Linguistics faculty, graduate students receive key honors

Graduate students and faculty in the Department of Linguistics have received key honors in their field.

John Goldsmith, Chair of Computer Science and the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor in Computer Science, Linguistics, Physical Sciences Collegiate Division and the Humanities, was chosen as Chair-Elect of the Linguistics and Language Sciences section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In this role, Goldsmith will help organize workshops and panels at the AAAS annual meeting. His term as chair will begin in February 2012.

Third-year PhD student Rebekah Baglini, who studies the interface between syntax and semantics, was awarded the Linguistic Society of America’s Bloch Fellowship. The bi-annual Bloch Fellowship is awarded to the student with the most promising application to the LSA’s Linguistic Institute. Bloch Fellows serve a two-year term as voting members of the LSA’s governing board.

Fifth-year PhD student Thomas Grano has received an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Completion Fellowship. These prestigious fellowships, which support the final year of dissertation writing, are given to just 65 graduate students in the humanities and social sciences nationwide. Grano studies syntax and semantics, with a particular focus on Mandarin syntax.