WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
In June, a new group of UCSC students is set to receive their Bachelor’s degrees, and among these are several who will be awarded departmental honors. Language Studies majors Annie Stert and Vienna Chan will receive this distinction, as will Linguistics majors Ivona Borissova, Jared Crawford-Levis, Melanie Gounas, Sarah Oertel, Azusena Orozco, and Corey Pessin. Congratulations, graduates!
This past Saturday, May 17, visiting professor Gorka Elordieta (University of the Basque Country) gave a presentation at the Monterey Bay Applied Linguistics Symposium (MBALS), which was held at UCSC. His talk was titled, “The falling intonational contours of polar interrogatives in Basque Spanish and their correlation with language attitudes towards Basque.”
This Sunday, May 19, UCSC’s Nido de Lenguas was in attendance at the Vive Oaxaca Guelaguetza, an annual Oaxacan cultural festival put on by local cultural non-profit Senderos. The event featured Oaxacan cultural music, dance, and food, and many of the attendees enjoyed learning about the languages of Oaxaca at the Nido booth. Thank you to all who volunteered for another successful Guelaguetza celebration!
MRG: Thursday, 1:15-2:15 PM, LCR: Jason Ostrove will give a presentation called “Domains for allomorphy selection in Scottish Gaelic.”
Phlunch: Friday, 10:30-11:30 AM, LCR: The group will have an abstract editing workshop for those intending to submit a project to AMP.
SPLAP, S-Circle, s/lab, LIP, and WLMA are not meeting this week.
On Friday, May 10, Jenny Bellik successfully defended her dissertation, “Vowel Intrustion in Turkish Complex Onsets.” There was an excellent and spirited exchange between Jenny, the audience, and her committee members, consisting of Jaye Padgett (co-chair), Grant McGuire (co-chair), and Ryan Bennett. The defense was followed by a celebration hosted by Junko Ito and Armin Mester, which occurred concurrently with a potluck following Sandy Chung‘s colloquium. The celebration was well-attended by Santa Cruz linguists, and a good time was had by all. Congratulations, Jenny!
Jenny Bellik and Nick Kalivoda recently had a paper on SPOT come out in Linguistics Vanguard: “Automated tableau generation using SPOT (Syntax Prosody in Optimality Theory).” You can find the article and an abstract here. Congratulations, Jenny and Nick!
On Saturday, May 4, the Department of Linguistics at UCSC hosted the second Syntax-Prosody in Optimality Thery (SPOT) workshop. The event was very productive and interesting, with talks from UCSC-ers and linguists from near and far. Everything went very smoothly, except for an exciting fight between a hawk and some crows right outside, which caused an exciting interruption. Among the presenters were the following slugs:
Jenny Bellik, Gorka Elordieta (University of the Basque Country), Junko Ito, Nick Kalivoda, & Armin Mester: “SPOT: theory and analyses.”
Nick Van Handel: “Recursive phonological phrasing in Italian.”
Three Stevenson linguists were discussants, as well: Gorka Elordieta, Ryan Bennett, and Nick Kalivoda.
Jenny Bellik and Nick Kalivoda, the organizers, are extremely grateful to all of the presenters and discussants for coming, especially Sara Myrberg (Lund University), who set the record for distance traveled (8,866 km). For more information, including pictures from the event, click here.