NEW WORKING GROUPS
Research and reading groups have been essential parts of the department’s intellectual life for many years. The well-established groups such as Language, Logic, and Cognition, Morphology Reading Group, Phlunch, S-Circle, and the Santa Cruz Ellipsis Consortium continue their work as before, but two new groups have come into existence this quarter—Semantics, Pragmatics and LAnguage Philosophy (SPLAP) (coordinated by Karen Duek, Margaret Kroll, and Deniz Rudin) and Agree(ment) (coordinated by Amy Rose Deal and Maziar Toosarvandani). We asked both groups to introduce themselves and to give a brief description of their goals and activities.
SPLAP (Semantics, Pragmatics and LAnguage Philosophy) is the brainchild of Rudin+Duek+Kroll. Our raisons for d’etring are twofold: first, to supply the UCSC Linguistics community with a reading/discussion group solely dedicated to the pursuit of the subtle sciences of meaning; second, to explore the connections between the ways that linguists think about meaning and the ways that philosophers think about meaning. The former raison represents our intellectual devotion to the maxim ‘Find a need and fill it,’ and/or to the maxim ‘Be the change that you wish to see in the world.’ The latter raison represents our sneaking suspicion that a lot of philosophers of language are interested in the same kinds of problems we are, and that maybe we would all benefit from a little cross-pollination.
Our faithful splappers are currently engaged in an investigation of vagueness that has taken us from ancient Greece to the modern-day Netherlands to Chicago, Illinois; we’ve reassessed the nature of logical truth and the essential heapiness of sandheaps, and we’re strolling boldly forward to tackle such weighty issues as what it really means for coffee to be expensive. All are welcome to join in, apprentices and adepts alike—direct your inquiries (of whatever kind) to drudin@ucsc.edu.
Agree(ment) is a group of faculty and grad students interested in agreement phenomena and in the nature and applications of the operation Agree. The group is organized by Amy Rose Deal and Maziar Toosarvandani, and meets on an (approximately) biweekly basis. The groups’s activities over the year will consist of reading recent papers, presentations by students and faculty, and invited talks from outside speakers. We are looking forward to our first student presentation by Nick Kalivoda on November 13.