WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Eileen O’Neill, who received the BA in linguistics with honors in 2015, was awarded both the Dean’s and Chancellor’s Undergraduate Awards for her undergraduate thesis, “An investigation of phonetic and phonological change and the influence of English on Modern Irish.” Together, these highly selective awards come with a $600 prize. Eileen will be honored during the Undergraduate Student Achievement Week (May 28-June 3). Congratulations, Eileen!
The linguistics department is sponsoring a speech pathology career workshop this Friday (May 20), featuring a talk by alumna Sylvia Soule (BA in linguistics, 2010):
After Sylvia graduated from UCSC, she completed post-baccalaureate work in speech language pathology at CSU Sacramento and an MS in communicative disorders at San Francisco State (SFSU). She participated in a grant program at SFSU that gives speech language pathologists specialized training to work with diverse learners with autism spectrum disorders. She has experience providing speech and language treatment for children and adults with various communication disorders, including language delay, articulation disorders, autism, and post-stroke and traumatic brain injury. Sylvia is currently working as a speech-language pathologist in the early intervention program (age 3 to kindergarten) at the West Contra Costa Unified School District.
The workshop will take place from 5 to 6 pm in the Silverman conference room at Stevenson College. Light refreshments will be provided.
UCSC alumnus Jeff Runner (BA hons., 1989), who is currently a professor and chair of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Rochester, was recently interviewed with Noam Chomsky on the NPR show Connections. Among other things, they discussed experimental syntax, including recent work that Matt Wagers was involved in with Jon Sprouse and Colin Phillips. Listen to the full interview here.
The most recent issue of Linguistic Inquiry saw two articles by UCSC linguists: Jim McCloskey’s paper “Lightest to the right: An apparently anomalous displacement in Irish,” which was coauthored with alumus Ryan Bennett (PhD 2012; Yale) and Emily Elfner (UBC), and Maziar Toosarvandani’s “Embedding the antecedent in gapping: Low coordination and the role of parallelism.” Both can be downloaded here.
Congratulations to Chantale Yunt (BA, 2015), who will enter the PhD program in Linguistics at the University of Connecticut in Fall 2016! Chantale has spent the past year as an English lecturer at Kamphaeng Phet Rajabhat University in Thailand, teaching English conversation and communication to roughly 300 students from diverse backgrounds and doing some curriculum design. She hopes to return to Thailand in the future to conduct fieldwork on some of the minority languages of the area. Chantale would be happy to answer questions from seniors in linguistics or language studies who are interested in teaching in southeast Asia. If you’d like to get in touch with her, contact the WHASC editors at whasc@ucsc.edu, who will forward your email.
This weekend (May 6-8) brings the 9th Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas (SULA) conference to UCSC. The three-day event will feature talks and posters by speakers from around the world on languages ranging from Algonquian to Yucatec. The sessions cover degrees, evidentiality, indexicality, mirativity, modals, nominal semantics, obviation, plurality, quantification, and tense.
The invited speakers include UCSC alumna Line Mikkelsen (PhD, 2004; Berkeley), who will speak on Friday (May 6) about “Contrastive talk in Karuk.” The other invited speakers are Lisa Matthewson (UBC), Vincent Medina (Muwekma Ohlone Tribe), Sarah Murray (Cornell), and Katie Sardinha (Berkeley). The program also features talks by alumni Scott AnderBois (PhD, 2011; Brown) and Robert Henderson (PhD 2012; Arizona).
The full program for SULA 9 can be found here. Registration is free, and all talks will take place in Humanities 1 (Room 210). There will be a conference dinner on Saturday evening (7:30-9:00) at the Cowell Provost House.
Carol Figueroa, who recently graduated with a double major in linguistcs and computer science, will be starting a master’s in speech and language processing at the University of Edinburgh next year. Not too long ago, she sent this update to WHASC:
I completed my Linguistics degree last Spring. I stayed two extra quarters to complete my BA in Computer Science and have now graduated. I’m writing to share some good news: I have been accepted to the University of Edinburgh’s MSc in speech and language processing program. I was also accepted to Brandeis University’s MA program in computational linguistics, University of Washington’s MS in computational linguistic, and University of Southern California’s MS in computer science. Making my decision was tough. I had been dreaming about attending Brandeis’ program ever since Susan sent an email about the program when I was in my second or third year. Ultimately, I have decided to attend Edinburgh’s Speech and Language Processing program. I want to give a special thanks to Professor Matt Wagers, Professor Marilyn Walker, and Professor Linda Werner for writing all of my letters of recommendation.
After submitting her report, Carol sent us some more good news. She has just been hired as a Speech and Language Researcher for Amazon Lab 126. She writes that “this will help me save up money before moving to Scotland!”