Category: Alumni News

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.

FARKAS AT CORNELL

On Thursday, November 6, Donka Farkas gave a colloquium at Cornell entitled Assertions, questions and the land in between. Donka sent WHASC the following report:

My talk reported on joint work I am doing with former LRC visitor, Floris Roelofsen. I then stayed on for the annual linguistics and philosophy workshop organized by Sarah Murray and William Starr. The theme this year was the semantics of plurals. The program of the conference featured two UCSC alums: Robert Henderson (Wayne State) was one of the presenters, and Chris Barker (NYU) was one of the commentators. It was an extremely enjoyable conference, with interesting talks and good, animated discussion. Sara and Will did a great job organizing it all seamlessly.

ALUM REPORT: MARK NORRIS

Mark Norris finished the PhD last spring with a dissertation on nominal syntax and nominal concord. He now holds a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Oklahoma. Still with the intent of checking in with last year’s graduate alums, we wrote to Mark to see how things were and he sent in this resport:

I am very comfortable at OU so far. My colleagues Marcia Haag and UCSC alumnus Dylan Herrick have been very helpful to me and also solicitous of my opinions, which has made me feel very welcome and very integrated. Between teaching phonetics and semantics, doing research, and advising a drove of linguistics undergraduates, I am keeping busy. The fall semester is wrapping up very soon, and then I’ll be gearing up for Typology and General Linguistics (our intro course) in the spring.

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