The New Sesquipedalian

John Rickford accepted the UCSC Alumni Achievement Award at the UCSC Founders Day Awards ceremony, October 23. Here’s a shot of him with (left to right) Ed Catmull, founder of Pixar and President of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, who received the Foundation Medal, and UCSC Vice Chancellor George Blumenthal, who presented the awards:

By the way: fellow new arrivals, did you know that John Rickford won the American Book Award in 2000 for Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English, co-authored with Russell John Rickford? Wow!

• Elizabeth Traugott is now a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. Only ten can be elected every year from every field — congratulations!
• Lauren Hall-Lew is leaving us to be a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford.
• Doug Ball has accepted a position as Temporary Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Linguistics at Truman State University.

The United States has defeated teams from 17 other countries in the International Linguistics Olympiad in Poland,  a competition for High School students involving various puzzles based on linguistic data sets. Our own undergrad Joshua Falk worked with Jenny Finkel and Kyle Noe to organize the local Stanford competition, and US team member Anand Nataraja will be a freshman here. Sesquicongratulations!