Category: Alumni News

STANFORD WORKSHOP ON HEAD MOVEMENT

Just before the new academic year opened (September 16th and 17th), our neighbors in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University hosted a Workshop on the Status of Head Movement in Linguistic Theory. The workshop, which was organized by alums Vera Gribanova and Boris Harizanov, engaged some of the difficult questions surrounding head movement and the phenomena it describes in the contemporary theoretical landscape. Among the presenters were Vera and Boris, Jim McCloskey, and MA alumnus Nick LaCara. Nick had just successfully defended his dissertation Inversion, Focus, and Ellipsis at Amherst and now holds a teaching position there.

AMHERST WORKSHOP ON SYNTAX-PROSODY INTERACTIONS

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.

NELS SLUGVASION 2016

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.

SANDERS IN LANGUAGE

You might want to check out a recent paper in Language 92.3 (09/2016, 192-204) by alum Nathan Sanders (PhD 2003): Constructed languages in the classroom. Here is an abstract:

Constructed languages (purposefully invented languages like Esperanto and Klingon) have long captured the human imagination. They can also be used as pedagogical tools in the linguistics classroom to enhance how certain aspects of linguistics are taught and to broaden the appeal of linguistics as a field. In this article, I discuss the history and nature of constructed languages and describe various ways I have successfully brought them into use in the classroom. I conclude from the results of my courses that linguists should take a closer look at how they might benefit from similarly enlisting this often criticized hobby into more mainstream use in the linguistics classroom. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/629767

NUGER’S BOOK PUBLISHED

Alum Justin Nuger (Ph.D. 2010) reports that a revised version of his dissertation was recently published by Springer in their Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory series. The title is Building Predicates, and here is a short abstract:

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the processes involved in word formation and the morphosyntax of predication that will appeal to anyone interested in formal syntactic and morphological theory. The data is drawn primarily from the Austronesian language Palauan, spoken in Micronesia and smaller communities elsewhere. The thesis is that words in Palauan are not drawn directly from a mental lexicon, but are instead composed at least partially via operations in the syntax. Using original data from syntactic constructions not previously explored in the language, the author entertains several competing theories of word formation and highlights the compatible and incompatible aspects of each.

You can check out the book on Springer here. Justin mentions that it is very rewarding to see all that work (and especially the Palauan data) in print, and he again would like to thank his committee for their support during the project: Judith Aissen, Sandy Chung, Jim McCloskey, and Kie Zuraw.

ALUMNA REPORT: AMY LOMBARDI

Amy Lombardi, who graduated from UCSC in 1995 but has been continuing her education the last couple years with linguistics classes, recently received news that she was accepted into the PhD program in linguistics at UC Davis, as well as the PhD program in education. She sent in a report about making the tough decision between the two programs:

Once Linguistics accepted me, and I had a chance to go to campus and talk to people in both departments, I decided to go with Linguistics. It’s really a hybrid program anyway, which is exactly what I want. I can switch off by quarter between teaching my own classes in the university writing program and TAing linguistics courses, depending on what’s being offered, how much responsibility I want, etc. My advisor is awesome, a perfect fit for me both in terms of research areas and personality. So I think I can hit the ground running.

WHAT’S HAPPENING THIS SUMMER?

The department’s traditional end-of-the-year celebration will take place this Friday (June 10) from 11:30 am to 1 pm in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge. After that, Santa Crucians have a busy summer ahead of them. Many students and faculty will be travelling, presenting at conferences, and doing fieldwork around the world. Some will stay put, enjoying a more quiet and contemplative summer:

  • Jeff Adler will spend the summer conducting linguistic fieldwork in Santiago Laxopa, Oaxaca on the Zapotec variety spoken there. This continues the work he began in the field methods course this spring. The consultant from the course, Fe Silva-Robles, invited him to stay with her during the summer, when she will be there as well. Along with Maho Morimoto, he will be looking at various phonological issues in the language, including the interaction of tone, length, stress, and phonation. In collaboration with other students from the class, he will also examine various other topics in phonology, syntax, and semantics.
  • Jennifer Bellik will participate in UCSC’s Science Internship Program. She will mentor a high school student, who will help her process the data from her ultrasound investigation of onset clusters in Turkish.
  • Steven Foley will travel to Tbilisi, Georgia to conduct fieldwork and pilot a psycholinguistic experiment for his second QP. At the end of the summer, he will present a poster in Paris at the South Caucasian Chalk Circle, a workshop on Georgian and related languages.
  • Nick Kalivoda will attend the Effects of Constituency on Sentence Phonology workshop at UMass Amherst this summer, where he will present a poster.
  • Sandy Chung will travel to Germany in early August, where she and Matt Wagers will give a paper on Chamorro at the Sentence Processing in Multilingual and Other Less Commonly Studied Populations workshop in Potsdam. Early in September, she will be back in the CNMI, where she, Matt, and Manuel F. Borja will conduct their latest experiment.
  • Donka Farkas is planning an uneventful summer in Santa Cruz reading and writing. This past spring while she was on sabbatical, she spent four weeks as a Royal Netherlands Academy for Arts and Sciences (KNAW) Visiting Professor at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, Amsterdam, working with former LRC visitor Floris Roelofsen. During her stay, she gave two colloquia (Utrecht University and ILLC) and met with colleagues and graduate students, including former LRC visitor Matthijs Westera.
  • Junko Ito and Armin Mester will be in Tokyo from mid-June to mid-August to conduct research on prosody and grammar at the National Institute of Japanese Linguistics (NINJAL) with Professor Haruo Kubozono (former LRC associate) and at Keio University with Associate Professor Shigeto Kawahara (former EAP student at UCSC). In the middle of their summer stay in Japan, they will fly to UMass Amherst to participate in the Effects of Constituency on Sentence Phonology workshop (July 29-31). They look forward to meeting up with the other participants from Santa Cruz: Jim and Nick.
  • Margaret Kroll will participate in the Science Internship Program for the first half of the summer. In September, she will attend Sinn und Bedeutung 21, where she will give a talk on polarity reversals under sluicing.
  • Jim McCloskey will spend the first half of the summer in Ireland, and then at the very end of July will join Junko Ito, Armin Mester, and Nick Kalivoda in Amherst for the
    The Effects of Constituency on Sentence Phonology workshop.
  • Grant McGuire will attend LabPhon 15 this July at Cornell University, where he will present a poster entitled “Cross-linguistic gender priming in speech processing,” along with Molly Babel and Alexandra Bosurgi. Then, in early September, he will head to County Kerry in Ireland to collect ultrasound data from native speakers of Munster Irish as part of his NSF grant, assisted by Máire Ni Chiosáin of University College Dublin. This trip is the final round of data collection for the grant.
  • Ben Mericli will be spending most of the summer in Istanbul, where he’ll be searching for P-side answers to S-side questions about questions and answers in Turkish. He hopes to both elicit and answer those questions en masse.
  • Jaye Padgett will be in Ireland for a week in July, working on a study of the unusual Irish “tense” sonorants with Máire Ní Chiosáin.
  • Jed Pizzaro-Guevara will be in Tokyo in June to give a presentation about the role of Tagalog voice morphology in processing wh-questions at the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. After a week of nom-noming in Japan, he will return to Santa Cruz to participate in UCSC’s Science Internship Program, along with Jenny, Maho, and Margaret. He will be working with Eustina Kim from Leigh High School to expand his investigation of the role of verbal agreement in processing to other A-bar dependencies.
  • Bern Samko will continue her UCSC career by teaching Syntactic Structures (Linguistics 111) in the summer session.
  • Maziar Toosarvandani will spend most of the summer writing and doing fieldwork in California. Towards the end, he will travel to Edinburgh with Pranav Anand to present at Sinn und Bedeutung 21 on present tense.
  • Erik Zyman will return to the island of Janitzio in Michoacán, Mexico to continue working with native speakers of Janitzio P’urhepecha to elucidate aspects of the language’s syntax. He will be investigating hyperraising to subject, object shift, and their implications for the theory of movement, with a focus on what they reveal about the driving force for movement.
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