WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Anissa Zaitsu and Tom Roberts were in Chicago last weekend at CLS 54. Anissa presented a talk on why-VP constructions, bravely arguing in the Ellipsis session that they are derived non-elliptically. Tom gave a talk about experimental work on the pragmatics of biased polar questions in Estonian. They report a collegial environment, full of plenty of new friends and raucous multilingual karaoke.
A paper by Ryan Bennett (PhD ’12 and current faculty member), Boris Harizanov (PhD ’14), and Robert Henderson (PhD ’12) has appeared in the latest issue of Linguistic Inquiry (LI). The paper, entitled “Prosodic Smothering in Macedonian and Kaqchikel,” proposes a novel analysis of dependent morphemes which idiosyncratically trigger prosodic restructuring of their hosts.
Another paper by Boris Harizanov appears in this issue, entitled “Word Formation at the Syntax-Morphology Interface: Denominal Adjectives in Bulgarian.” The paper seeks to understand mismatches between syntactic representations and corresponding morphological representations.
A paper by faculty member Ivy Sichel also appears in the issue, entitled “Anatomy of a Counterexample: Extraction from Relative Clauses.” The paper argues for an approach to extraction from RCs where locality is determined syntactically, in combination with a more fine-grained structure for RCs and a theory of how extraction interacts with the theory of locality.
Congratulations to current linguistics major (and history double major) Ian Kussin-Gika, whose project “Kinderlach and Communists: or A Comparison between Soviet Ethnic Policy and Labour Zionism Through the Lens of the Infamous JAO” has been selected to receive a 2017-18 Deans’ Undergraduate award. The award will be recognized at the Annual Humanities Spring Awards Celebration. The announcement of the award states that “the projects submitted this year were outstanding and reflect the high caliber of work of the students who undertook research projects.”
Congratulations again, Ian!
On May 4-6 Stanford University will be hosting the 27th annual meeting of Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics (FASL). The program promises two and a half days packed full of interesting talks, and can be found here. UCSC alums Boris Harizanov (Stanford) and Vera Gribanova (Stanford) look forward to seeing all who can make it!
Starting May 21, I will be working at a new NLP Ad Tech company Semasio, currently based in Germany and Portugal, but moving their HQ to New York City. Semasio uses “semantic behavioral targeting” to create user profiles that advertisers can use to more accurately and efficiently reach their target audience. For anyone whose interesting, I’ll unpack what that means:One of the primary focuses of Advertising Tech (“Ad tech”) is to discover algorithmic methods of chopping up the population into demographic segments, so that the right people are hit with the right advertisements. Semasio’s language-based take on this challenge is to first, extract keywords from the web, and build a gigantic semantic network based on which keywords correlate with others. Then, information is gathered about where past consumers of a given product would fall in this network. That is, what is the semantic profile of people who have purchased a given product in the past. Finally, we locate users who have not yet purchased the product, but fall in similar quadrants on the network. In this way, we use a linguistic bottom-up, data-driven approach (= probabilistic, = Surfeit (= Not Poverty) of the Stimulus, = Generativisits will roll their eyes but haters gon’ hate, right?) to build consumer profiles.My role at the company will be Client Development Manager. Basically, that means I will be consulting with our clients to show them how to best use our software, and what kind of analytic insights we can gain by tweaking different parameters. So, this means is that I will not be doing much NLP or data science or even coding myself, but rather, acting as an ambassador for the product, and the language/data scientists that built it. The reason I say this is to make the point that, for any graduate students who are flirting with the idea of leaving academia, but are afraid that, unless they can code, they will have no avenue, they are Dead Wrong.There are tons of opportunities for people who, even if they do not want to be on the technical side of things, can communicate technical topics in a easily-digestible manner. In other words, if you’re the type of person who, like me, hated learning R but loved giving talks, or just discussing interesting topics, you’re so much more marketable than you think you are. To that end, if anyone wants to talk about how to find those opportunities, feel free to write!
In the coming week (Friday April 27 – Saturday April 28) the department will host an international workshop on the theme of Pronouns and Competition. The theme of competition (between more and less ideal expressions of the same content) has appeared constantly in both the theoretical literature on anaphoric relations and in the psycholinguistic literature which explores the real-time expression and comprehension of such relations. This workshop aims to ask if the concepts of ‘competition’ at work here are the same or different and to re-evaluate the status of competition in both domains. Over the two days of the workshop there will be 12 oral presentations and seven poster presentations, by researchers from Santa Cruz, Tel Aviv, Berlin, Harvard, Rutgers, London, Amherst, Seattle, Leipzig, Göttingen and San Diego. More information is
available here.
Last Tuesday, graduate student Erik Zyman gave a talk at the University of Chicago on “The Rich Syntax of Grammatical Relations: Raising and Hyperraising in P’urhepecha.” He reports that he received a warm welcome and a great many helpful questions and suggestions, and that he had productive and enjoyable meetings with various faculty members and graduate students while there.