WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
The WHASC Editors were surprised and delighted to see former LRC Visitor Filippa Lindahl, currently a graduate student at the University of Gothenburg, on campus last week. An exciting presence in the department two years ago, she is visiting the United States — and Santa Cruz — for a brief time. So if you happen to run into her, be sure to say hello!
For language studies and linguistics majors who are thinking about a linguistics-related job in technology, three UCSC alumni — Rachelle Boyson (BA, 2015), Cecilia Lopez (BA, 2014) and Tony Zavala (BA, 2013) — will be available on campus this Thursday (February 25) to talk about their careers. The event will take place in Stevenson 249, starting at 6pm.
Alumnus Jeff Runner (Rochester; BA, 1989) alerted WHASC to a new MS program in computational linguistics. This program at Rochester trains students to be conversant both in the analysis of language and in computational techniques applied to natural language. The curriculum consists of courses in linguistics and computer science for a total of 32 credit hours. Graduates from the MS program will be prepared for both further training at the PhD level in computer science and lnguistics, and for computational linguistics positions in industry. For fullest consideration, applicants should submit completed applications by March 1, though applications will continue to be considered as space permits. For more information, go here, or direct questions by email to Jeff.
Hot on the heels of the launch of the new open access journal Glossa by the former editorial team of the journal Lingua, the birth of a new book series has just been announced. The series will be known as Open Generative Syntax and will be published by Language Science Press (a publisher of open-access books in linguistics). Its goal is to publish high-quality peer-reviewed books on theoretical syntax on an open-access basis. Jim McCloskey is a member of the editorial board, along with alumni Vera Gribanova and Jason Merchant. Led by editors Elena Anagnostopoulou, Mark Baker, Roberta D’Alessandro, David Pesetsky, and Susi Wurmbrand, the new series plans on accepting proposals and manuscripts very soon.
The 42nd Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (BLS) will take place this weekend (February 5-7) with a parasession on Austronesian linguistics and a special session on learnability. Graduate student Anna Greenwood will give a talk Friday afternoon (February 5) entitled “Phonetic naturalness is driven by channel bias: Evidence from final devoicing”, while LRC Visitor Eric Rosen will present Saturday afternoon (February 6) on “Predicting the unpredictable: Capturing the apparent semiregularity of rendaku voicing in Japanese through Gradient Symbolic Computation.”
In addition, UCSC alumnus Joey Sabbagh (BA 2000; UT Arlington) is an invited speaker at BLS this year, giving a plenary address entitled “Syntactic and prosodic adjunction in Tagalog” at 12 pm on Saturday (February 6). Other alumni in attendance include Jason Merchant (Chicago) and Eric Potsdam (Florida).
Alumna Scarlett Clothier-Goldschmidt (BA 2014, MA 2015) has accepted a position as Research Coordinator at Cogito, a venture-backed technology company in Boston. She writes:
I’m very excited about it because I consider myself a psycholinguist and it’s exciting to find a job that actually applies the skills that I cultivated in my time at UCSC. I’ve always thought that there could be really interesting and useful applications for some of the paradigms we use in psycholinguistics in other areas, but it’s rare to find a company that is looking for someone with this kind of experience. For my interview I gave a version of my LASC presentation (with Chelsea Miller’s help editing my handout to make it accessible for non-linguists), and I was really surprised how well people followed along and the level of discussion that it generated.
Congratulations, Scarlett, and the best of luck in your new job!
While Sandy Chung and Matt Wagers flew to the Middle East last weekend, Jim McCloskey travelled less far — to the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. Jim took part in a Workshop on Ellipsis Licensing beyond Syntax, which focused especially on the role of prosody in shaping ellipsis phenomena. Co-organized by Lisa Cheng, Anikó Liptak, and former LRC visitor Güliz Güneş, the workshop featured talks by Chris Tancredi, Andrew Weir, Volker Struckmeier, Anikó Liptak, Shin Ishihara, and Hubert Truckenbrodt. Jim presented recent joint work with Emily Elfner and alumnus Ryan Bennett. Former LRC visitor Luis Vicente was also an active participant and commentator at the event. Handouts and slides are available here.
On a side trip to Den Hag on the day following the workshop, Jim had the great good fortune to discover the ideal lunch-spot and resting place for the weary syntactician trying to un-ravel the mysteries of phasehood. The following day and more or less by accident, the three Santa Crucians (Jim, Matt, and Sandy) met in Schiphol airport at the departure gate for the long flight home from Amsterdam to SFO.