Month: May 2017

SICHEL AT WCCFL

Last weekend, Ivy Sichel was among those who stampeded to WCCFL in Calgary, Alberta, where the Flames of linguistic enthusiasm burn bright. Ivy had this to say about the event:

“The beautiful thing about research in linguistics is that it is full of surprises. When you start studying something, you never know where you will end up. The paper I presented at WCCFL this past weekend is based on a joint project with Martina Wiltschko from UBC, in which we follow the lead of a curious “negative effect” sometimes associated with the use of demonstrative-pronouns in German and Hebrew. The study of its distribution revealed a surprising demonstrative-internal typology, in which deixis and anaphora are two sides of the same coin, rather than oppositional categories.

There was impressive variety in the talks at WCCFL this year, in terms of content, and also in terms of the wide array of languages that were discussed: Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian, Tagalog, Korean, Turkish, Algonquian, Japanese, French, Mi’gmaq, to name but a few.”

WEEK-LONG VISIT BY PRINCE AND MERCHANT

The last week of April brought phonologists Alan Prince (Rutgers University) and Nazzaré Merchant (Eckerd College) to the department. Alan gave a special lecture on “Property Analysis” in Phonology B, reporting on joint work with Birgit Alber on a new way of analyzing and understanding the typologies produced by OT analyses. At Friday’s Phlunch, Naz presented ‘Representing Stringency Hierarchies Using Property Analysis’ (joint work with our 2016 LRC visitor Martin Krämer), which applied Property Analysis to new work on the typology of syllable codas. During the week, Alan and Naz had many productive discussions with the members of the Santa Cruz Accent Project and the SPOT Project (Syntax-Prosody in Optimality Theory), whose names are too numerous to mention here.

SLOGGETT OFF TO NORTHWESTERN

Congratulations to alum Shayne Sloggett (B.A. 2010, Honors), who this fall will be Postdoctoral Fellow in Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Northwestern University. Shayne began his psycholinguistic career as an R.A. in the language processing lab at Santa Cruz, and after a stint as a Baggett R.A. at Maryland, joined the Ph.D. program at UMass Amherst. There he is completing a dissertation entitled “When errors aren’t: How comprehendhers selectively violate binding theory ” supervised by Prof. Brian Dillon.

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