Brian Smith to Grad School

Congratulations to Brian Smith (a RU undergraduate student, class of 08) who has been offered admission to several Ph.D. programs in Linguistics.  He is now in the process of deciding among them.

[Contributed by Veneeta Dayal]

Grimshaw interviewed for ReVEL

Jane Grimshaw is the interviewee in the next issue of Revista Virtual de Estudos da Linguagem - ReVEL. This is an exclusively on-line journal.

It can be visited at www.revel.inf.br/eng.The next issue, on Formal Syntax, will be published in March 2008.  The topic of the interview will be OT Syntax.

Visiting Scholars: Gasparin and Keskin

We welcome Dafina Ratiu Gasparin of the Université de Nantes (France) who is a visitor at Rutgers Linguistics during the Spring semester.  Dafina is a Ph.D. student working on multiple wh questions in Rumanian under the supervision of Prof. Hamida Demirdache.

We also welcome Cem Keskin of Utrecht University who'll be visiting from March 18 to April 30.

[Contributed by Veneeta Dayal]

Baker: Syntax of Agreement and Concord

Mark Baker's new book "The Syntax of Agreement and Concord" has just been published by Cambridge University Press.

The announcement is here.

The publisher's description is:
"'Agreement' is the grammatical phenomenon in which the form of one item, such as the noun 'horses', forces a second item in the sentence, such as the verb 'gallop', to appear in a particular form, i.e. 'gallop' must agree with 'horses' in number. Even though agreement phenomena are some of the most familiar and well-studied aspects of grammar, there are certain basic questions that have rarely been asked, let alone answered. This book develops a theory of the agreement processes found in language, and considers why verbs agree with subjects in person, adjectives agree in number and gender but not person, and nouns do not agree at all. Explaining these differences leads to a theory that can be applied to all parts of speech and to all languages."

QPs: Akers, Fasola, O'Keefe

Congratulations to Crystal Akers and Carlos Fasola who successfully defended their first qualifying papers, and to Michael O'Keefe for successfully defending his second QP.

Crystal's QP was called "Relatives and Questions with Good Fit: The Properties and Structure of Wh-All Constructions".  Her committee was Jane Grimshaw, Veneeta Dayal, Viviane Deprez.

Mike's QP was "Composite arguments: An account of the English null reciprocal".  Mike's committee was Jane Grimshaw, Roger Schwarzschild, and Ken Safir.

Carlos' QP was "A unified semantics for the Quechua question and negation marker -chu".  His committee was Veneeta Dayal, Jane Grimshaw, and Liliana Sánchez.

[Contributed by Veneeta Dayal]