Category: Alumni News

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.

Alum Paul Jensen an Assistant Professor at Hiroshima Shudo University

Paul Jensen received a BA and an MA (the last in 2007) from the department. He has kept busy since then, and we recently received word of his endeavors.

In April 2012 I’ll be starting a tenure-track position as an assistant professor teaching English in the Economic Sciences department at Hiroshima Shudo University in Hiroshima City, Japan.

I started working as an English instructor for kids and adults in Hiroshima immediately after completing the Linguistics M.A. program at UCSC in 2007. During the past four plus years I’ve met a lot of interesting people through my job (including my wife). I’ve also learned a lot about teaching, as well as how to put my linguistics skills to practical use in the classroom. My students really seem to
appreciate having an instructor who can explain the ins and outs of language, and I’m really grateful to the professors at UCSC for giving me the tools to analyze and describe language to others.

Congratulations, Paul!

Floris Roelofsen and Marcin Morzycki Publish in Linguistic Inquiry

The most recent issue of Linguistic Inquiry (42.4, Fall 2011) contains a short paper by Floris Roelofsen on ‘Free Variable Economy’. Floris was an LRC Associate in 2010—11 and will be returning to UCSC in the same capacity in January 2012 to resume his collaboration with Donka Farkas and with Adrian Brasoveanu.

The same issue of the journal also contains a paper by undergraduate alumnus Marcin Morzycki. Marcin went on to the doctoral program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is now Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Michigan State University. His LI paper (‘Quantification Galore’) is on the semantic properties of the little-studied element galore in English.

ALUMNA ARIANNA PUOPOLO TELLS US ABOUT THE TEACHING ASSISTANT PROGRAM IN FRANCE

Recent undergrad alum Arianna Puopolo is spending a year in France on the Teaching Assistant Program in France (TAPIF). If you might be interested in an opportunity like this after graduating, read on! When not working in a French classroom Arianna has been traveling to Poland, Switzerland, Belgium,… Not the worst way to spend your time.

Arianna writes:

The French Ministry of Education actually created TAPIF. English assistants (like me) in France work for the French government and qualify for a work visa and social security. It’s pretty cool! The official websites are https://www.tapif.org/ or http://www.frenchculture.org.

Qualified English assistants must be college graduates, demonstrate some level of competency working as an organizer or leader, and have some proficiency in French (fluency and/or complete proficiency is not a requirement). There are no minimum GPA or work experience requirements.

Applicants must submit a personal statement, provide two letters of recommendation (one attesting to the applicant’s competency in French and the other should speak to his/her/their ‘leadership skills’), a resume and official university transcripts.

France is divided into several “academies” (kind of like school
districts). Applicants may indicate the three academies they would most like to be placed in. I would strongly recommend that applicants NOT apply to the Lille academy. The Lille Academie is the third largest in France and the majority of it comprises small (NOT quaint) former coal mining districts. The small towns here are anything but provincial. Many have very weak economies and (because they were founded for industry rather than on the whim of a developing community) lack a city center or other points of interest. I know. I’m here.

Applicants are paid something like 960 euro every month, but after taxes, the net salary is 790 euro. Contracts are seven months long, and, in those seven months, there are eight weeks of school vacation. Assistants are paid for the entire month regardless of the number of vacation days during that month.

It’s a pretty wonderful program, if you ask me.

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