Author: Thera M Crane

Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of traveling to Ghent to serve on the jury of then PhD-candidate Hilde Gunnink‘s defense. She did a marvellous job throughout, and I was honoured to be on the jury together with Nancy Kula (University of Essex), Mark Van de Velde (CNRS), and Maud Devos (RMCA and Ghent University). Dr. Gunnink’s outstanding thesis, A Grammar of Fwe, makes a tremendous contribution to the field and will be of interest to theorists and typologists for many years to come.

(I was also able to visit the van Eyck brothers’ Adoration of the Mystic Lamb for the second time – always a moving experience.)

I am excited to be giving a guest lecture at the University of Gothenburg on 1 March, 2018. I’ll be talking about various models of grammatical aspect, and how they fare when applied to Bantu languages, with their complex lexicalizations of state-change verbs. I’ll give a preliminary version of the talk at the Helsinki Area and Language Studies monthly seminar this Friday (23 March 2018, 14-16:00).

I am pleased to announce that the volume Revealing Structure: Papers in honor of Larry M. Hyman, co-edited by Jeff Good, Eugene Buckley, and myself, will be published by CSLI in July 2018. It contains a wide-ranging set of papers by many of the distinguished linguists with whom Larry (my PhD advisor,  frequent collaborator, mentor, and dear friend) has worked over the years, united “by the investigative method they employ in revealing grammatical patterns”. All of us involved with the project are indebted to Larry for both his incredible body of scholarly work and his amazing generosity of spirit.

Most photos are by me or my husband, John Ringhofer.

Artwork in photos in rotating home page/top image:

Ndebele artwork above by Lina Maphosa

These Ndebele-style painted buildings are in Mapoch Cultural Village in South Africa. Their community-based tourism program is less active than in earlier years, but is still worth a visit.