcome to both these linguists!

---Academic Year 2008-2009---

Linguistics & TESOL at ACES Symposium

Congratulations to Tod Allman (PhD Linguistics student), who won a President's Award in the ACES competition for his presentation on "The Typology of Relative Clauses and Natural Language Generation." (See other student publications, presentations, and honors on the Student Accomplishments page.)

Filing Deadlines

Applying?

29 January (Fri.): If you're applying to the PhD program and wish to be considered for financial aid, your application must be submitted to the Graduate School on or before the last day of January. (Financial aid is not guaranteed to all applicants who submit their applications by the deadline; however, late applicants who are accepted to the program may not be eligible for financial assistance.)

Defending?

Linguistics and TESOL Students planning to defend a proposal, thesis or dissertation in the spring should review the clarification of the filing deadline for their degree: for PhD's, for MA's in Linguistics, for MA's in TESOL.

Forms for Exams

Also, students must submit forms stating their intention to take the exam:

Other News

Also check out our student and alumnus accomplishments, and faculty news.

Past Events

Linguistics & TESOL at ACES Symposium

On March 26, nine students from the Department of Linguistics & TESOL will be presenting at ACES (8 talks, 1 poster). ACES has posted a schedule of talks, a poster assignment list, and more at their website. Presenters were chosen by the ACES selection committee on the basis of 250-word abstracts.

Student Conference in Linguistics

05-06 March 2009 (Thurs.-Fri.): The 16th annual UT Arlington Student Conference in Linguistics and TESOL (UTASCILT) will be held during the spring semester. Lingua's UTASCILT 16 page has additional information, including the speaking schedule and the abstracts booklet.

Video As a Research Tool: An Interdisciplinary Workshop

29-30 January 2009 (Thurs.-Fri.): This interdisciplinary workshop will focus on the use of video and visualization as a research tool in the humanities. It will include a screening of the Sundance-premiered documentary The Linguists, talks from UT Arlington faculty and others, and an interactive session in the e-Create Lab. More details on the Video as a Research Tool page. (And here's an article published at UT Arlington's News Center.)

Free Indirect Thought in Languages with Oral Traditions

19 November 2008 (Wed.): Dr. Todd McDaniels of Comanche Nation College will discuss discourse issues in Comanche and other languages. 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm, 200 Trimble Hall. Find out more by reading the abstract of his talk.

Brown Bag Panel: Linguistic Data Gathering

05 November 2008 (Wed.): From 12:30 to 1:30 in 014 Trimble Hall (linguistics lab), three of our PhD students will talk about the ways that they have been collecting language data for their dissertation work: