News

Announcements

Korean Culture Night

The Korean Studies Program will be presenting a Korean Culture Night on Nov. 6 (Thursday) from 6:45pm to 8:30pm in PS (Physical Sciences) 130. Everyone is invited. View flyer (.doc)

New co-operative agreement with Korean university

A new joint M.A. program in linguistics has been initiated between SDSU and Sogang University in Korea.  Students from Sogang University will take one year of coursework at Sogang followed by one year at SDSU. The first cohort of students is expected to begin study in our Department in spring or fall 2009.

Korean language coursework to start

Korean language classes will start in Fall 2008!  This will be the first time Korean will be offered at SDSU, providing an opportunity for SDSU students to fulfill their language requirement through study of this important Pacific Rim language.  Students can take Korean either as newcomers to the language or if they have some Korean language background.  Korean will be offered initially as Linguistics 296 (secs. 3 and 4).  The class schedule can be seen here: http://www2.sdsu.edu/cgi-bin/schedule/browse=dept/command=search/dept=LING/semester=fall08.  Students new to Korean should register for Ling 296 sec. 3, and students with some Korean language background should register for  Ling 296 sec. 4.

Fall 2008 courses

Besides the Department's regular offerings, and the new Korean courses (see above), the courses listed below will be given in fall 2008.  Students should note the availabilty of these courses, since they are not offered every semester.

Courses for undergraduates

Ling 352 Language and Advertising TTh 1600-1715 (instructor: Justice)
Ling 354 Language and Computers MWF 1300-1350 (instructor: Malouf)

Courses for graduate students

Ling 656 Quantitative Research Methods W 1600-1840 (instructor: Csomay)
Ling 657 Language Assessment Th 1600-1840 (instructor: Wu)
Ling 795 Seminar in Language and Law W 1900-2140 (instructor: Kaplan)

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Recent News

Spring colloquium featured Prof. John Baugh speaking on "linguistic profiling"

At our Spring Colloquium April 19, an enthusiastic audience of linguists and linguistically-interested members of the public heard a talk by well-known sociolinguist Prof. John Baugh of Washington University in St. Louis. Here is the abstract for his talk, entitled "Linguistic Profiling in Global Perspective":

Scholars who study linguistic diversity in social settings throughout the world often do so without explicit reference to racial circumstances; in many instances questions regarding linguistic usage have little, if anything, to do with race. However, efforts to study nonstandard dialects have often had considerable racial relevance. Moreover, sociolinguists in Africa, Europe, and North and South America have documented significant linguistic diversity that is socially stratified with racial parallels.

Results, in the present instance, grow from studies of linguistic profiling in France, The Republic of South Africa, and the United States regarding the devaluation of Black Speech. Growing from global debates spawned by the Oakland Ebonics controversy of 1996, people of African descent in post-colonial communities throughout the world began to reevaluate their own linguistic circumstances. Studies of housing discrimination against Blacks and Latinos in the United States, along with preliminary analyses of linguistic attitudes throughout the African Diaspora reveal that employment, education, housing, and access to other goods and services may be influenced by linguistic stereotypes that are deduced during telephone conversations sight unseen.

Commencement 2008

On Friday, May 23, the Department paid tribute to twenty-one new B.A. graduates, ten with a major in Linguistics and eleven with a major in Japanese.  Also honored were twenty new M.A. graduates in Linguistics.  Following SDSU tradition, Outstanding Graduates are chosen by the faculty for each major, and each Outstanding Graduate selects a "most influential faculty member" to honor.  This year our Outstanding Graduate in Japanese was Eli Magaña, and our Outstanding Graduate in Linguistics was Yasutaka Iwata. Eli's Most Influential Faculty Member was Prof. Ryu Kitajima.  Yas's Most Influential Faculty Member was Prof. Deborah Poole.

The Department honored two new members elected to Phi Beta Kappa:  Stephanie de Vera and Raymond Purdy.

The Department also said a warm public goodbye to retiring Prof. Tom Donahue, who is leaving after four decades of teaching in our Department. In his forty years of teaching linguistics here, Tom taught Sociolinguistics, American Dialectology, Sociology of Language, Phonology, Historical Linguistics, Old English, and History of English, as well as occasional courses for the English Dept., in Tolkien and the Arthurian Romance.  Tom ascends into retirement with good wishes from many people at SDSU, linguists and others, for a richly deserved and enjoyable retirement.

Summer Japanese Studies program

For the third straight year, our Professor Yoshiko Higurashi directed the Japan Studies Institute, a National Faculty Development Institute entitled "Incorporating Japanese Studies into the Undergraduate Curriculum," sponsored by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU).

This Institute selected 19 Fellows from state colleges and universities from all across America who came to SDSU for an intensive 3-week study program in Japanese anime and pop culture, art, business, culture and civilization, economics, education, history, language, literature, music, politics and foreign policy, religion, and contributions by Japanese-Americans to the U.S.

The multi-disciplinary program (June 2-20) featured readings, lectures, panel discussions, workshops, films, and field trips, all designed for faculty from a wide range of academic fields -- and without prior experience in Japanese studies - who had an interest in incorporating information about Japan into the courses they teach. SDSU Provost Marlin hosted an Opening Ceremony and President Weber hosted a Reception in honor of the JSI Fellows. Presenters included scholars in the U.S. and Japan, Japanese government officials from Los Angeles, business representatives, and leaders of community organizations in San Diego.

For more information, please visit: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~japanese.

Computational linguistics award for grad student in computational linguistics

Paulo Malvar, a student in our Computational Linguistics program, is one of a handful of students accepted for the prestigious Johns Hopkins summer school on Human Language Technology. This is an annual event sponsored by the North American Association of Computational Linguistics which funds students to attend 2 weeks of lectures and workshops given by leaders in the field, covering topics as diverse as Automatic Speech recognition, Robust Speaker Identification, Machine Translation, Vocal Tract Modeling, Machine Learning, and Speech Perception.

Fulbright grants awarded

We are very proud that two of our students have received Fulbright awards:

Our Outstanding Graduate in Japanese, Eli Magaña, has been awarded a Fulbright grant to Korea, where he will enroll in Yonsei University's Korean Studies Program.

Erica Hashiba, who is finishing up her MA in Linguistics, and who has been teaching Japanese as a TA, has been awarded a Fulbright grant to teach English in Macao.

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Newsletters

>>Download the Spring 06 Newsletter (PDF)

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