The New Sesquipedalian

In a move that caused much discomfort in the student bodies of every linguistics department in the country (world?), a Language Log post earlier this month reported that we are all expected to get jobs at some point. This unsettling news was delivered by Chris Potts, based on work with our very own Stephanie Shih and alum Rebecca Starr.

If anyone is still deciding on a subfield and is interested in playing the marketability angle, I recommend taping this post to the side of your monitor for the next however-many years.

Uriel Cohen-Priva has accepted the position of Assistant Professor in Brown’s Department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences. Congratulations, Uriel!  Hazor’im bedim’a – berina yiqtsoro.

Some of you may have noticed that Hannah Rohde, our illustrious Mellon postdoc, hasn’t been around this week. That’s because she’s been visiting the University of Edinburgh, where she’s been giving a talk, interviewing, etc. And….this just in: they’ve offered her the job! Woo hoo! Be sure to tune in again next week for the next exciting episode of Rohde on the Road…

Stephanie Shih informs us:

Beth, Penny, and Vera have graciously agreed to give an info session about the process of applying to academic jobs and postdocs. See info below.

What: (applying to) Academic Jobs and Postdocs Info Session
Who: with Beth Levin, Penny Eckert, and Vera Gribanova
When: 3:30pm, Friday, April 8th (regular colloq slot)
Where: Greenberg room
Why: because it’s never too early to at least be aware of what you need to know! (even if your actual inclination is to hide underneath the rock that is grad school forever.)

Mark your calendars and be there!

From John Rickford:

Caroline Piercy, the brilliant sociolinguist grad student/then postdoc from Essex university who has been a visitor here since Feb 2009, has just been awarded a post-doctoral fellowship in the Linguistics Department at Oxford University. She’ll replace our recent PhD Lauren Hall-Lew, the previous recipient of this competitive and prestigious award, who left Oxford to take up a regular teaching/research position at the University of Edinburgh.

While at Stanford, Caroline not only completed and successfully defended her dissertation on "One /a/ or two?’: the phonetics, phonology and sociolinguistics of change in the TRAP and BATH vowels in the southwest of England" (David Britain, supervisor, Peter Trudgill and Enam Al-Wer, examiners), but she also embarked on a new study of relativizer omission in Dorset English with John Rickford, Tom Wasow, and Ewart Thomas, with a grant from the Stanford Presidential Fund. That study involved comparisons with relativizer omission patterns from Guyana, Jamaica, Barbados, Appalachian English and AAVE from Rickford’s NSF project, and drew on the relativizer omission findings from Switchboard and the Predictability theory of Tom Wasow and Florian Jaeger. A joint paper on the results of this collaborative research (by Piercy et al) will be presented at the Variation and Language Processing conference at the University of Chester in April 2011, and follow up papers are planned.

Itamar Francez (2007 Stanford PhD) has accepted a position as one of the seven new fellows at the Zukunftskolleg at the University of Konstanz. These fellowships are across disciplines. Wonderful to have a linguist among them, and congratulations Itamar!

Thanks Cleo!

In early June, we learned that Lauren Hall-Lew (2009 Linguistics PhD) accepted a sociolinguistics faculty position at the University of Edinburgh. Congratulations, Lauren!

Ash Asudeh (2004 Stanford PhD; newly promoted to Associate at Carleton University) has accepted an offer from Oxford Linguistics. His full title: University Lecturer in Semantics and Pragmatics at the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics, University of Oxford, and Hugh Price Fellow at Jesus College. The position begins January 1, 2011. Congratulations, Ash!