Week of April 22
Happy Retirement, Jim!
Our beloved faculty and legendary linguist Jim Huang is retiring this week after joining the Linguistics Department for 22 years! Jim will be teaching his last class on April 24, so we will announce and celebrate his retirement at the Whatever Wednesday following his class!
C.-T. James Huang received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from National Taiwan Normal University in 1971 and 1974, respectively, and in 1982 earned a Ph.D. in linguistics from MIT. He received the Linguistic Society of Taiwan's Lifetime Achievement award in 2014 and was elected a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America in 2015. In 2016, he was elected an Academician in the Convocation of the Academia Sinica's division of Humanities and Social Sciences. In 2019 he was elected a Member of Academia Europaea (The Academy of Europe).
Huang has published articles and books in both English in Mandarin Chinese within the generative grammar framework of linguistics, extensively on the structure of Mandarin Chinese grammar. His influence in the field is widely credited for 'paving the way and leading the development of Chinese theoretical syntax'; 'without his pioneering research [...] such a field would not exist in the rich way we presently know it'. In 2015, Huang received a Festschrift comprising the work of 21 specialists in Chinese syntax, which is headlined by his own most recent publication on the subject of both synchronic and diachronic approaches to syntactic analyticity in Chinese parametric grammar.
Thank you so much, Jim!!! It's been a great pleasure for all of us to work with you!
LangCog
The final LangCog talk of the semester will be on Tuesday, April 23 from 5:30-7:00pm! It will take place in William James Hall, Room #1050. Please note the room change! The speaker is Dr. Amir Anvari (MIT), and the title and abstract of his talk can be found below. Food will be available at the meeting.
Title: On the subject matter of formal semantics
Abstract: here
Senior Thesis Colloquium and Spring Reception
The Senior Thesis Colloquium will be held on Thursday, April 25 at 9.30 AM in 2 Arrow St, Room 408. Coffee, juice, and light breakfast items will be provided. The Colloquium will be followed by a celebratory lunch at 1 PM in 2 Arrow St, Room 420.
Following the colloquium, the Spring Reception will be held later that day at 5 PM in the Linguistics Department Lounge.
Whatmough Lecture
The seventeenth annual Joshua and Verona Whatmough Lecture will be held on Monday, April 29, 2024 in Sever Hall 113. This year's lecture will be delivered by Maribel Romero, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Konstaz. A reception will follow at the Harvard Faculty Club after the lecture. Looking forward to seeing all of you there!
