Congratulations
Osama Abdel-Ghafer (U KS) was selected by the Linguistics Department faculty for the Linguistics Award for the 2002-03 academic year.
Susan Carey (Harvard U) received the 2002 William James Fellow Award from the American Psychological Society for her significant intellectual contributions to the basic science of psychology.
Jean Berko-Gleason (Boston U) delivered the 24/7 (24 seconds long, summed up in 7 words) lecture on language at the 2002 Ig Nobel awards at Harvard U.
Lila Gleitman (Penn) will present the Blackwell/Maryland Lectures in Language and Cognition at U MD-College Park in November.
Stanley Insler (Yale U) was presented with a festschrift on the occasion of his 65th birthday.
Aravind Joshi (Penn) was awarded the David E. Rumelhart Prize by the Cognitive Science Society in August. The award is given for outstanding contributions to the formal analysis of human cognition.
Dan Jurafsky (U CO) was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship.
D. Terence Langendoen (U AZ) was elected a AAAS Fellow for 'distinguished contributions to the study of cognitive aspects of language, especially bridge-building across subdisciplines, and for outstanding service to the entire field of lingustics'.
Keren Rice (U Toronto) has been appointed to the Council of the Social Science and Research Council of Canada.
Muffy Siegel (Temple U) captured media attention (AP wire story, NPR, CBS, CNN) as a result of her article on the expression 'like' recently published in the Journal of Semantics.
Sally Thomason (U MI) presented the Gavan Lecture at the U MO-Columbia this month.
American Council of Learned Societies: Arienne M. Dwyer (U KS) and Susan Gal (U Chicago) were awarded fellowships in the 2001-02 fellowship competition.
Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation: Nicholas Fleisher (Yale U) received a 2002 Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies.
National Arts and Humanities Month
October has been declared National Arts and Humanities Month (NAHM). Americans for the Arts, coordinator for the event, encourages cultural organizations and individuals to help raise the profile of the arts and humanities in local communities across the country by participating in NAHM. A list of '101 Things To Do To Celebrate the Month' can be found at: http://www.AmericansForTheArts.org/issues/otherinterests/other_article.asp?id=1009.
Nominations for MLA Prizes
The Modern Language Association invites nominations for the Kenneth W. Mildenberger Prize, awarded for an outstanding research publication (published in 2001 or 2002) in the field of teaching foreign languages and literatures, and for the MLA Prize for Independent Scholars, awarded for a distinguished scholarly book published in 2002 in the field of English or another modern language or literature. Nominees do not have to be members of the MLA. The deadline for nominations is 1 May 2003. For details, contact: MLA, Office of Special Projects, 26 Broadway, 3rd floor, New York, NY 10004-1789; (646) 576-5141; awards@mla.org.
Script Encoding Initiative: Assistance Needed
Current work on Unicode (/ISO 10646), the international character encoding standard, needs support and assistance from linguists. Unicode was created in part to rectify problems of the past, when competing character encoding standards made sending (and receiving) texts electronically difficult. With Unicode (and Unicode-enabled products), it should be possible for linguists to send IPA, cuneiform, or any script, and have it received by another person using any kind of computer or software. To date, Unicode covers 52 scripts, but over 90 are still missing, including many minority scripts (such as Balinese, Batak, Chakma, Cham, Meithei Mayek, New Tai Lu, N'Ko, and Vai) and many scripts of historic importance (including Aramaic, Avestan, Brahmi, Egyptian Hieroglyphics, Glagolitic, Javanese, and Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform). Unfortunately, historic and minority scripts are not of primary interest to corporations (and some governmental bodies), so the primary push to cover the remaining scripts must now come from the universities and professional societies, and in particular, linguists.
The Script Encoding Initiative was established at UC-Berkeley to coordinate efforts to cover missing characters and scripts. Linguists are needed to report on characters (and scripts) missing from Unicode, provide feedback on current proposals, and answer questions on specific scripts. Also, funding is needed to support the creation of Unicode proposals and for the creation of free fonts. A fuller description of the project is available on the Script Encoding Initiative's website: http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/~dwanders. For further information on SEI, please contact: Deborah Anderson, Dept. Linguistics, 1203 Dwinelle Hall #2650, UC-Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-2650; dwanders@socrates.berkeley.edu.
Summer Institutes
North American Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information, 2nd. 17-21 June 2003 at Indiana University. Contact: nasslli@indiana.edu; http://www.indiana.edu/~nasslli/.
Phonology and Phonetics School. 7-11 April 2003 in Ile-de-Porquerolles, France. Contact: Isabelle Marlien, Phonology/Phonetics School, Parole and Langage Laboratory, CNRS and University of Provence, 29 av. Robert Schuman, 13621 Aix-en-Provence, France; fax: 33-04-42-59-50-96; isabelle.marlien@lpl.univ-aix.fr.
In Memoriam
Tristano Bolelli (Pisa, Italy)
A. Machtelt Bolkestein (U Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Eugenio Coseriu (U Tübingen, Germany)
Kathleen Fenton (Malden, MA)
W. Nelson Francis (Brown U)
Meredith Knox Gardner (Washington, DC)
Akio Kamio (Japan)
Gordon Messing (Cornell U)
John N. Seaman (East Lansing, MI)
Bozena H. Thompson (Pasadena, CA)