Category: Alumni News

JIM MCCLOSKEY SPEAKS AT UC DAVIS AND CATCHES UP WITH ARIEL LORING

In the final week of Winter Quarter, Jim McCloskey travelled to UC Davis for a talk jointly sponsored by the Departments of Linguistics and English on the cultural politics of language attrition and their expression in Irish literature. While in Davis, Jim re-connected with alumna Ariel Loring. Ariel is a fourth year student in the PhD program in linguistics at Davis and advanced to candidacy at the beginning of this year. She graduated from UCSC in 2008, with a B.A. in linguistics, and in her last quarter she took Ling 80C (Language, Society, and Culture) to satisfy a general education requirement. She was sufficiently taken with the material of that course to decide that she wanted to be an applied sociolinguist and that is why she entered the program at Davis. Her first qualifying paper was on monolingual English-only ideologies in the U.S. and its effect on bilingual education policies, a topic she was first introduced to in 80C. Ariel’s dissertation research is centered on a set of issues around citizenship and language policy and she expects to defend her thesis at the end of the 2012-13 academic year. She hopes to go on to work in applied sociolinguistics either in an academic or public policy setting.

Linguistics At Santa Cruz Conference

On Saturday, the linguistics department hosted its annual graduate student research conference, LASC. The second- and third-year graduate students (and a visitor!) presenting work were Nate Arnett, Kendra Buchanan, Nick Deschenes, Yasuhiro Iida, Katia Kravtchenko, Oliver Northrup, Bern Samko, and Allan Schwade. These presentations spanned the subfields of linguistics and dealt with aspects of a variety of languages, including English, Hindi, Japanese, Maltese, Russian, and Turkish. (Find the program here, and some photos below.) Chris Barker gave the Distinguished Alumnus Lecture, “How to Sprout”, which engaged with the long tradition of UCSC work on sluicing and sprouting. After the conference, the discussion continued over dinner at a party at the home of Pranav Anand (who deserves thanks and congratulations for organizing Saturday’s events).

As usual, LASC coincided with the department’s Open House weekend for visiting prospective PhD students. A total of seven admitted students were here this week (five of them on Friday and Saturday), attending classes and reading group meetings, meeting with faculty, and being treated to the beauty of campus. Friday’s events culminated in a delicious pizza party hosted by Mark Norris.

Getting started

Bern Samko

Microbe catch

Nate Arnett

Chris Barker

Conference participants

Linguistics at Santa Cruz (LASC) Conference This Saturday

The department’s annual Linguistics at Santa Cruz (LASC) conference will take place this Saturday, March 10th, 8:15-4:30, in Humanities One, room 202. The program for the conference is available here. Our guest alum speaker this year is Chris Barker of New York University. As in previous years, LASC overlaps with our Prospective Graduate Student Open House. Please welcome any and all visiting prospectives!

UCSC Alum Elliott Callahan Catches Us Up

Elliott Callahan, a recent graduate of UCSC’s Linguistics program, writes this about his experiences since graduating:

For the past 2 1/2 years I’ve been focused on fulfilling my prerequisites for medical school at UC Berkeley Extension, as part of their post-baccalaureate health professions program. The courses have been challenging and interesting, and I’m excited to finally apply to med schools in June.

After quitting my job at a large San Francisco law firm in Fall of 2010, I dedicated myself full time to studying and volunteering. I’ve been extraordinarily lucky to volunteer in the immunology department at UCSF, studying the biochemistry of asthma and lung fibrosis. I’ve also been fortunate to volunteer and shadow in emergency departments at St. Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco, and Kaiser in San Diego.

As always, I’m thankful for the time I spent with UCSC Lingustics, for what I learned, and the connections I made. I’m looking forward to the coming years.

Alice Nichols Starts Internship with Endangered Language Fund

Among those who attended the LSA Meeting in Portland in early January was alumna Alice Nichols. Alice graduated with the BA in Linguistics in June 2011 and was a core member of the team of undergraduate research assistants who contribute so much to the work of the Phonetics and Phonology Lab.

In Portland, Alice was in transition to the east coast, where she is to begin an internship with the Endangered Language Fund in New Haven, Connecticut. The ELF (founded in 1996) works to provide financial support for the documentation, preservation, and revitalization of endangered languages all over the world, providing grants to individuals, tribes, and museums. Grants provided by the ELF have promoted work in over 30 countries and have supported projects such as the development of indigenous radio programs in South Dakota, recording of the last living oral historian of the Shor language of western Siberia, and the establishment of orthographies and literacy materials for teaching programs all over the world.

Alice will be working with Doug Whalen, who is the president of the foundation, a researcher at Haskins Laboratory, and a professor of linguistics at CUNY. At ELF, Alice will focus her efforts in the vital area of fund-raising and in addition, she will be helping to digitize recordings of Tarahumara, a language of northern Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental.

Report From the Linguistic Society of America Meeting

Presidential address

Micronesian community members

This year’s LSA meeting in Portland, Oregon, was a memorable one for the department in many ways. On Saturday evening, the first ever collaborative Presidential address was given by outgoing president Sandy Chung, along with Matt Wagers and their collaborator on Saipan Manny Borja. The address (Bridging Methodologies: Experimental Syntax in the Pacific) dealt with the large question of what the right relation should be between the methodologies of experimental psycholinguistics and field linguistics, and it reported specifically on the results of the collaborative research project on WH-dependencies in Chamorro on which all three have been engaged since the summer of 2011. The speakers were introduced by alumnus Jason Merchant, and the event was attended by members of the Micronesian community in the Northwest.


Matt Tucker

Jorge Hankamer

At the awards ceremony which preceded the Presidential Address, Matt Tucker was presented with one of three awards given for outstanding student abstracts submitted to this year’s meeting.

Meanwhile, at the Business Meeting on the preceding day Jorge Hankamer was inducted, along with nine other distinguished linguists, as a Fellow of the LSA.

In the course of the meeting, papers were presented or co-presented by Scott Anderbois, Ryan Bennett, Amy Rose Deal, Nick Deschenes, Robert Henderson. Wendell Kimper, Bill Ladusaw, Adam Morgan, Matt Tucker and many
alums, undergraduate and graduate, of the program.


Arm-wrestling

All of this lent a distinctly festive air to the annual Santa Cruz party, which was held (without interruption this year) on Saturday evening in the splendor and isolation of the Presidential Suite on the 22nd floor. The party was attended by numerous students, faculty, visitors, alums, friends and hangers-on and featured, for the first time but probably not for the last, an arm-wrestling competition between distinguished alumnae and current faculty members.

Next year, Boston.

Strong UCSC Presence at Amsterdam Colloquium

The 18th Amsterdam Colloquium took place December 19-21, and you can guess where. Besides a rich regular program, there were three workshops: on inquisitiveness, on semantic evidence, and on the semantics and pragmatics of Sign Language. One of the four invited speakers was Donka Farkas, who gave a talk titled “Polarity Particles in English and Beyond”, based on work with past and future LRC visitor Floris Roelofsen. In addition, Adrian Brasoveanu and Jakub Dotlacil had a very well-received poster; alumna Louise McNally, currently at Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, gave two co-authored talks, one of them with former LRC associate Henriette de Swart; alumna Line Mikkelsen was a co-author on a talk given by Daniel Hardt; and alumnus Chris Potts and co-authors had a poster.

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