Category: Alumni News

UCSC SEMANTICISTS AT CUSP

UC Santa Cruz Linguistics was well represented last weekend at the 8th annual California Universities Semantics and Pragmatics workshop (CUSP), hosted this year by Stanford University. Friday’s sessions kicked off with a presentation by Kelsey Kraus on her recent work on German modal particles. This was followed, after the break, by a presentation by Deniz Rudin on scalar and non-scalar implicatures of might and some. Tom Roberts opened the final session of the day with a talk on propositional attitudes in Estonian.

On Saturday, the Department’s CUSP presence was impressive: a visually impenetrable block of seats in the room was filled by UCSC linguists. The morning included a talk by Hitomi Hirayama, whose work on ignorance inferences of wa in Japanese left us anything but ignorant about what this contrastive marker denotes. The day was rounded out in style by a presentation from the LaLoCo group–Deniz Rudin, Karl DeVries, Karen Duek, Kelsey Kraus and Adrian Braseoveanu–on the semantics of correction. The presentation sparked lively debate, uh sorry, conversation which extended well past the official end of the workshop.

TOOSARVANDANI GOES EAST

Maziar Toosarvandani, who is on research leave this Fall, filed this report:

I have been making regular trips to Mono Lake in eastern California to continue my work with speakers of Northern Paiute, an endangered Uto-Aztecan language. I have also done some traveling farther afield. Last week, I attended NELS 46 at Concordia University in Montreal, where I presented a poster on verb suppletion in Northern Paiute, using it to probe the locality conditions on vocabulary insertion in Distributed Morphology. In attendance were a couple of alumni: Robert Henderson (Arizona) gave a joint talk on “When adverbs embed clauses: An explanation of variability in Kaqchikel agent focus,” and Kyle Rawlins (Johns Hopkins) gave a joint talk called “Or what? Challenging the speaker”. I got a chance to chat with Idan Landau (Ben-Gurion University), who recalled spending a fun and productive year at Santa Cruz in 2009-2010 as an LRC Research Associate.

On my way to Montreal, I stopped off in Boston to see old colleagues and friends at MIT and to give a colloquium at BU. I talked about the process of durative gemination in Northern Paiute, which conveys an aspectual category of some kind. I located it within a typology of imperfective aspect, shedding light on certain unexpected uses of the imperfective in better-studied languages. The discussion period afterwards was very productive with a number of questions from alumnus Pete Alrenga, who is now an Assistant Professor there.

BELLIK AND KALIVODA IN VANCOUVER

Jenny Bellik and Nick Kalivoda presented a poster on their recent work on theories of syntax-phonology mapping at the 2015 Annual Meeting on Phonology, which was held October 9-11 in Vancouver, co-hosted by the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University. Posters and talks were also presented by many others with connections to UCSC, including B.A. alums Sara Finley (Assistant Professor of Psychology, Pacific Lutheran University) and Eric Baković (Professor of Linguistics, UC San Diego), Ph.D. alums Andrew Wedel (Associate Professor of Linguistics, University of Arizona), Ryan Bennett (Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Yale), Rachel Walker (Professor of Linguistics, USC), and Aaron Kaplan (Assistant Professor of Linguistics, University of Utah), and former visiting faculty Adam Albright, Lev Blumenfeld, and Wendell Kimper. Santa Cruz B.A. and M.A. alum John Alderete (Associate Professor of Linguistics, Simon Fraser University) served as a session chair.

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.

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