News

  • Matthew Dryer received a $262,229 three year NSF grant for field work and documentation of four languages of Papua New Guinea - Walman (VAN), Poko-Rawo (RWA), Sreenge (LSR), and Yeri (YEV).

  • The National Science Foundation has awarded Jürgen Bohnemeyer the research grant #0723694 "Spatial language and cognition in Mesoamerica", with a total budget of $250,000, a duration of 42 months, and a start date of November 1, 2007. This project is a comparative study of the representation of space in 15 indigenous languages of Guatemala and Mexico. It focuses on two unusual traits of spatial language in Mesoamerica, highly productive terminologies for object parts defined in geometric terms and a preference for "allocentric" (i.e.,non-observer-based) frames of reference.

  • Roger Woodard received the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2006 award for his book "Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages". The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages is the first comprehensive reference work treating all of the languages of antiquity. Clear and systematic in its approach, the Encyclopedia combines full linguistic coverage of all the well-documented ancient languages, representing numerous language families from around the globe. Each chapter focuses on an individual language or, in some instances, a set of closely related varieties of a language. Providing a full descriptive presentation, each of these chapters examines the writing system(s), phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon of that language, and places the language within its proper linguistic and historical context. The Encyclopedia brings together an international array of scholars, each a leading specialist in ancient language study. While designed primarily for linguistic professionals and students, this work is invaluable to all whose studies take them into the realm of ancient language. Roger D. Woodard is the Andrew V.V. Raymond Professor of Classics at the State University of New York, Buffalo. He previously served on the faculties of Classics and/or Linguistics at the University of Southern California, Johns Hopkins University and Swarthmore College. Among his other books are Greek Writing from Knossos to Homer: A Linguistic Interpretation of the Origin of the Greek Alphabet (Oxford, 1997) and co-author of Ovid's Fasti (Penguin, 2000). He is a member of the Linguistic Society of America and the American Philological Association.

  • Jeff Good has been the recipient of two recent NEH grants under the Documenting Endangered Languages program to fund documentary and descriptive work on two groups of underdescribed languages of the Northwest Province of Cameroon, the Western Beboid languages and the moribund languages of the Furu Awa subdivision. This work will produce the first comprehensive descriptive materials on the grammar and lexicon of these languages.

  • Heike Lehnert received an NIH postdoctoral fellowship for the Center for Language Sciences at the U of R. The PI of the NIH training grant is Mike Tannenhaus and her faculty sponsor is Joyce McDonough.

  • Jenn Cornish received the Raymond H. Stetson Scholarship in Phonetics and Speech Sciences (for 2006), awarded by Acoustical Society of America.