WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Cody Townsend completed the Language Studies degree in the Fall of 2008, graduating with Honors. Cody’s professional life recently took a new turn, however, as you can see here. It all goes to show that a training in linguistics prepares a body for many career options.
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.
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.
And as luck would have it, the latest issue of Linguistic Inquiry (Volume 45, Number 4) has appeared online. Among the papers published there is `Licensing Trouble’ by recent alum Mark Norris, current faculty member Jorge Hankamer and not-so-recent alumna Line Mikkelsen. The abstract and text are available here.
Aaron Zachmeier completed the BA in Linguistics at UCSC in 1994. Following several years of travelling, teaching, and working in Russia, Mexico and India, he entered the graduate program in Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana University in 2011 and graduated from that program with the PhD in 2014. He has now returned to UCSC, having been hired as an Instructional Designer working with the Faculty Instructional Technology Center (FITC) in McHenry Library, where (among other responsibilities) he consults with and supports faculty who want to develop hybrid and online courses.
Paul Jensen completed the MA in Linguistics at UCSC in 2007 with a thesis on the Japanese reciprocal pronoun otagai. Paul recently wrote to WHASC with an update:
Back in April of this year I was promoted to Associate Professor in charge of English language courses in the Faculty of Economic Sciences at Hiroshima Shudo University in Hiroshima, Japan. I started working at HSU in 2012 as an Assistant Professor, and before that I worked in the private English language teaching industry in Hiroshima for about five years. I’m extremely grateful to all the fine faculty, staff, and of course my fellow Ling/Lang students at UCSC for providing such a fantastic learning environment and making it possible for me to land a tenured university teaching position.
In May of this year, Oliver Northrup completed his PhD with a dissertation entitled Grounds for Commitment. WHASC recently had the chance to catch up with what he’s been doing since:
I moved down to Southern California over the summer and did some corpus linguistics work for a law firm in Santa Monica. In early September, I started work as an Analytical Linguist at Google LA, near Venice Beach. The work is interesting so far, and the neighborhood is fun too; Venice reminds me of Santa Cruz, so it’s easy to feel at home.