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17
Mar 15

Funding: Columbia School Linguistic Society Graduate Student Fellowship

Columbia School Linguistic Society

Graduate Student Fellowship

Request for proposals for the 2015-2016 academic year
Deadline for applications: May 26th, 2015

columbia linguistics

The Columbia School Linguistic Society (henceforth the Society) invites applications from graduate students in linguistics for the third round of its Graduate Fellowship program. The successful applicant (henceforth referred to as the Fellow) will undertake a linguistic research project from the perspective of Columbia School under the guidance of a Mentor. The Fellowship and the research project associated with it will cover a period of one academic year. The Fellow will be expected to make every effort to present work-in-progress at the Columbia School Seminar.

The research project undertaken by the Fellow will address a grammatical, lexical, or phonological problem in the language of the Fellow’s choice. The Fellow will produce a final report, written in English, putting forth a Columbia School analysis of the problem, preceded by a review of the relevant literature. The Fellow must be either (a) a matriculated student in good standing in a recognized graduate program in linguistics or closely related area anywhere in the U.S. or (b) an applicant to such a program, and (c) be a U.S. citizen (this because of the Society’s tax constraints). The Mentor must be a member of the Society.

The Fellow will receive a stipend of $15,000 for the period covering from September 1, 2015 to August 31, 2016. The stipend is calculated on the basis of a 12-month calendar year. Assuming satisfactory progress in the judgment of the Society’s Executive Committee, stipend payments will be made on a monthly basis (12 payments of $1250) in the form of a check from the Society. A successful Fellow may reapply for continuing support for the following year. The Mentor will not receive any financial compensation.

It is expected that the Fellow will work on the project for no less than 15 hours a week. In addition, it is expected that the Fellow will make at least four presentations before the Columbia School Linguistics Seminar during the course of the Fellowship year. It is also expected that the Fellow will attend the Seminar on a regular basis. The Seminars are held at Columbia University in New York City. A Fellow whose residence is distant from New York will be expected to make arrangements for remote attendance and presentations.

The application is to be prepared by the prospective Fellow in consultation with the prospective Mentor. The application consists of a statement of the problem, an account of existing analyses if any, a brief preliminary review of the relevant literature, and a description of the data to be used. The application is not to exceed 10 double-spaced pages written in 12-point font. It is required that the prospective Fellow contact the prospective Mentor and that the Mentor review the application before submission.

The name of the prospective Fellow and that of the prospective Mentor must be included in the application. The Fellow’s telephone number and email address, and the name of the Fellow’s graduate school, are also to be included in the application.

The deadline for receipt of the first round of applications is May 26, 2015. The proposal will be reviewed by three members of the Society appointed by the Society’s Executive Committee. Applicants will be notified by the end of June 2015. The application must be submitted electronically to Professor Ricardo Otheguy of the PhD Program in Linguistics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (rotheguy@gc.cuny.edu).

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01
Dec 14

NYC: Daniel Everett: “On the Role of Culture in the Emergence of Language”

The Columbia University Seminar on Columbia School Linguistics cordially invites you to the next meeting on Thursday, December 11. Daniel Everett will be presenting: “On the Role of Culture in the Emergence of Language”.

From the event organizers:

Daniel Everett is a leading linguist who has published extensively on grammar, phonology, cognition, and culture, including including many papers in important linguistics journals (i.e., Language, Linguistic Inquiry, Natural Language and Linguistic Inquiry). He is best known for his study of the Pirahã people and their language in Brazil, a solid empirical base of research which led him to reject a generative view of language in favor of a functionalist approach that sees culture and grammar as intertwined.  Everett is the rare linguist who is deeply familiar with both formal and functional approaches to language, making him an ideal guest for the Columbia School Linguistics Seminar.

We will meet at 5:00 pm for talk in Faculty House at Columbia University. Space is limited, please RSVP to Billur Avlar, by email: ba2342@columbia.edu

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Abstract: 

On the Role of Culture in the Emergence of Language

In the early days of American anthropology, the field was divided into four main areas of inquiry, all believed to be related: archaeology, cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, and linguistics. This view was pioneered by Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead, among many others. This lecture is a continuation of that tradition in the sense that it argues that language and culture share a deeply symbiotic relation – neither is supervenient on nor independent of the other, but both language and culture shape and constrain the other.  I address here the culture-shaping-language side of this relationship and argue that it is not possible to understand either the phonology, the discourse, or the syntax of the Piraha language without simultaneously understanding Piraha culture. This is so, it is argued, because culture is causally implicated in the structures of Piraha grammar from its sound system to its conversations, including its sentential syntax.
Bio:

Daniel L.  (Dan) Everett  holds a ScD in Linguistics from the Universidade Estadual in Campinas, where he served as professor of linguistics.  He has held appointments at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Manchester, UK, and Illinois State University. Since 2010 he is the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Bentley University in Waltham, MA. Everett   has lived in the Amazonian jungle for nearly eight out of the last thirty years, studying more than a dozen Amazonian languages. He has published more than 100 scientific articles and eight books, including Don’t sleep there are snakes: life and language in the Amazonian jungle and Language: The Cultural Tool. He is currently working on Dark Matter of the Mind for the University of Chicago Press and How Language Began, for W.W. Norton. A documentary about his life and work, The Grammar of Happiness, was released in 2012.

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29
Nov 14

NYC: Transitions/Transgressions (Columbia)

The Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia invites you to:

Transitions/Transgressions: A discussion on feminism, neoliberalism and cultures of resistance in Portugal and Spain, forty years after the Portuguese Revolution

From the event organizers:

Poet and Professor Ana Luísa Amaral (University of Porto) will give the keynote address, engaging her own work, literature and poetry as resistance, and the fortieth anniversary of New Portuguese Letters (1972), which saw the arrest and trial of the three women authors, caught the attention of feminist thinkers such as Adrienne Rich and Simone de Beauvoir, and provoked international feminist activism.

More information here

We hope this dialogue will complicate the narrative of democratic transition in Portugal and Spain, and consider the ways in which transgressive cultures thrive and may be foreclosed upon in Iberia today.

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15
Nov 14

NYC: “Lost Madrid: The Royal Palace of the Spanish Habsburgs” (Columbia University)

As part of the 2014-2015 Bettman Lecture Series, Columbia’s Department of Art History and Archaeology invites you to attend “Lost Madrid: The Royal Palace of the Spanish Habsburgs,” a talk by Prof. Jesús Escobar (Northwestern University).

6:00pm, Monday, November 24th
612 Schermerhorn Hall
Columbia University

From the organizers:

Jesús Escobar is a professor of art history at Northwestern University, where he holds the Harold H. and Virginia Anderson Chair.  He specializes in the art, architecture, and urbanism of early modern Spain, Italy and the Ibero-American world.  His book The Plaza Mayor and the Shaping of Baroque Madrid (2003; revised Spanish edition 2008) received the Eleanor Tufts Award from the American Society for Hispanic Art Historical Studies.  Most recently Professor Escobar has published on subjects ranging from religious architecture across the Spanish Empire to the political dimensions of a mid-seventeenth century map of Madrid.  He is currently at work on his upcoming book Baroque Madrid: Architecture, Space, and the Spanish Habsburgs.

Inaugurated in 2004, the Bettman Lectures are an annual program of monthly lectures in art history sponsored by Columbia University’s Department of Art History and Archaeology.  Endowed with a bequest from Linda Bettman, a former graduate student of the department, the lectures are named in her honor.  A reception will follow the lecture.

columbia schermerhorn

A map showing the location of Schermerhorn Hall on Columbia’s campus can be found here

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