WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
A paper by assistant professor Ryan Bennett has recently appeared in Glossa. The paper, entitled “Recursive prosodic words in Kaqchikel (Mayan),” argues that the prefixal phonology of Kaqchikel provides evidence for unbounded recursion of the prosodic word ω. The paper can be accessed here.
Thanks to everyone who participated in this year’s Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC) on Friday, June 8. Three undergraduates in Linguistics and Language studies — Alejandro Garcia, Kevin Sanders, and Emily Martinez-Figueroa — presented original research dealing with topics in ellipsis, movement, focus, comparatives, reduplication, and prosody. The conference was capped off with a lovely presentation by UCSC undergraduate alumna Meredith Landman, entitled “The pragmatics of the sentence-final particle o in Yoruba”. Congratulations to our student presenters for a job well-done!
Thanks also to Hitomi Hirayama, who provided photo coverage of the event. Some highlights are included below.
Pictured: Kevin Sanders
Pictured: Meredith Landman
Pictured: Alejandro Garcia
Pictured: Emily Martinez-Figueroa
Pictured (Left to right): Alejandro Garcia, Kevin Sanders, Ryan Bennett, Emily Martinez-Figueroa, Meredith Landman
Junko Ito and Armin Mester have been successfully awarded a 2-year NSF grant for Syntax-Prosody in Optimality Theory (SPOT), an ongoing collaborative research project with Jenny Bellik, Nick Kalivoda, and Ozan Bellik, which aims to develop new tools for rigorously investigating the mapping from syntactic to prosodic structure in Optimality Theory.
SPOT has also received workshop funding as a Humanities Institute research cluster for 2018-19. The first SPOT workshop took place in Fall 2017.
Congratulations also to Nick Kalivoda, who will be holding a one-year postdoc position during 2018-19 on the SPOT NSF grant at UCSC.
Congratulations to Kelsey Kraus (PhD ’18), who recently started a job at Google. She reports:
Just a few days after my defense, I started a contract position on the Speech and Data Ops Team at Google. The position is your standard Linguistics Project Manager Position on the Text To Speech Team, where I join three other former UCSC linguists. This makes it feel more like home (but with an upgraded StevCaf).
Congratulations, Kelsey!
Last Tuesday, graduate student Erik Zyman gave a talk at the University of Chicago entitled “On the Timing of Adjunction.” He reports that he received a warm welcome and numerous helpful questions and comments, and had productive meetings with faculty and graduate students about both their work and his, for all of which he’s grateful to his UChicago hosts (not to be confused with adjunction hosts).
On June 1, Ivy Sichel and Maziar Toosarvandani gave a talk on “Attraction and pronoun movement in Sierra Zapotec” at the 2nd Symposium on Oaxacan Linguistics at UCLA. This conference had its first iteration at UCSC last year, sponsored by the Workshop on the Languages of Meso-America (WLMA). This year’s SOL — its new acronym — was well attended, and the conference looks to become a more permanent fixture in the California Oaxacanist community. Next year’s SOL is planned to take place at Cal State LA.