Undergrad Paris Gappmayr is a finalist in a thesis competition
Paris Gappmayr, linguistics undergrad extraordinaire, has advanced to the Top 10 Finals of the Undergraduate 3 Minute Thesis Competition. This is a new competition funded by the PURE award that falls under UBC’s Strategic Plan. Congratulations, Paris! You can watch her successful presentation on YouTube. Better still, you can and should attend the final round […]
Galia Freiwirth wins Dharmaratne Award
Galia Freiwirth has been awarded the inaugural Edna Dharmaratne Award in Linguistics. The award recognizes students who embody a spirit of volunteerism and service. Galia is a Speech Sciences major in her fourth year. Here’s what curriculum review manager Wendy Trigg wrote about her: For many years, she has been an active participant in volunteer programs in […]
Gitksan Lab — In the spotlight!
Check out this great piece on the Gitksan Lab, put together by the UBC Language Sciences initiative.
Guggenheim Fellow!
Congratulations to our current department head, Dr. Bryan Gick, on being selected as a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow! “As a Guggenheim Fellow, Dr. Gick will work with top interdisciplinary experts developing and extending his body-based approach to speech, with the goal of deepening links between biomechanics, the nervous system, the digestive system and the evolution of […]
Congratulations — Outstanding Dissertation
Congratulations to Dr. Patrick Littell, whose 2016 dissertation “Focus, predication, and polarity in Kwak’wala” (supervised by Dr. Hotze Rullmann) has been chosen by UBC as a finalist for the national competition for the Canadian Association of Graduate Studies’ Distinguished Dissertation Award.
Three new PhDs!
Congratulations to Blake Allen, Scott Mackie, and Jennifer Glougie, who all successfully defended their PhDs in September. Blake: “Bayesian models of learning and generating inflectional morphology” (Supervisor: Doug Pulleyblank) Scott: “Simulating the Evolution of Consonant Inventories” (Supervisor: Gunnar Hansson) Jennifer: “The semantics and pragmatics of English evidential expressions: The expression of evidentiality in police interviews” […]
Abdul-Mageed interviewed on tweet dataset
The Language Sciences website has a new interview with Muhammad Abdul-Mageed on the large publicly-available dataset of tweets about COVID-19 he and his colleagues assembled. It includes 1.5 billion tweets in 104 languages.
COVID-19 staffing & support update
In keeping with the Faculty of Art’s lead and guidelines, staff in the Linguistics Department are now working remotely, but they are still available to assist you. Please do not hesitate to contact them. Please see ubc.ca for the most up-to-date information about UBC’s response to COVID-19, and keep an eye out for emails as we explore […]
All talks for next few weeks canceled
Due to coronavirus concerns, all of the department’s colloquia and undergraduate presentations that were scheduled to take place in the next few weeks—including those associated with our syntax job search—have been canceled. We will try to reschedule them in electronic form. More news on that is to come.
Bryan Gick and Arian Shamei on the astronomy-linguistics interface
Following up on an astronaut’s observation about what it’s like to speak after a return from space, faculty member Bryan Gick and doctoral student Arian Shamei researched the phonetic effects of space travel. They demonstrated that, in Arian’s words, freshly-returned astronauts “speak as if their tongues are effectively heavier.” In addition to being an early work […]