Downing 2010 cover opt b_Layout 1 - Downing College - University ...

DOWNING COLLEGE 2009–2010During 2008–9, he presented his research at the Universities of Campinas(Brazil), Berlin, Barcelona, Budapest, Leiden, Edinburgh and at MIT. Hecontinues to serve as a member of the Review Panel for Linguistics of theEuropean Research Council and on the editorial board for all four CambridgeUniversity Press book series in Linguistics.David Feldman has been elected President of the Society of Legal Scholars (theprincipal learned society for researchers in and teachers of law in highereducation in the United Kingdom and Ireland) for 2010–11. It promises to bea busy year, as the Society’s roles include representing the academic disciplineof Law to government and funding bodies, contributing to the process of lawreform, and supporting the scholarly activities of its members. The highlight ofthe Society’s calendar is its annual conference, which traditionally follows thePresidency, so the 2011 Conference will take place in Cambridge in September2011 and will be based in and around the College. Among other activities,David has had sabbatical leave, conducting research on factors affectingconstitutional change (particularly interesting in the light of the UnitedKingdom’s general election result in May 2010). In February 2010 he had theprivilege of being the Sir John C. Smith Visiting Scholar for 2009–10 in theSchool of Law, University of Nottingham. The stay was both stimulating andenjoyable, and the connection between the late Professor Sir John Smith andthe College (as alumnus and Honorary Fellow) gave added significance to theappointment. In June 2010 David participated in the Anglo-Israeli LegalExchange between the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom and theSupreme Court of Israel, having been invited to give a paper on constitutionallimitations on privatization during the seminars at the new, beautifullyadapted Supreme Court building (which used to be Middlesex Guildhall CrownCourt in Parliament Square, Westminster) in June 2010.Marcus Tomalin continues to work on the DARPA-funded GALE (GlobalAutonomous Language Exploitation) project. He has helped to develop state-ofthe-artlarge vocabulary continuous speech recognition systems for Arabic, andhe has published several journal articles concerning the impact of morphologicaldecomposition on system performance. In addition, he has contributed a chapterto the book Chomskyan (R)evolutions – (John Benjamins, 2010). Drawing upondifferent philosophical approaches to scientific theory development, this chapterexamines the complex relationship between Generative Grammar and RelationalGrammar during the period 1965–1988. Marcus still finds time to give numerouslute recitals. Most recently, he has focused on lute intabulations of Europeanchoral works from the 16th century.113