WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Jorge Hankamer gave two invited talks at Boǧaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey. According to Jorge, one of the talks was about suspended affixation and the other was about pseudo-sluicing. These talks were for faculty and graduate students in the Linguistics program at Boǧaziçi University, an English-language university on the Bosphorus. Jorge has also been invited to teach a course on Distributed Morphology next summer at Boǧaziçi.
During winter break Donka Farkas traveled to snow-covered Bucharest to participate in a conference on the syntax and semantics of specificity, organized by Alexandra Cornilescu. She gave a paper co-authored with her fellow invited speaker, Adrian Brasoveanu. (This was a special honor, given that both Adrian and Donka started their careers in linguistics as students of Alexandra’s in Bucharest.) UCSC was further represented at this conference by two former LRC visitors, Klaus von Heusinger (University of Cologne), and Larisa Avram (University of Bucharest). Donka was particularly pleased to see a whole new crop of bright young linguists doing first rate work at the University of Bucharest.
From Peter: Over the break I got married! On 12/29/2012 I married my high school sweetheart Melody Pothier in Scotland, CT. We’re both out here now and she is studying hard to take her Occupational Therapy Board Exam soon!
Tami Schuyler graduated from the MA Program in Linguistics at UCSC in 2001. Her much-cited MA thesis (Wh-Movement out of the Site of VP Ellipsis) was a study of the interaction among movement, focus, and ellipsis. Since graduating, Tami has made a career using her linguistic training at H5 in San Francisco. For the past year or two, however, she has returned to an old calling and been engaged in creative writing. Tami recently achieved a significant breakthrough in having her first story accepted for publication. The story (provisionally titled Ugly) will appear in February in the Cutbank Literary Magazine, a well regarded journal associated with the creative writing program at the University of Montana.
This Friday, January 11, at 4-5 pm, Vera Gribanova (Stanford, UCSC PhD 2010) will speak at the Syntax and Semantics Circle (S-Circle). Her talk is called “Case and agreement in Uzbek nominalized clauses”. The talk will take place in the Linguistics Common Room (Stevenson 249), and you can read the abstract here.
From Andrew Pedelty, Linguistics major:
If you’ve ever looked at a large set of data, a computationally complex problem, or a frustratingly useless corpus of text, “Man, I should get in on that programming stuff,” then this is your chance. I’ll be offering a tutorial of sorts in (at least) 3 parts over the coming weeks. We’ll start from scratch and end up in a place where students will be competent in their basics and confident in their ability to continue to grow as programmers. If this sounds interesting, send an email to Andrew Pedelty (apedelty@ucsc.edu) for more information or just show up at the LCR (Stevenson 249) at 4pm on this coming Monday, the 14th. Interested parties are strongly encouraged to check the hastily constructed website linked here for more information.