WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
A number of UCSC faculty, students, and affiliates attended the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in Melbourne, Australia. These included Linguistics faculty members Amanda Rysling, Ryan Bennett, and Grant McGuire; Applied Linguistics faculty member Mark Amengual; post-doc Jenny Bellik; graduate students Maho Morimoto and Andrew Hedding; former PhD student Robert Henderson (PhD, 2012); and former LRC affiliate Haruo Kubozono.
Tom Roberts spent the summer writing, reading, and thinking about attitude verbs and clausal complementation, including several weeks of fieldwork and travel in Estonia. There, in addition to unraveling the mysteries of complementizers, he was able to see a moving Arvo Pärt concert in the rural island province of Hiiumaa, alongside 2018 PhD alum and Estonian choral music enthusiast Kelsey Kraus. The event took place in the historic Pühalepa Church, the island’s oldest at a respectable 764 years old, just shy of the median age of concert attendees.
Sandy Chung and Jim McCloskey spent September 9-12 at Queen Mary University of London, attending the Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB), where Sandy was an invited speaker. The other invited speaker was Christopher Potts (UCSC Ph.D. 2003, now Professor of Linguistics and Director of CSLI at Stanford). Sandy gave the Henry Sweet Lecture, Chris gave the Linguistics Association Lecture, and each taught a class in the LAGB Summer School on September 9. View the program here.
In August, the 31st European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI) convened at the University of Latvia in Riga. Many of our own linguists decamped to the Baltics to participate, including PhD students Jack Duff, Lisa Hofmann, Morwenna Hoeks, and Stephanie Rich, and faculty member Maziar Toosarvandani.
More details on their exploits in logic, language and information are given below.
Lisa presented a talk titled “Sentential negativity and Polarity-Sensitive-Anaphora.”
Jack and Morwenna presented posters titled “The locus of commitment: Flipping judges in a commitment-based discourse model” and “The alternatives in disjunctive questions and where they come from.”
Maziar delivered a course titled “Semantics and pragmatics of temporal sequencing,” developed with Pranav Anand (Pranav also contributed to colleague Natasha Korotkova‘s (Konstanz) course “Speech reports”).
Pictured from left are Lisa Hofmann, Maziar Toosarvandani, Morwenna Hoeks, Jack Duff, and Stephanie Rich.
Ryan Bennett spent 3 weeks in Guatemala carrying out fieldwork on two Mayan languages, Kaqchikel and Uspanteko. This research included the recording of narratives, data collection with electroglottography, a community workshop on language pedagogy, and the training of native speaker linguists in data collection and transcription.
This summer, Junko Ito and Armin Mester were profiled in the fifth issue of UCSC’s Inquiry magazine. The delightful article summarizes their impactful careers, from their pioneering work on the syntax-prosody interface in the 90’s to recent collaborations with Jenny Bellik, Nick Kalivoda, and spring 2019 visiting associate professor Gorka Elordieta using Bellik and Kalivoda’s SPOT (Syntax-Prosody in Optimality Theory) program.