Category: Alumni News

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.

UCSC LINGUISTS ON THE ROAD

UCSC linguists will travel from drought-stricken California to three conferences in October. Matt Wagers and UCLA’s Kie Zuraw will open the American International Morphology Meeting (AIMM3) to be held Oct. 2-4 at UMass Amherst, with a tutorial on building digital resources for research on under-resourced languages. Jason Ostrove will give a paper (“Allomorphy and locality in the Irish verbal complex”) the next day. Also presenting papers at AIMM3 are former Foundation Fellow Scott Seyfarth and Ph.D. alum Abby Kaplan.

Donka Farkas will give an invited talk at the annual meeting of the Israel Association for Theoretical Linguistics (ITAL31), to be held Oct. 13-14 at Bar-Ilan University. Donka’s talk (“Assertions, polar questions, and the land in-between”) is based on joint work with ILLC’s Floris Roelofsen. The same day, Maziar Toosarvandani will give a colloquium at Boston University (“How imperfect is the imperfective aspect? Durative gemination in Northern Paiute and crosslinguistic variation in aspectual semantics”). Maziar will go on to present a poster (“Vocabulary insertion and locality: Verb suppletion in Northern Paiute”) at the North East Linguistics Society (NELS46), to be held Oct. 16-18 at Concordia University.

FALL WELCOME

The Department’s Fall welcome reception, on Friday September 25, was a most amiable and convivial event. Grad students, faculty, staff, and visitors gathered on the lawn behind the Cowell Provost’s house to talk, bask in the late afternoon sun, admire the scenery, and enjoy an excellent dinner catered by Mortal Dumpling. This pop-up restaurant, owned and operated by B.A. alum Noah Kopito, has been making quite a splash on the Santa Cruz restaurant scene; for reviews, visit here and here.

ANOTHER TRANSITION

Alumnus Cathal Doherty will also be moving to a nearby campus at the beginning of Fall 2015. Cathal completed the PhD at UCSC in 1993 and then held a position in the Department of Linguistics at University College Dublin and was tenured there. He left that position to pursue a religious vocation and then completed a second PhD in theology at Boston College in 2014. In the coming Fall, Cathal will be returning to the Bay Area to take up a position as Associate Professor of Theology at the University of San Francisco.

1 … 20 21 22 23 24 … 35