Category: Alumni News

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.

SALT 25 AT STANFORD

SALT 25 took place from Friday May 15th to Sunday May 17th, on Stanford’s ostentatiously beautiful campus. Work by current, former, and future Cruzites was presented—–a talk coauthored by incoming PhD student Tom Roberts (On double access, cessation and parentheticality; joint work with Daniel Altshuler, Valentine Hacquard and alumnus Aaron White); a talk coauthored by alum Louise McNally (The -ing dynasty: rebuilding the semantics of nominalizations, joint work with Scott Grimm); and a rockstar invited talk by Adrian Brasoveanu (Incremental and predictive interpretation: Experimental evidence and possible accounts), joint work with Jakub Dotlačil. There was a poster by alumn Chris Kennedy, co-authored with Helena Aparicio and Ming Xiang. Daniel Büring, a former UCSC visiting professor, was among the invited speakers. Many Cruzites past and present were in attendance as well. A non-exhaustive list includes: Donka Farkas, Amy Rose Deal, Christine Gunlogson, Chris Potts, Peter Alrenga, Boris Harizanov, Bern Samko, Karen Duek, Hitomi Hirayama, and Veronika Richtarcikova. With Chris Gunlogson/Kennedy/Potts all present, there was a quorum of UCSC Chris semanticists in attendance and a nearly complete reunion of the Four Chris(s)es of Alumni Conference fame. Honeydew and banana bread were consumed in startling quantities. Meaning was discussed. Much was learned.

SYNPHON AT SANTA CRUZ

It has been a very lively period for investigations of the interface between syntax and phonology in the department. The seminar offered by Junko Ito and Armin Mester on the topic has been the focus of much of that work and the presence of visitors Emily Elfner, Ryan Bennett and Boris Harizanov this week has added to the sense of occasion. In the seminar on Monday Jim McCloskey and Emily presented some joint work with Ryan on Prosody, Focus, and Ellipsis in Irish; Emily will present some of her current work on the syntax-prosody mapping on Wednesday (April 29th). And on Friday (May Day), Ryan and Boris will present joint work with fellow alumnus Robert Henderson at Phlunch. That talk is on Prosodic smothering in Macedonian and Kaqchikel and the abstract is available here.

 

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