Category: Alumni News

ALUM REPORT: RUTH KRAMER

Ruth Kramer, who was promoted in the spring to Associate Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University, submitted this update:

I had a fun and busy summer. I spent most of May at the University of Chicago — catching up with fellow alums Jason Merchant and Chris Kennedy and teaching a mini-seminar on agreement (in which we read a chapter of Mark Norris‘s dissertation). In June, I went to Roots IV in NYC with a number of Santa Cruz folks including alums Vera Gribanova and Matt Tucker, and grad student Steven Foley. In September, I traveled to Ottawa for a workshop on my (still) favorite linguistic topics ever: gender and number. I’m now on post-tenure sabbatical until late January when I take up a visiting position at NYU (where the current chair is alum Chris Barker). My book on gender — including results that I talked about at LASC 2014 — came out a few days ago. I’m hoping to see many members of the UCSC community in DC for LSA 2016!

NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF IRISH ULTRASOUND

Work continues on An Ultrasound Investigation of Irish Palatalization, a project funded by the National Science Foundation, whose PI’s are alum Ryan Bennett, Grant McGuire, Máire Ní Chiosáin (Head of Linguistics, University College Dublin), and Jaye Padgett. In May, Ryan collected new data from 5 speakers of Ulster Irish. Two UCSC Linguistics majors who had been working on the project doing sound file labeling, Abigail Katz and Eileen O’Neill, have graduated and will be missed. Meanwhile, grad student Jenny Bellik joined the project last Spring. In addition to her work doing data analysis, Jenny created this wonderful web site, a public face for the project.

WAGERS IN MASSACHUSETTS

Matt Wagers, who is on sabbatical, filed this report:

I went to UMass for the 3rd American International Morphology Meeting. There I gave a tutorial workshop with Kie Zuraw on building digital resources on under-resourced languages. Essentially, we used Kie’s workflow for building her Tagalog corpus from web text to put together a Chamorro corpus; and then we attempted to cross-validate it with the behavioral data that Sandy Chung, Manny Borja, and I have been collecting in the Marianas — subjective frequency ratings, listening times, etc. In attendance were alumni Ryan Bennett (Yale) and Abby Kaplan (Utah). The notes from the workshop are available here. The next day, current Ph.D. student Jason Ostrove opened the conference with his paper “Allomorphy and Locality in the Irish Verbal Complex”. Abby gave a poster on “Paradigm (Non-)Uniformity of Continuously-Valued Features in an Exemplar Framework.” Former Foundation Fellow Scott Seyfarth talked about acoustic cues in morphologically-distinct homophones. Other Santa Cruzans spotted at the conference include undergraduate alumni Caroline Andrews and Shayne Sloggett, who are both now Ph.D. students at UMass. Shayne was one of the central student organizers of the conference.

I stuck around to plan some experiments on ambiguity resolution with Brian Dillon. I also gave a talk in their Psycholinguistics Workshop on the insertion of null pronouns in incremental structure building, using Chamorro data as the test case. Spotted roaming around the halls of the department’s new digs were Nick LeCara (M.A. 2010) and Wendell Kimper (Visiting Assistant Professor 2011-12).

ELLIPSIS AT SANTA CRUZ

The research group on ellipsis SCEC has now swung into high gear with the aid of an infusion of funding that arrived in early summer from the National Science Foundation via Project 1451819, the Implicit Content of Sluicing. The group’s initial annotation effort continues to focus on sluicing, and a group of graduate students, including Kelsey Kraus, Karen Duek, Margaret Kroll, and Deniz Rudin worked with Pranav Anand and Jim McCloskey during the summer, both on the intellectual issues raised by sluicing and on some of the hard operational problems encountered in the annotation effort. Meanwhile, a second group of undergraduate research assistants (Brooks Blair, Mansi Desai, Zach Lebowski, Lyndsey Olsen, Reuben Raff, Lydia Werthen, and Anissa Zaitsu) joined the project to train as the second-generation annotation team. Training took place during the summer, and the group began work in earnest at the beginning of Fall Quarter. M.A. student Chelsea Miller and B.A. alum Rachelle Boyson act as lead annotators and coordinators of the annotation effort. Co-PI Dan Hardt joined the group for an intense week of collaboration in early August. Later in the Fall, Ph.D. alum Jason Merchant, who wrote the book on sluicing, will be visiting for several days as a consultant and advisor on the project.

UCSC LINGUISTS AT THE 2016 LSA MEETING

Four UCSC graduate students will deliver papers at the Linguistic Society of America’s 2016 Annual Meeting, to be held January 7-10 in Washington, D.C. Lauren McGarry will give a paper on “East Slavic Paucal Constructions: A Cross-Slavic Assessment of Pesetsky 2013”. Jason Ostrove will give a paper on “Allomorphy and Locality in the Irish Verbal Complex”. Bern Samko will give a paper on “Verum Focus in Alternative Semantics”. Erik Zyman will give a paper on “Quantifier Float and the Driving Force for Movement: Evidence from Janitzio P’urhepecha”. The UCSC alums delivering papers include Eric Bakovic (B.A. 1993), Boris Harizanov (Ph.D. 2014), Aaron Kaplan (Ph.D. 2008), Eric Potsdam (Ph.D. 1996), and Jason Riggle (M.A. 1999), as well as former faculty colleagues Shoko Hamano and Lev Blumenfeld. Posters will be presented by alums Nicholas LaCara (M.A. 2010), Anya Lunden (Ph.D. 2006), Jeffrey Runner (B.A. 1989; now Professor and Chair of Linguistics, University of Rochester), and Matthew A. Tucker (Ph.D. 2013). For the full program, go here.

ALUM KHUE DONG NOW TENURED

Congratulations to alum Khue Duong (M.A. 2004), who has been promoted to tenure as Associate Science Librarian at CSU Long Beach! Khue received the Master’s degree in Library and Information Science (MLIS) at University of Washington in 2009 and has been working at CSULB since then. In his position, he supports the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, mainly in the physical sciences. Khue will be on sabbatical in 2016, and will spend part of the time at Stanford, shadowing work at the Geospatial Center.

ALUM REPORT: MATTHEW ONG

Alum Matthew Ong (M.A. 2013) writes:

For the past two years I was in Nanchang, China, teaching English and studying Chinese. This year I am enrolling in the Ph.D. program in Assyriology at UC Berkeley. Just wanted to let people know and say thanks to two UCSC professors, Adrian Brasoveanu and Jaye Padgett, for writing good letters and helping to make this possible.

All best wishes to Matt in his Ph.D. career! Check out his grad student profile here.

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