WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
The current issue of Linguistic Inquiry (42.4, Fall 2011) sees the publication of Aaron Kaplan‘s paper Harmonic Improvement without Candidate Chains in Chamorro, a paper which grew out of Aaron’s dissertation Noniterativity is an Emergent Property of Grammar completed at UCSC in 2008. The abstract for the paper is available here.
Judith Aissen and Scott AnderBois (PhD 2011, currently Assistant Professor in Residence at the University of Connecticut) were in Austin, TX last weekend to participate in the fifth CILLA (Conference on Indigenous Languages of Latin America). Judith spoke on passive and agent focus in Tzotzil (“El pasivo y el enfoque de agente en tzotzil”), Scott on attitude reports in Yucatec Mayan (“Las atribuciones actitudinales en maya yucateco: Sintaxis y semántica”). High points of the conference included a keynote by Roberto Zavala (LRC visitor in Spring 2006), reporting on a newly discovered Zoquean language spoken in Chiapas, Mexico (Jitolteco), and one by Frank Seifart (MPI, Leipzig) on Manguaré, communication by drums among the Bora of the Amazons. CILLA is held every two years, always at UT. Spanish is the preferred language for the conference, with English and Portugese as alternatives.
Ember Van Allen (BA 2004, MA 2006), who works for Sensory, Inc., sends the following announcement:
I’m a linguist working for Sensory, Inc., in Portland, Oregon, and I’m currently modeling Arabic phonology for a speech recognition product. I’m looking for a native speaker of Gulf Arabic (preferably from Saudi Arabia) with a background in linguistics who can work approximately 20 hours (perhaps more) over the next few weeks to two months. The work would primarily be answering my questions about the language, mostly regarding phonology and text normalization, and some amount of review or light phonetic transcription. The speaker would be employed as a paid, temporary contract consultant, with flexible hours. There would be no need to travel, as the consultation would happen predominately by email and occasionally by phone.
To learn more about this opportunity, see the posting outside the department office.
John Benjamin’s Publishing Company has just issued Emily Manetta‘s book Peripheries in Kashmiri and Hindi-Urdu: The Syntax of Discourse-Driven Movement. The book is a major revision of Emily’s doctoral dissertation, completed at UCSC in 2006. Since leaving the department, Emily has been at the University of Vermont, where she is Assistant Professor of Linguistics. Her most recent paper “Reconsidering rightward scrambling: Postverbal constituents in Hindi-Urdu”, will appear in issue 43.1 of Linguistic Inquiry, due out in January 2012.
From John:
I’m writing to tell you about an exciting study abroad program I will be leading in Spain during Summer 2012. This is a UCSD Global Seminar, where students accompany UCSD faculty for a 5-week summer program. The program is open to college students from any college in the US.
This will be the fifth year I have offered this very successful program. It includes two 4-unit, upper-division courses: one on Spanish Dialectology and one on Flamenco History and Culture. There are no prerequisites (Spanish is not required either). The program combines flamenco music and dance with Spanish dialects on location in the beautiful, historic port city of Cadiz, Spain, from June 20-August 4, 2012.
This program has attracted a diverse group of students from a variety of backgrounds and majors. At UCSD, the courses satisfy a number of General Education requirements, as well as requirements in the Linguistics, Language Studies, Latin American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Communications, History, Anthropology, Literature, and Music majors and minors. They may satisfy additional requirements as well.
The dialectology course covers technical linguistics aspects of Spanish Language history and dialectology. It also discusses the history of Spain and Latin America, from the Islamic period, through the reconquest and the colonial period. In particular, it deals with the social factors: strong versus weak social ties that lead to basic dialect similarities and differences in the Spanish-speaking world.
The flamenco course also deals with technical aspects of flamenco and the structure of its oral tradition, but also discusses the historical and social aspects of its development, including the Spanish Roma diaspora.
More information is available here.
Recent graduate visiting scholar to our Linguistics Research Center, Lindsay Butler, has taken a post-doc position at the University of Rochester for the 2011-2012 academic year. Lindsay is continuing research with Floriain Jaeger and Juregen Bohnemeyer on an NSF-funded grant titled Studying Language Production in the Field: Accessibility Effects on Variation. Good luck, Lindsay!
Recent graduate Jennifer Sawyer received a prestigious 5 year Cota-Robles Fellowship to do a Ph.D. in computer science in natural language processing here at UCSC, joining the research group of Marilyn Walker. Congratulations and good luck, Jennifer!