Category: Alumni News

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.

Meanwhile MayFest 2015 took place at the University of Maryland and was notable for the participation of three UCSC alumni— Vera Gribanova, Ruth Kramer, and Robert Henderson all of whom gave invited talks, and the presence of Pranav Anand who is visiting Maryland as part of his spring sabbatical. The MayFest program is available here.

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.

Vera Lee-Schoenfeld earned the PhD at UCSC in 2005 with a dissertation on the syntax of German (Beyond Coherence: The Syntax of Opacity in German), which in 2007 was published in revised form as a book in the Linguistik Aktuel series from Benjamins. Vera’s initial position was at Swarthmore College but she has been at the University of Georgia since 2010. Vera recently wrote to WHASC with an update and some very good news:

I wanted to share that, in my 5th year as the main syntactician of the Linguistics Program at the University of Georgia, I found out that my tenure and promotion review was successful. So, starting this August, I will be Associate Professor! My home department is still Germanic and Slavic Studies, as the UGA Linguistics Program is in the process of becoming its own department.

This summer, I will be in Germany, teaching a seminar on argument structure at the Leibniz Universität Hannover and continuing joint research with Gabriele Diewald. We are working on a book taking a trans-theoretical approach to argument structure in German and English with particular focus on arguments that, in German, are prone to being dative-marked.

I’m also continuing joint work with fellow UCSC alumna Anya Lunden (William and Mary) on the syntax, information structure, and prosody of German VP-fronting.