SAMKO’S YEAR IN BERLIN

Also (re-)joining the department this year is Bern Samko who has spent the last twelve months on a research fellowship at the University of Potsdam in Germany. Bern sent in this report of her year:

I’ve just returned to Santa Cruz from the University of Potsdam, where I spent a year as a visiting PhD student in the Integrated Graduate School associated with the Collaborative Research Center Information Structure: The Linguistic Means of Structuring Utterances, Sentences and Texts. The project group I worked with, The Syntactic Expression of Information Structure and the Architecture of Grammar, was led by Gisbert Fanselow and former LRC Research Associate Luis Vicente. Two internal workshops and a PhD day gave me the opportunity to meet, interact with, and get feedback from students and faculty working on information structure at the University of Potsdam, the Humboldt University of Berlin, and the Free University of Berlin. I had a great time living in Berlin, learned a lot, and am looking forward to making the most of that knowledge this year in Santa Cruz!