WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
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.
Tamara (Tami) Schuyler earned a BA in Biology and an MA in Linguistics at UCSC. Her MA thesis (completed in 2001 and published in SASC (Syntax at Santa Cruz) Volume 3) is a widely cited study of the conditions which govern the possibility ofWh-Movement out of VP Ellipsis sites in English. Since completing the MA, Tami has worked as a linguist in the legal industry, most recently as a Senior Consultant with H5 Inc. However, she has also been developing a career as a writer of fiction and has recently achieved considerable success. In recent months, Tami has published three new stories. One grew out of her participation in LitQuake (a literary festival in San Francisco) and was published in Crack the Spine earlier this summer. A second story came out a month ago in a journal that has both online and print editions (The Milo Review). A third story (which Tami describes as her favorite of 2014) was published online earlier this month in the current issue of The Mulberrry Fork Review.
Another distinguished alumna, Line Mikkelsen of UC Berkeley will be returning to the department on Friday October 17th to give a presentation in S-Circle (Syntax and Semantics Circle). Line’s talk, entitled “What goes postverbal in a verb-final language? On the interplay of prosody, information structure, and word order in Karuk” will take place in the Linguistics Common Room at 4:00pm. Other events planned for S-Circle this quarter are listed here.
Louise McNally earned the PhD from UCSC in 1992 with a dissertation that has become one of the foundational documents in the literature on existential constructions (An Interpretation for the English Existential Construction). Since 1995, she has been a faculty member at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and she has had a central role in developing the language sciences community in Catalonia. Louise was recently recognized (for the second time) with a research professorship from ICREA (Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudio Avançats), so we thought that this would be a good time to check in with her.
WHASC: First, many congratulations on your recent ICREA Research Professorship (your second). Could you tell us a little about what this award means for you and what opportunities it opens (for you and for your group)?
Louise: The ICREA award gives me a 50% teaching buyout for 5 years, plus some additional research money. The money comes with very few strings attached, so I’ve used it for various things, mainly as extra support for my students. The best thing about the grant, besides the extra research time, is the flexibility these funds offer.
WHASC: What are you working on at present?
Louise: I’m starting a new project that’s called ‘CONNECT: Connecting conceptual and referential models of meaning’. The title sums it up pretty clearly, and the problem the project addresses is one that has come up repeatedly in different strands of my work. On the one hand, a recurring theme for me since my dissertation has been what you might call the interplay of type- and token-level expressions in language. On the other, I’ve spent most of the last 10 years trying to figure out how to deal with the context dependence of the interpretation of modifiers. A few years ago, since I felt like I couldn’t get much further with classical formal models of modification, I started collaborating with researchers working on distributional semantic models of meaning. Distributional representations do very well at resolving many sorts of context-dependence, and they turn out to offer quite interesting (if imperfect) models of type-level contents as well. On the other hand, distributional models in their current form do not look very promising as models of reference or information structure—things that frameworks like DRT handle well. So the idea is to work on integrating the two sorts of models.
WHASC: You’ve been centrally involved in developing the research and teaching community in linguistics in Barcelona. How does that look at present? What kind of work is being done and what is the community like? What does the future hold?
Louise: Things are great. We’ve got a critical mass of strong doctoral students and have been very lucky to have a steady stream of excellent postdocs and visiting researchers. Our Master’s program, which we started to offer in English a few years ago, is attracting lots of students from all over. I hope we can consolidate the quality we have, continue to strengthen our ties with some other programs both in Spain and in Europe, and just keep on doing new and interesting things. The people in our group are doing all kinds of things. To give just a sample: the clause structure of Catalan Sign Language, the evolution of the auxiliary system in Spanish and Catalan, nominalization of verbs and adjectives in various languages, lexical aspect in Japanese, the syntax of long-distance dependencies, different expressions of denial and the insights they offer into pragmatic theory, and the interaction of prosody and gesture.
WHASC: That all sounds really exciting. However, building that community has involved a lot of heavy administrative work on your part, yet you have remained very active in research. How is that possible? How do you meet both kinds of demands on your time?
Louise: There’s no secret: First, I have a lot of administrative support. Second, I work a lot of hours, try to maximize efficiency, and try to lose sleep over nothing. It’s amazing how much you can improve your efficiency in research by simply learning how to calculate the approximate time it takes to do a given research-related task and scheduling those tasks into your day.
WHASC: What’s it like in Barcelona?
Louise: In some ways it’s like a big, European-flavored Santa Cruz. Every time I go running along the beach here, I remember running along West Cliff Drive. Barcelona is an ideal city for anyone interested in language, especially multilingualism, sociolinguistics, and language policy. An easy way to see for yourself is to come to ESSLLI at UPF next August (a few preliminary details are already available on the web), or to spend some time as a visitor.
WHASC: Looking back at your own time in Santa Cruz, have you any advice for current students looking to build a career like yours?
Louise: I think the most important things I learned at Santa Cruz were humility and how to dig deeper into whatever issue was under discussion. I also remember and find occasion to repeat regularly many pearls of wisdom from my professors. I’ll mention just one: ‘Ideas are cheap; it’s working out the details that has merit.’ (Your collective homework is to figure out who said that; hint: it’s someone who’s still on the faculty.) A few other pieces of advice:
WHASC: Thanks a lot, Louise, and good luck with everything.