Category: Alumni News

OKRAND LECTURE

At the end of the week (on Saturday November 9th) many linguists were in attendance for a lecture given by alumnus Marc Okrand. The lecture was sponsored by the American Indian Resource Center on campus, and Marc’s title was From Mutsun to Klingon: How Helping Bring Back One Language Gave Rise to Another. This week’s WHASC Challenge is to name all of the linguists identifiable from the backs of their heads in the photograph which accompanies the Santa Cruz Sentinel‘s report of the lecture. After the event Marc got together with some UCSC linguists who have done fieldwork on indigenous languages of North America, including Amy Rose Deal and grad student Nick Kalivoda. Since Nick has strong interests both in field linguistics and in constructed languages, he was pleased to be able to have his picture taken with Marc.

DEAL IN CHICAGO

Amy Rose Deal travelled to Chicago last week for the Workshop on Semantic Variation, at which she gave a talk about the mass/count distinction in Nez Perce. (You can read the paper here.) The workshop was a lively occasion with many interesting papers on the semantics of under-studied languages and the ramifications for universals in semantics. Also presenting at the workshop was undergraduate alumna Lauren Winans, now a doctoral student at UCLA, who gave a paper on Disjunction in Egyptian Arabic.

BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY MA IN COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS

Lotus Goldberg is an alumna of the Santa Cruz program, completing first the BA and then the MA in Linguistics in 1998. Lotus went on to complete the PhD at McGill University in Montreal and is now Assistant Professor of Language and Linguistics at Brandeis University. At Brandeis, Lotus is deeply involved in, among other things, the MA in Computational Linguistics which the department there offers. Our colleagues at Brandeis have asked us to publicize that program, which they describe as follows:

The Brandeis University Masters in Computational Linguistics is a unique program designed for students with backgrounds in linguistics, languages, computer science or mathematics who are interested in further study in computational linguistics. This two-year program provides students with a strong theoretical foundation and a working knowledge of applications, as well as solid programming skills and knowledge of industry standards and tools. When they graduate, our students are prepared for jobs in speech recognition, machine translation, search, and information extraction or continuing on to a PhD in computational linguistics.

An informational flyer about the program is available here.

MARC OKRAND TO SPEAK AT UCSC

Marc Okrand is another undergraduate alumnus of the UCSC program. From UCSC, Marc went on to the PhD program at UC Berkeley, where in 1977 he completed a dissertation on the grammar of Mutsun, which is a dialect of the Ohlone language (sometimes known as Southern Costanoan). He is probably now best known for his work on the Klingon language, a language that he developed originally for the Star Trek franchise. His commitment to Amerindian linguistics has never waned however, and it is in that capacity that he will give a lecture at UCSC on Saturday November 9th at 2pm. The lecture is sponsored by the American Indian Resource Center, the Amah Mutsun Band of Ohlone Indians, and the Office of the Dean of Humanities. Marc’s title is From Mutsun to Klingon: How Helping Bring Back One Language Gave Rise to Another.

SCOTT ANDERBOIS AT BROWN

Scott Anderbois graduated with the PhD in linguistics from UCSC in 2011. Last spring, he accepted a permanent position in the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences at Brown University. We checked in with Scott to get his perspective on his new situation and on his path from dissertation to tenure-track position.

WHASC: Congratulations on your new position, Scott. Could you tell us about your current situation: What’s the environment like? Who are your colleagues?

Scott: I just started here at Brown as an Assistant Professor. Our department is Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences, and it is really exciting to get to know folks doing work in all sorts of areas in, around, and (well) beyond linguistics. For example, one project I’ve been working on has to do with the discourse behavior of attitude reports in Yucatec Maya, and so it is great to have colleagues right down the hall who work on issues like how children acquire mental representations and how adults reason over them. Beyond my department, there’s a very active research community here in Latin American studies (e.g. there was recently a roundtable discussion of researchers working on indigenous languages of Mesoamerica), a burgeoning Native American and Indigenous studies group, and lots of other folks doing interesting work! The other language folks in the department here are Sheila Blumstein, Uriel Cohen-Priva, Laura Kertz, Jim Morgan, and Pauline Jacobson. We have a small PhD program in Linguistics which we are hoping to grow a bit now that the faculty has grown (I am the third new linguistics hire in 4 years).

Continue Reading SCOTT ANDERBOIS AT BROWN

MCCLOSKEY AT NORTHWESTERN

Jim McCloskey travelled to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois on Friday, to give a colloquium at the Linguistics Department there (more or less a repeat performance of the first UCSC colloquium of the year). Being in Evanston, Jim was able to connect with Tommy Denby who graduated with the MA from Santa Cruz in June 2013 and is now in the PhD program at Northwestern. While settling in at Northwestern, Tommy has continued to blog at the New Yorker. A contingent also came out for the talk from the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago, led by alumnus Jason Merchant, who sends his greetings via WHASC to all at Santa Cruz.

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