We’ve been doing some extensive self-study in the context of larger university reviews, and we note with gratitude a stable number of students, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels, who come to the program to become part of the linguistics community.  This stability in enrollments is not at all to be taken for granted in the current environment!

In addition, our faculty have been also growing back towards their numbers in the 1990’s, with the addition of Monica Nesbitt, a quantitative sociolinguistic research last year (as noted in last year’s newsletter), and with Emily Hanink this year (as noted in this year’s newsletter).  Prof. Hanink is a syntactic expert and is particularly interested in what less well-researched languages can teach us about the field.  In addition, the department welcomes another very prominent and accomplished linguistic field worker in Shobhana Chelliah this spring.  Prof. Chelliah comes to I.U. from a long and fruitful tenure at the University of North Texas, and will be building the department’s research profile in field work.  Finding out about all those other 1000’s of languages has long been a focus and important role for I.U. linguistics in the context of the overall discipline, and we are glad that this role can continue to grow in the future years.

Also commensurate with this role, Francis Tyers is working on extending the department’s effectiveness at linking our well-developed computational program to this larger goal of linking to less well-resourced languages, as noted in another story below.

In other notes, another one of our leaders in field work, Sam Obeng, was promoted to Distinguished Rank last year, culminating many years of writing on a broad range of topics in West African languages.  And in a somewhat different note, the department has received the first endowed scholarship in the history of the department, as a memorial to Steven Chin, doctoral alumnus of the department from 1994.  Steven was an active researcher in the phonological group in the department, and moved from Bloomington into a long-term professional research position on the Indianapolis campus.  His long-term labors in clinical language work and commitment to Indiana University have been commemorated by his family in the Steven B. Chin endowment supporting students in linguistics at Indiana University.  More on this event is in the newsletter as well.

Kenneth de Jong
Professor, Linguistics
Affiliate, Cognitive Science Program
Adjunct Professor, Second Language Studies
Chair, Linguistics