Category: Alumni News

Karen De Clercq and Violeta Martínez-Paricio were both LRC visitors at UCSC in the academic year 2011-2012. Both laid down solid roots in the department and contributed a lot to the life of the department while they were here. Both defended their doctoral dissertations in December (at the University of Ghent in Belgium and at the University of Tromsø in Norway respectively) and both had UCSC faculty members as external members of their dissertation committees.

Karen’s dissertation was on A Unified Syntax of Negation and the defense took place in Ghent on December 13th. The external examiners were Jim McCloskey and and Michal Starke of CASTL, the linguistics research center at Tromsø. There are some pictures of the event here. Violeta’s defense took place at Tromsø on December 11th and the two “opponents” were Junko Ito and Birget Alber of the University of Verona. The social events following the intellectual work of the defense (and a workshop on the following day) gave Junko and Armin a chance to reconnect with former LRC visitor Ove Lorentz and with alumnus Peter Svenonius, who is now director of CASTL. Go here for the picture. Johan Brandtler, who was an LRC visitor at the same time as Karen and Violeta, was also present for Karen’s defense.

Also in December Adrian Brasoveanu traveled to Amsterdam for the 19th Amsterdam Colloquium held at the University of Amsterdam on December 19th-20th. Adrian gave an invited talk reporting joint work with LRC visitor Jakub Dotlacil. Adrian and Jakub’s paper What a Rational Interpreter Would Do: Building, Ranking, and Updating Quantifier Scope Representations in Discourse is available here. The talk was part of the workshop on Quantitative Methods in Formal Semantics and Pragmatics, at which alumna Louise McNally also presented joint work with Scott Grimm in a paper entitled No ordered arguments needed for nouns. Matthijs Westera, another former LRC visitor, presented Attention, I’m violating a maxim! A unifying account of the final rise at the 17th SemDial workshop which was held this year in conjunction with the Amsterdam Colloquium. Matthijs’ paper is available here.

December also saw the publication of two papers by Adrian. He and Anna Szabolcsi coauthored the paper Presuppositional Too, Postsuppositional Too which appeared in a volume in honor of Jeroen Groenendijk, Martin Stokhof, and Frank Veltman. The volume is available here. Floris Roelofsen, another repeat LRC visitor, is one of the editors of the Festschrift. Also in December, a paper (At-issue Proposals and Appositive Impositions in Discourse) co-authored by Adrian and alumni Scott Anderbois and Robert Henderson appeared online in the Journal of Semantics.

Recently Jaye Padgett flew to Edinburgh, Scotland, to attend Ultrafest VI, the latest incarnation of a conference dedicated to the use of ultrasound in phonetics and phonology. Ryan Bennett (Ph.D., 2012) was also there and led the presentation of his joint work with Jaye, Grant McGuire, and Máire Ní Chiosáin (University College Dublin) exploring quantitative measures of palatalization using ultrasound. Other people at the conference included Diana Archangeli (University of Hong Kong), Lisa Davidson (NYU), Brian Gick (University of British Columbia), Alexei Kochetov (University of Toronto), Doug Whalen (CUNY Graduate Center and Haskins Labs), and Jaye’s past co-author Marija Tabain (La Trobe University). Outside of the conference Jaye enjoyed exploring beautiful Edinburgh, including its scenic pubs.

Donka Farkas travelled to the flagship campus on Tuesday November 5th to give a presentation to the Linguistics and Philosophy Group at Berkeley. Donka’s talk was based on joint work with erstwhile LRC visitor Floris Roelofsen and was entitled Assertions, polar questions and the land in between. There was a lively discussion during and after the talk and among other things Donka was able to catch up with alumna Line Mikkelsen.

Line, meanwhile and in turn, visited the Santa Cruz department later that same week, to reconnect with her roots, finish a joint paper with Jorge Hankamer, and attend the amazing post-colloquium potluck held at the home of Amy Rose Deal and Barak Krakauer. The paper was completed before the party.