Category: Alumni News

In Memoriam Gunnar Hrafn Hrafnbjergarson

Gunnar
Hrafn Hrafnbjergarson was a visiting graduate student in the UCSC department, under the auspices of the Linguistic Research Center, for a good part of the academic year 2003-4. While in Santa Cruz he worked especially with Judith Aissen on topics in OT syntax and was engaged in many other aspects of the life of the department. He earned the BA in linguistics from the University of Iceland in 1999, then studied with Sten Vikner, first in Stuttgart, then at Aarhus, in Denmark, where he earned the PhD in 2004, not long after his return from Santa Cruz. He held a faculty position in linguistics at the University of Lund, in Sweden. Sadly, we learned recently that Gunnar passed away in August. He died in a drowning accident while diving with friends near the Swedish side of the bridge connecting Copenhagen with Malmø. Gunnar was a fine linguist (known especially for his contributions to the Scandinavian Dialect Syntax project) and a kind and thoughtful person; he will be much missed. Øystein Vangsnes of Tromsø, who was a close friend, has written an essay in Gunnar’s memory, which is available on
his blog.

UCSC at the LSA

The preliminary program of the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, to be held January 5-8, 2012, in Portland, Oregon, has now been posted. WHASC’s first reading of it reveals an unusually hefty UCSC presence. Among those delivering papers are grad students Ryan Bennett, Nick Deschenes, and Matt Tucker, and faculty members Amy Rose Deal, Wendell Kimper, and Geoffrey Pullum (emeritus). Bill Ladusaw will be the discussant on a panel about the undergraduate major in Linguistics. Grad student Robert Henderson will present a joint poster with alum Scott AnderBois (Ph.D. 2011, now University of Connecticut). Many other alums will be presenting papers, including Ph.D. alums Pete Alrenga (Boston University), Vera Gribanova (Stanford), Chris Kennedy (Chicago), Ruth Kramer (Georgetown), Vera Lee-Schoenfeld (University of Georgia), Anya Lunden (University of Georgia), Jason Merchant (Chicago), and Rachel Walker (USC), as well as B.A. alums Joseph Sabbagh (University of Texas, Arlington) and Mark Sicoli (University of Alaska, Fairbanks). On Friday evening, Jorge Hankamer will be inducted as a member of the 2012 class of LSA Fellows. On Saturday evening, the Presidential address will be delivered by Sandy Chung, Manuel F. Borja, and Matt Wagers.

Judith Aissen and Scott Anderbois in Texas

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.

Paid Work for Gulf Arabic-speaking Linguist

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.

Benjamin’s Publishes Book by Emily Manetta

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.

Ph.D Alum John Moore Offers Summer Courses in Spain

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.

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