Author: nbenmeir

RESS RECOMMENDS SLP

Alum Lindsay Ress reports on success and opportunities in Speech Language Pathology:

I graduated in 2013 with my BA in Linguistics at UCSC and then took a year off to figure out what I wanted to do next. During undergrad, I interned with a speech language pathologist (SLP) in Santa Cruz. I fell in love with this career. It was a perfect mix of working with people and using knowledge of speech and language. I applied to a few grad programs for speech and language pathology and went to San Jose State University for the 3-year extended masters. It’s typically a 2-year program, but because I have a BA in a different field, I was in the 3-year program. I graduated in May of this year and am currently working at a pediatric therapy center, then starting in a school district this fall, both as an official SLP. For anyone interested in working with people on difficulties with speech and language, I’d suggest looking more into this field and possibly doing some volunteering. It’s always fun, interesting, and currently very in demand – there is no shortage of jobs (and pays well too)!

HOW OUR READINGS ARE GROUPING THIS WEEK

Phlunch: Tuesday, 9:50 – 11:25 pm, Cave classroom John Alderete (Simon Fraser University) will be giving a guest lecture in Phlunch entitled “Phonological regularity, perceptual biases, and the role of phonological grammar in speech error analysis” (Note: this is not phlunch’s standard meeting time or place)

SPLAP: Wednesday, 1:20 – 2:20 pm, LCR Discussion of a short handout/squib by Barbara Partee as background on semantics of embedded questions (QUD for Fall 2017)

s/lab: Wednesday, 3:00 – 4:00 pm, LCR Matt Wagers will present ongoing work on the integration of complex subjects

LaLoCo: Thursday, 2:00 – 3:00 pm, LCR Discussion of chapters 2 – 3 of the textbook “Introduction to Connectionist Modelling of Cognitive Processes”

WLMA: Friday, 10:00 – 11:30 am, Stevenson 217 Discussion of Caponigro, Torrence, and Cisneros (2013), which talks about free relatives in two varieties of Mixtec

LIP: Friday, 3:00 – 3:45 pm, Stevenson 217 Nick Van Handel, Netta Ben-Meir, and Grant McGuire will be presenting on an ongoing perceptual learning study

S-Circle: Friday, 4:00 – 5:30 pm, LCR Mansi Desai will be talking about negation in Gujarati

DEO COLLOQUIUM

This Friday, October 6th, at 4:00 pm in Humanities 1, Room 210, there will be a colloquium by Ashwini Deo (Ohio State University). Her talk is entitled “Alternative circumstances of evaluation and the ser/estar distinction in Spanish,” and the abstract is given below:

The Spanish copulas ser and estar have distributional and interpretational patterns that have resisted an adequate analysis. In this talk, I work towards a unified analysis that treats the two copulas as being presuppositional variants that are differentially sensitive to properties of the circumstances at which the truth of the copular sentence is evaluated. On the proposed analysis, estar presupposes that the prejacent is boundedly true at the evaluation circumstance. The prejacent’s bounded truth at a circumstance i at a given context of use c depends on two conditions:

(a) there are no-weaker alternative circumstances i′ accessible at c where the prejacent is false, and

(b) i is a maximal verifying circumstance at c.

Central to the analysis is the notion of a strength ordering over alternative circumstances of evaluation — a circumstantial counterpart to the more familiar ordering over alternative propositions. Assuming that this content is conventionally associated with estar allows for an account of its distinct flavors and readings with a range of predicates. ser is shown to be associated with its own inferences that derive from its status as the presuppositionally weaker, neutral member of the pair.

VINCENT DEFENDS QP1

Congratulations to Jake Vincent, who successfully defended his first qualifying paper on 9/28, titled “D-raising in Chamorro relative clauses and other A’ constructions”. The main goal of the paper is to motivate an analysis for Chamorro internally headed relative clauses, a construction in which the noun phrase being modified by a relative clause surfaces as an argument inside that relative clause. Jake proposes an analysis in which the head noun phrase is a DP headed by a null operator that undergoes long head movement, stranding the head noun phrase inside the clause. The analysis is motivated by other A’ constructions in Chamorro in which overt determiners raise independently of their nominal restrictor. His committee consisted of Sandy Chung (chair), Matt Wagers, and Maziar Toosarvandani.

WELCOME RECEPTION

Our official first week back culminated in a lovely reception catered by none other than our beloved Viva’s, where we welcomed old and new to the department.

Two new faculty members have joined the department:

Ryan Bennett (Ph.D. UCSC, 2012) comes to us from Yale, where he has been Assistant Professor, and joins the department as Assistant Professor.

Amanda Rysling (Ph.D. UMass, Amherst, 2017) joins us as Assistant Professor as well.

Our incoming graduate class for Fall 2017 consists of two Ph.D. students and four M.A. students:

Jeremie Beauchamps received his B.A. and M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Ottawa. His thesis was on posture locatives and existential expressions in Mẽbengokre. This reflects both a broader interest in the syntax-semantics interface, and commitment to original fieldwork on Mẽbengokre and other Jê languages.

Benjamin Eischens received a B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Minnesota, after which he served with AmeriCorps. He has investigated Northern Azeri – the focus of his senior thesis being its light verb constructions. He is primarily interested in syntax, with broader interests in Turkic and Semitic.

Joining us as new MA students are Richard Bibbs (B.A. with honors in Linguistics, UC Santa Cruz, Spring 2017), Dhyana Buckley (Former B.A./M.A.), Lydia Werthen (Former B.A./M.A.), and Anissa Zaitsu (Former B.A./M.A.).

Welcome also to the newest members of the BA/MA Program: Jacob Chemnick and Anny Huang (both of whom you may remember from their past presentations at LURC).

At the reception we also had the opportunity to welcome four undergraduate exchange students from ICU in Tokyo, Japan.

DUEK DISSERTATION DEFENSE

Our congratulations to Karen Duek, who successfully defended her dissertation “Sorting a complex world: an experimental study of polysemy and copredication in container and committee nominals” at the beginning of the summer (June 19th). Many who were present at the defense followed Karen to an after-party, where her success was celebrated with an Oreo Ice Cream Cake. We are happy to see Dr. Duek move ahead, but we will also miss her.

1 … 16 17 18 19