Category: Alumni News

ALUMNA INTERVIEW: ROBYN PERRY

Robyn Perry graduated with the BA in Linguistics in Spring 2008, earning Honors in the major and highest honors in Italian Studies. Having worked initially for Powerset, she embarked on a path of further training and education. We recently caught up with her and asked about her current projects and plans.

WHASC : What has been your career-path so far, Robyn, or where are you professionally at this point?

I’m in the second year of the Master of Information Management and Systems at UC Berkeley’s School of Information. Interestingly, the program ties together my linguistics background and my foray into nonprofit technology work quite nicely. Before this, I worked at the Progressive Technology Project, a small organization that supports grassroots organizing groups and their needs, through technology and communications. While at the School of Information, I’ve focused on getting better at data analysis in many domains. I’m particularly interested in developing tools that enable more informed civic participation, especially in urban settings.Continue Reading ALUMNA INTERVIEW: ROBYN PERRY

BRASOVEANU AND ONG IN CSSP

CSSP 10 (Colloque de Syntaxe et Sémantique à Paris) took place in Paris in September 2013 at l’Université Paris Diderot, Paris 7. The papers from that conference have just been published on-line and among them is a paper by Adrian Brasoveanu and MA alumnus Matthew Ong. The paper (which builds on Matt’s 2013 MA thesis Strict and Sloppy Reflexives under VP Ellipsis) argues for a discourse-based theory of strict and sloppy readings of reflexive pronouns under VP Ellipsis. It is available here.

ALUMNUS ANTHONY SHORE IN THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

Anthony Shore graduated from UCSC with a degree in Linguistics in 1990 having written a senior thesis with Armin Mester on the historical phonology of Latin. He has for many years been a leading figure in the growing field of naming and branding and has advocated strongly for this as a rewarding career path for those with linguistic training (he returned to the department in January 2009 to give a career workshop on the topic). Anthony and his work were recently featured in an essay in the New York Times Magazine about professional namers—the kind of work they do and how they do it.

BARKER RETURNS TO S-CIRCLE

Chris Barker graduated with the PhD in Linguistics from UCSC in 1991, his dissertation topic being Possessive Descriptions (published by University of Chicago Press in 1995). Chris is now Professor and Chair of Linguistics at NYU. He will return to the department on Wednesday January 21st for a day-long visit, along with Dylan Bumford and they will give a joint presentation to a specially convened meeting of S-Circle at 1 pm in the Linguistics Common Room (LCR). The title of Dylan and Chris’ talk is Incremental quantification for adjectives of comparison and the abstract is available here.

Toosarvandani and AnderBois in Language

The final issue of Volume 90 of Language (journal of the Linguistic Society of America) landed in our mailboxes just before the end of the year. In it we find a paper by Maziar Toosarvandani and a paper by recent alumnus Scott AnderBois. Maziar’s paper is on Two types of deverbal nominalization in Northern Paiute and grows out of his long-term commitment to work on the Mono Lake variety of that language. The paper deals with the syntax and semantics of two nominalizing suffixes and with what there is to learn from them more generally about the process of nominalization, focusing especially on the surprising semantic variability shown by the Northern Paiute nominalizers (they can express both individual and event nominalizations). Scott’s paper (The semantics of sluicing: Beyond truth conditions) grows out of his 2011 dissertation research; it develops a theory of the licensing of sluicing in which both truth-conditional semantics and issues (in the sense of inquisitive semantics) play a crucial role. Scott is now Assistant Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences at Brown University.

Alumna Kristen Sheets Helps Localize Gmail To Irish

Also in the second half of December, at an event held at The Foundry (the conference and innovation center at Google’s EU headquarters in Dublin), Google launched an Irish language version of its email service gmail. Among the people who made this possible was alumna Kristen Sheets. Since her graduation in Spring 2014, Kristen has been working with Google doing localization and the Irish project was one of the principal ones that she has so far been involved in. Kristen has this to say about the project:

I’m always very excited when I get to work, even peripherally, on projects translating into minority/endangered languages. There are obviously other more ‘promotional’ issues at play here, but I think allowing people to use the internet/internet applications in their native language is a really worthwhile endeavor.

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