Category: Announcements

WELCOME BACK, MATTHEW!

The Department is happy to announce our new Undergraduate Advising Coordinator: Matthew MacLeod. Matthew graduated in Winter 2015 with a BA degree in Linguistics (University Honors, Cum Laude) from UC Santa Cruz, and is extremely excited to be joining our department as a staff member.

Having worked for the past 17 years in printing production, and as an office manager, Matt comes to us with a fantastic combination of technical and customer service skills, as well as his deep understanding of our majors. Please join us in welcoming Matt to our department! He can be reached at: 241 Stevenson College, (831) 459-4988, or macleod@ucsc.edu.

WELCOME TO THE NEW MEMBERS OF OUR UC SANTA CRUZ LINGUISTICS COMMUNITY!

Two new faculty members are joining the department:

Ivy Sichel (Ph.D. CUNY, 2001) comes to us from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she has been Senior Lecturer and Chair, and joins the department as Associate Professor in syntax.

Brian Smith (Ph.D. UMass, Amherst, 2015) joins us as Visiting Assistant Professor in phonology.

Our incoming graduate class for Fall 2016 consists of five Ph.D. students and one M.A. student:

Andrew Angeles completed his B.A. in Psychology at UC Irvine and an M.S. in Speech Pathology at Columbia University. He has a commitment to Japanese as well as several areal languages (Ainu, Korean, and Mandarin). His interests lie chiefly in phonetics and phonology, and he hopes to connect them to speech pathology.

Netta Ben-Meir completed her B.A. in Global International Studies at UC Santa Barbara and an M.A. in Linguistics at San Jose State. At SJSU, she wrote her M.A. thesis on broken plurals in Urban Jordanian. She is interested primarily in morphophonology.

Andrew Hedding completed his B.A. in Linguistics and Spanish at the University of Minnesota. He has worked on phonologically-conditioned morphology in Amharic, presenting this work at the LSA and a forthcoming book chapter. Andrew is primarily interested in phonology.

Lisa Hofmann completed her B.A. in Linguistics at the Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf. She has worked on the determiners in French-based creoles and the semantics-pragmatics of performatives, which she presented at SemDial. Lisa is primarily interested in semantics and pragmatics.

Nicholas Van Handel completed his B.A. in Linguistics at Washington University. He has worked on the perception of foreign accented speech by native speakers and is writing a thesis on whether or not clauses. Nicholas is interested in the phonetics-phonology interface.

Joining us as a new MA student is Mansi Desai (B.A. with honors in Linguistics, UC Santa Cruz, Spring 2016).

Welcome also to the newest members of the BA/MA Program: Dhyana Buckley, Lydia Werthen, and Anissa Zaitsu (all of whom you may remember from their presentations at last year's LURC).

We are excited to greet two new LRC visiting scholars, Professor Dr. Klaus von Heusinger from Köln (Cologne) University and post-doctoral researcher Lavi Wolf from Ben Gurion University of the Negev.

Klaus von Heusinger's main research interests are in the area of semantics and pragmatics, and he will be a Visiting Research Associate with the LRC through October 8, 2016. He uses the LRC visitor's office (237, Stevenson).

Lavi Wolf's main interest is also in semantics and pragmatics, and he will be a Visiting Research Associate through October 22, 2016. He also uses the LRC visitor's office.

DEVRIES TO DEFEND DISSERTATION

Karl DeVries will defend his dissertation entitled “Independence Friendly Dynamic Semantics: Integrating Exceptional Scope, Anaphora and their Interactions” on Thursday, September 29 at 5pm in HUM 1 – Room 210.

Abstract:

The goal of this dissertation is to provide a semantic account for exceptional scope indefinites in terms of independence friendly reasoning. I take the view that an indefinite takes exceptional scope when its witness is required not to vary with the value of a variable introduced by a syntactically higher quantifier. This dissertation shows that a straightforward implementation of this view in a static logic results in a system that assigns truth conditions to sentences containing wide scope indefinites that are too strong. I show, surprisingly, that a better implementation of this intuition requires dynamic logic. While using a dynamic logic is a necessary ingredient in the analysis of wide scope indefinites in terms of independence, it is not a sufficient one. I survey a number of recent dynamic systems, examine possible definitions of maximization, and show that only some of these permit the proposed analysis of wide scope indefinites. I show that a system of dynamic plural logic (DPlL) with unselective maximization can be modified to fully account for wide scope indefinites in terms of independent witness choice.

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