WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Peter Svenonius, currently of University of Tromsø, UCSC alum (PhD, class of ’94), and most recently distinguished alumnus speaker at LASC 2018, has made available a write-up of his LASC talk, titled “Delimiting the syntactic word.” A copy is available here.
On the Saturday of LASC, March 10th, current and former students and colleagues celebrated Jim McCloskey‘s 30th anniversary at UCSC by presenting him with a collection of essays inspired by his influence. Spearheaded by Jason Merchant, Line Mikkelsen, Deniz Rudin, and Kelsey Sasaki, the papers span a wide range of languages such as Irish, Chamorro, German, and Santiago Laxopa Zapotec, as well as a wide range of topics covering syntax, ellipsis, the syntax/semantics interface, the syntax/prosody interface, and Old Irish literature. The collection also includes a dedication by Cathal Goan. Congratulations Jim!
The festschrift, “A reasonable way to proceed,” is available on escholarship here.
Our congratulations to Erik Zyman who defended his dissertation on March 15th. Erik’s dissertation is titled “On the Driving Force for Syntactic Movement.” Those who were present followed him to a celebratory after-party. Congratulations Dr. Zyman!
Congratulations to Jed Pizarro-Guevara who successfully defended his QE on March 21. The project is entitled “The predictive value of Tagalog voice in sentence processing: Evidence from a series of Stops-Making-Sense studies.” His committee included Matt Wagers (chair), Sandy Chung, Amanda Rysling, and Joey Sabbagh (UT Arlington). Congratulations Jed!
Jim McCloskey used the quarter-break to travel to the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, where he gave an invited talk in the Cambridge Linguistics Forum series. Jim’s title was Understanding Ellipsis: Corpus, Annotation, Theory and he used the occasion to discuss some of the work being done by the ellipsis annotation project at Santa Cruz and to present some of the initial results that are emerging.
On March 31 – April 1 Emily Manetta (UCSC PhD 2006; now at University of Vermont), current MA student Mansi Desai, and Rachel Showstack (UCSC BA History, 2006; PhD Hispanic Linguistics UT Austin, now a linguist at Wichita State) attended the eighth annual Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages (FASAL) conference at Wichita State University. Mansi presented a poster entitled “Agreement Probes in Standard Gujarati” and Emily gave a talk on adverbs, polarity and verb movment in Hindi-Urdu in a session chaired by Rachel. A photo of the slug crew is below. Behind them is a recently restored original Miró mural “Personnages Oiseaux”, composed of over a million glass and which is part of the permanent collection of Wichita State’s art museum.
At the end of winter quarter, Jed Pizarro-Guevara, Matt Wagers, and Adrian Brasoveanu traveled north along with an entourage of Santa Cruz psycholinguists (Margaret Kroll, Steven Foley, Nick Van Handel, Jake Vincent, and Netta Ben-Meir) for the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference at UC Davis. Jed presented a poster co-authored with Matt Wagers entitled “Not all filler-gap dependencies are perceived alike: Evidence from Tagalog”. Meanwhile, Adrian presented joint work with Jakub Dotlačil: both a poster called “Modeling Lexical Access in ACT-R” as well as a talk on “A cognitively realistic left-corner parser with visual and motor interfaces“. Several former Slugs also attended, including Shayne Sloggett (BA, ‘10), Caroline Andrews (BA, ‘11), Adam Morgan (MA, ‘13), Ekaterina Kravtchenko (MA, ‘13), and Chelsea Miller (BA, ’14, MA, ’16). On-leave faculty Amanda Rysling graced CUNY with her presence, and organized a joint UMass-UCSC dinner. Delicious Indian food was had, and many bottles of wine, consumed.