WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Another distinguished alumna, Line Mikkelsen of UC Berkeley will be returning to the department on Friday October 17th to give a presentation in S-Circle (Syntax and Semantics Circle). Line’s talk, entitled “What goes postverbal in a verb-final language? On the interplay of prosody, information structure, and word order in Karuk” will take place in the Linguistics Common Room at 4:00pm. Other events planned for S-Circle this quarter are listed here.
The program for the 89th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (in Portland, Oregon, January 8-11, 2015) was recently announced. Among those presenting at the meeting are faculty members Sandy Chung and Matt Wagers (Filler-gap order and online licensing of grammatical relations: evidence from Chamorro, with Manuel F. Borja), along with graduate students Nate Arnett (Interference effects in subject-verb attachment: Case, position, and clause-finiteness), Anna Greenwood(Substance bias in stress pattern learning), and Bern Samko (The emphatic implicature of English verb-phrase preposing.
Also presenting at the meeting are many alumni of the graduate program, including Matt Tucker (NYU), Chris Potts (Stanford University), Rachel Walker (University of Southern California), Andy Wedel (University of Arizona), and Adam Ussishkin(University of Arizona). Among undergraduate alumni presenting are Lauren Winans (UCLA), Aaron White (University of Maryland), Joseph King (New York University), and Eric Bakovic (University of California, San Diego). Former visiting graduate student Filippa Lindahl (University of Göteborg) is also on the program.
Our colleagues at Berkeley Linguistics have asked us to help spread the word about a position in semantics and pragmatics that they hope to fill in the coming year. The position will be filled either at the assistant professor or associate professor level and the department hopes to see applications from people at all levels (current graduate students, postdocs, assistant professors, or individuals already tenured). The person appointed will need to have a strong research record in semantics or pragmatics and will need to be able to teach formal model-theoretic semantics at all levels. The department would be happy to hire someone who would make connections with other research currently under way at Berkeley (for example in syntax, morphology, corpus linguistics, experimental linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, typology, language change, or documentation). The formal announcement and other particulars are available here and here.
We have also been notified of a Linguist position at the University of Wisconsin Eau-Claire. The English Department seeks to hire a tenure-track faculty member in Linguistics at the rank of Assistant Professor to begin in August 2015. The date to apply for this position is quickly approaching. Submissions will be accepted until this Friday, October 24th. You can find more information about this position here.
Jane Grimshaw of Rutgers University will be the first speaker in this year’s colloquium series. The talk will take place at 4pm on Friday, October 17th and it will be in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge. Jane’s title is The use of force in clausal complementation and the abstract is available here.
Louise McNally earned the PhD from UCSC in 1992 with a dissertation that has become one of the foundational documents in the literature on existential constructions (An Interpretation for the English Existential Construction). Since 1995, she has been a faculty member at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and she has had a central role in developing the language sciences community in Catalonia. Louise was recently recognized (for the second time) with a research professorship from ICREA (Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudio Avançats), so we thought that this would be a good time to check in with her.
WHASC: First, many congratulations on your recent ICREA Research Professorship (your second). Could you tell us a little about what this award means for you and what opportunities it opens (for you and for your group)?
Louise: The ICREA award gives me a 50% teaching buyout for 5 years, plus some additional research money. The money comes with very few strings attached, so I’ve used it for various things, mainly as extra support for my students. The best thing about the grant, besides the extra research time, is the flexibility these funds offer.
WHASC: What are you working on at present?
Louise: I’m starting a new project that’s called ‘CONNECT: Connecting conceptual and referential models of meaning’. The title sums it up pretty clearly, and the problem the project addresses is one that has come up repeatedly in different strands of my work. On the one hand, a recurring theme for me since my dissertation has been what you might call the interplay of type- and token-level expressions in language. On the other, I’ve spent most of the last 10 years trying to figure out how to deal with the context dependence of the interpretation of modifiers. A few years ago, since I felt like I couldn’t get much further with classical formal models of modification, I started collaborating with researchers working on distributional semantic models of meaning. Distributional representations do very well at resolving many sorts of context-dependence, and they turn out to offer quite interesting (if imperfect) models of type-level contents as well. On the other hand, distributional models in their current form do not look very promising as models of reference or information structure—things that frameworks like DRT handle well. So the idea is to work on integrating the two sorts of models.
WHASC: You’ve been centrally involved in developing the research and teaching community in linguistics in Barcelona. How does that look at present? What kind of work is being done and what is the community like? What does the future hold?
Louise: Things are great. We’ve got a critical mass of strong doctoral students and have been very lucky to have a steady stream of excellent postdocs and visiting researchers. Our Master’s program, which we started to offer in English a few years ago, is attracting lots of students from all over. I hope we can consolidate the quality we have, continue to strengthen our ties with some other programs both in Spain and in Europe, and just keep on doing new and interesting things. The people in our group are doing all kinds of things. To give just a sample: the clause structure of Catalan Sign Language, the evolution of the auxiliary system in Spanish and Catalan, nominalization of verbs and adjectives in various languages, lexical aspect in Japanese, the syntax of long-distance dependencies, different expressions of denial and the insights they offer into pragmatic theory, and the interaction of prosody and gesture.
WHASC: That all sounds really exciting. However, building that community has involved a lot of heavy administrative work on your part, yet you have remained very active in research. How is that possible? How do you meet both kinds of demands on your time?
Louise: There’s no secret: First, I have a lot of administrative support. Second, I work a lot of hours, try to maximize efficiency, and try to lose sleep over nothing. It’s amazing how much you can improve your efficiency in research by simply learning how to calculate the approximate time it takes to do a given research-related task and scheduling those tasks into your day.
WHASC: What’s it like in Barcelona?
Louise: In some ways it’s like a big, European-flavored Santa Cruz. Every time I go running along the beach here, I remember running along West Cliff Drive. Barcelona is an ideal city for anyone interested in language, especially multilingualism, sociolinguistics, and language policy. An easy way to see for yourself is to come to ESSLLI at UPF next August (a few preliminary details are already available on the web), or to spend some time as a visitor.
WHASC: Looking back at your own time in Santa Cruz, have you any advice for current students looking to build a career like yours?
Louise: I think the most important things I learned at Santa Cruz were humility and how to dig deeper into whatever issue was under discussion. I also remember and find occasion to repeat regularly many pearls of wisdom from my professors. I’ll mention just one: ‘Ideas are cheap; it’s working out the details that has merit.’ (Your collective homework is to figure out who said that; hint: it’s someone who’s still on the faculty.) A few other pieces of advice:
WHASC: Thanks a lot, Louise, and good luck with everything.
In the course of the week, the University of Minnesota Press published Deaf Gain, a volume of essays which argue from various perspectives against the deficit view of deafness and which instead frame deafness as a distinct way of being, one which brings intellectual and cultural benefits. Among the contributors to the volume is grad student Clara Sherley-Appel, who coauthored one of the chapters in the book along with John Bonvillian of the University of Virginia. The title of their paper is Manual Signs and Gestures of the Inuit of Baffin Island: Observations during the Three Voyages Led by Martin Frobisher and Clara has this to say about the paper:
The chapter is part of a project I worked on with John Bonvillian at UVA on the use of manual signs and gestures in first contact situations. The primary case study in this chapter concerns the journeys of a privateer of the Elizabethan era named Martin Frobisher. Frobisher was commissioned by Elizabeth to seek a Northwest Passage to what was then known as Cathay. He didn’t find a Northwest Passage (because it doesn’t exist), but the logs and diaries of the crew from the three voyages he led mention using signs and gestures to facilitate contact and trade, and there is some additional evidence that the Inuit of Baffin Island had elaborated sign systems used for hunting and other purposes, making it an interesting case study.