Author: tdrobert

Matt Wagers was across the pond at University College London last week, giving a series of talks as part of their linguistics seminar series. Matt reports:

“Last week I traveled to University College London to give a series of lectures in the Department of Linguistics. There I was hosted by Wing-Yee Chow, who is a Lecturer in Experimental Linguistics, and one of my collaborators. The first lecture, given to a public audience, was about the relationship between verbatim memory for whole sentences and how its degradation can be attributed to the ordinary forgetting that occurs in the course of language comprehension. I was happy to be able to incorporate some of the research that Jenny, Tom, Jed & Steven did in my Fall Seminar. The second two talks were given as seminars, and both touched on the interaction between word order and morphological resources. There I drew upon my research on Chamorro with Sandy, as well as Jed’s research on Tagalog. Abstracts and notes can be found here. I was deeply impressed by the questions and contributions I received, which were simultaneously very perceptive but also friendly and constructive. In my free time, I did a lot of walking around London. Some highlights were visiting the Temple Church, a round church built in the 12th Century by the Templars, and attending a performance of the Duchess of Malfi, a rather grim (and rather long) Jacobean tragedy in which (nearly) everyone dies!

PS: While at UCL, I also met a Banana Slug: Caitlin Canonica (Linguistics B.A. 2010) who is currently a Ph.D. student in Linguistics at UCL.”

In other Ontario-related news, Donka Farkas recently gave a talk at the University of Toronto. Donka had this to report:

“This past week I visited University of Toronto, where I gave a talk on nominal semantics, for Michela Ippolito‘s research group, and a department colloquium on the semantics and discourse effects of declaratives and interrogatives. Among the familiar faces at the colloquium, there was Nathan Sanders, UCSC PhD, who is about to start teaching at Toronto. It was a joy to work with Michela and to spend some time with her lovely family. She sends a warm hello to her UCSC friends.”

Last weekend, Ivy Sichel was among those who stampeded to WCCFL in Calgary, Alberta, where the Flames of linguistic enthusiasm burn bright. Ivy had this to say about the event:

“The beautiful thing about research in linguistics is that it is full of surprises. When you start studying something, you never know where you will end up. The paper I presented at WCCFL this past weekend is based on a joint project with Martina Wiltschko from UBC, in which we follow the lead of a curious “negative effect” sometimes associated with the use of demonstrative-pronouns in German and Hebrew. The study of its distribution revealed a surprising demonstrative-internal typology, in which deixis and anaphora are two sides of the same coin, rather than oppositional categories.

There was impressive variety in the talks at WCCFL this year, in terms of content, and also in terms of the wide array of languages that were discussed: Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian, Tagalog, Korean, Turkish, Algonquian, Japanese, French, Mi’gmaq, to name but a few.”