WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Ryan Bennett traveled to New Jersey last week to give a colloquium at the Princeton University Program in Linguistics, recently reinvigorated by the hiring of three new faculty members (Laura Kalin, Byron Ahn, and Florian Lionnet). It was a lively visit, filled with interesting and challenging conversations about many areas of linguistics, and the strange and wonderful ways they interact at their interfaces.
On April 13-15, Maziar Toosarvandani and Jérémie Beauchamp traveled to Ottawa on the occasion of the 23rd Workshop on Structure and Constituency in Languages of the Americas (WSCLA). As one of the keynote speakers, Maziar presented his work with Steven Foley on constraints on clitic combinations in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec. As for Jérémie, he presented on vowel epenthesis in Kĩsêdjê. Despite a threatening weather forecast and freezing rain on the last day, the crowd of fieldworkers created a warm atmosphere, engaging in interesting discussions about several aspects of a variety of South, North and Meso-American languages.
We are pleased to report that fifth year Deniz Rudin has been offered and has accepted a tenure-track assistant professor of linguistics (semantics) position at USC, to commence in August 2018. We wish you best of luck in your future endeavors. Congratulations, Deniz!
Nick Kalivoda will be defending his dissertation at 1:30pm on Friday, April 13th, in HUM 1 Room 202. Nick’s dissertation is titled “Syntax-Prosody Mismatches in Optimality Theory.” The committee consists of Junko Ito (chair), Armin Mester, Jim McCloskey, and Alan Prince (Rutgers).
Jim McCloskey is this year’s recipient of the Dizikes Faculty Teaching Award in Humanities. Named in honor of Professor Emeritus John Dizikes, the award celebrates the Humanities faculty’s commitment to excellence in teaching and its transformative impact for students. The announcement of the award mentioned that “students and colleagues alike offered high praise for Prof. McCloskey’s ability to inspire and engage students over the years, and for creating an inclusive learning environment that challenges and encourages all students.” Jim joins several other linguistics faculty who have received the award in the past, including Pranav Anand (2016), Donka Farkas (2013), Jorge Hankamer (2011), and Jaye Padgett (2006). He will be presented with the award during the Celebrating the Humanities/Spring Awards event on Friday, June 8 from 4:00-7:00 p.m. at Cowell Provost House.
Junko Ito recently gave a colloquium at UCLA on Friday, April 6th, where she presented her work (jointly done with Jeff Adler, Nick Kalivoda and Armin Mester) on the microvariation of pitch accent systems in Kagoshima Japanese dialects. Contributing to the very interesting and stimulating discussion after the talk were the USC phonologists Stephanie Shih (Stanford PhD 2014) and Rachel Walker (UCSC PhD 1998).
PhD alum Louise McNally (UPF, Barcelona) was recently granted a Humboldt Research award, which will allow her to spend an extended sabbatical with Artemis Alexiadou’s group at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Find out more about the award here. Louise writes:
The Humboldt Foundation has great programs both for junior and senior researchers who want to spend time in Germany (for example, 2-year postdoctoral grants), and what I was most interested to learn is that the opportunities the Foundation affords continue even after the grant period technically finishes. I encourage you all to check out the foundation’s web page for more information.
Congratulations, Louise!