Ling grad student Anne Therese Frederiksen has accepted a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC Irvine, to work with Judith Kroll on pronoun processing in bimodal bilinguals. Congratulations, Anne Therese!

Our graduate student Yuan Chai has been awarded the Friends of the $2,000 International Center Fellowship at UC San Diego to conduct summer fieldwork in Southeast Region of China. Yuan will describe and document Xiapu Min, an understudied Min language spoken in eastern Fujian province, China. The specific research goal is to analyze the tone sandhi system of the language. Congratulations, Yuan!

Our graduate student Tory Sampson has been awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship for 2019-2022 to pursue her project on “Pronominal Acquisition of ASL in Deaf Children”. This project will explore pronoun acquisition in signing deaf children and analyze how they distinguish between deictic and pronominal pointing in ASL. The acquisition of pointing and pronouns in deaf children will be compared to that of hearing children using spoken language. Congratulations, Tory!

Our graduate student Nese Demir has been awarded the Friends of the $2,000 International Center Fellowship at UC San Diego to conduct summer fieldwork in the Northern Black Sea Region of Turkey. Nese will research vowel harmony in the non-standard dialect spoken in the region—specifically, the Laz language and how bilingual speakers of Laz and Turkish use vowel harmony in the Turkish dialect they speak. Congratulations, Nese!

Our 4th year graduate student Adam McCollum has accepted a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in Phonology in the Department of Linguistics at Rutgers University. Adam’s research is based on fieldwork, formal and computational methods and laboratory phonology. His (soon-to-be-completed) dissertation is examining gradient vowel harmony patterns in several Turkic languages. Congratulations, Adam!

Matthew Zaslansky has been awarded a prestigious Fulbright fellowship in linguistics for the 2019-2020 academic year. Beginning in September, Matthew will carry out linguistic research in the Republic of Georgia to document and describe morphosyntactic variation in the dialects of Georgian Sign Language used by deaf signers in Batumi and Tbilisi. Matthew will be one of more than 700 U.S. citizens to carry out research abroad next year courtesy of the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, which is overseen by the U.S. Department of State and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. He is the sole recipient of the 2019-2020 Fulbright Study/Research Award for Georgia, and  will be the first grantee from UC San Diego to visit the country.

Since its inception in 1946, the Fulbright Program has provided more than 380,000 participants—chosen for their academic merit and leadership potential—with the opportunity to exchange ideas and contribute to finding solutions to shared international concerns. Over 1,900 U.S. students, artists and early career professionals in more than 100 different fields of study are offered Fulbright Program grants to study, teach English and conduct research annually in over 140 countries throughout the world.

Nina Kaldhol, one of our first year graduate students, was awarded one of an LSA Linguistic Institute Fellowship to attend the 2019 LSA Linguistic Institute at the University of California at Davis. Congratulations, Nina!

José Armando Fernandez Guerrero received a UC San Diego International Institute Research and Travel Award for 2019-20 for his research on the Ch’ol language in Chiapas, Mexico. Congratulations, José Armando!

José Armando Fernández Guerrero, one of our first year graduate students, was awarded the Ken Hale Student Fellowship to attend the 2019 LSA Linguistic Institute at the University of California at Davis. This fellowship is awarded to a graduate student who is pursuing a course of study to document endangered languages and work with communities toward their preservation. Congratulations, José Armando!

Our graduate student Matthew Zaslansky and alumna Savithry Namboodiripad presented a talk entitled “Syntactic Flexibility in the Djar Dialect of Avar: Experimental Evidence from Basic Constituent Order” to the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow at the Linguistic Forum 2019: Indigenous languages of Russia and beyond, April 4-6, 2019. This conference was organized by the Institute in partnership with CIPL – Comité International Permanent des Linguistes / Permanent International Committee of Linguists in honor of the declaration by the United Nations of 2019 as The Year of Indigenous Languages.