Category: Alumni News

As semanticists migrate northward in preparations for winter, phonologists will be heading south. Graduate student Jeff Adler will be presenting two posters at the 2016 Annual Meeting in Phonology Conference (AMP), at USC: “The moraic trochee in the Mohawk stress-epenthesis interactions”, based on his QP last year and, alongside Jesse Zymet from UCLA, “Irreducible parallelism in process interactions”, which extends the claims of Adler’s QP, both cross-linguistically and theoretically. Visiting faculty Brian Smith will be presenting the poster “Emergent idiosyncrasy in English comparatives” with UConn’s Claire Moore-Cantwell.

Speakers at the conference include alum Ryan Bennett, who is delivering the co-authored talk on Kaqchikel entitled “Against phonetic realism as the source of root co-occurrence restrictions”, and other poster presenters include former visitors Adam Albright and Lev Blumenfeld, and alum Andy Wedel.

On Saturday Sept. 24, the Department hosted the first meeting of PHREND (Phonology/Phonetics Research Weekend), an informal phonology/phonetics workshop of the three departments in the Bay Area (Berkeley, Santa Cruz, and Stanford). PHREND 1 was very well attended, with 12 participants from Berkeley, 3 from Stanford, 20 Santa Cruzers, and alum Eric Bakovic from UC San Diego as a surprise visitor. The meeting was an all-around success thanks to a series of fascinating papers, including ones by our own Grant McGuire and grad students Jeff Adler and Nick Kalivoda. Thanks to Nick for the superb organization as well. Stay tuned for Berkeley’s PHREND 2 in Spring 2017!

At the end of July 2016, a workshop on interactions between syntax and prosody took place at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Organized principally by Lisa Selkirk and Emily Elfner, the workshop (The Effects of Constituency on Sentence Prosody) grew out of (and was funded by) the NSF project ‘The effects of constituency on the phonology and phonetics of tone’ of which Selkirk is the PI, with collaborators Gorka Elordieta, Seunghun Lee, and Elfner.

Several Santa Cruzers spoke, converging on Northampton from around the globe. Junko Ito and Armin Mester, arriving from Tokyo, gave a presentation on the implications of certain interactions between syntax and prosody in English; Nick Kalivoda, coming from Sweden, presented a poster on his ongoing research developing a command-based alternative to Match Theory. Jim McCloskey (on his way back from Ireland to California) succeeded in driving a rented car from Logan airport into the depths of rural Massachusetts in order to participate in the event. Also attending was alum Ryan Bennett. The program (along with other information about the event) is available here.

The 47th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 47) will take place at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on October 14th – 16th, and Santa Cruzers will have a strong presence at the meeting:

New faculty member Ivy Sichel will present a paper on Extraction from Relative Clauses; and visiting professor Brian Smith will give a joint paper (with Claire Moore-Cantwell) on Emergent Idiosyncracy in English Comparatives.

Among the grad student presenters are Deniz Rudin and Margaret Kroll, who will present a paper growing out of their participation in Pranav Anand and Jim McCloskey’s ellipsis project: Licensing and Interpretation: A Comprehensive Theory of Sluicing, and Jeff Adler, who will present a joint paper with Jesse Zymet of UCLA on Irreducible Parallelism in Process Interactions.

Graduate alums Matt Tucker, of Oakland University and Erik Potsdam, of the University of Florida, along with undergrad alum Shayne Sloggett of UMass Amherst are also in the lineup.

The entire NELS program is available here.