DUEK ADVANCES TO CANDIDACY

Congratulations to Karen Duek, who advanced to candidacy this Monday (June 6) by passing her qualifying exam. Karen’s committee consisted of Pranav Anand, co-chairs Adrian Brasoveanu and Donka Farkas, and external member Barbara Partee. The local members will also be on Karen’s dissertation committee.

LAST ROUND OF SUCCESSFUL DEFENSES

  • Jeff Adler: “The nature of conspiracy: Implications for parallel versus serial derivation” (Armin Mester, chair, Junko Ito, and Ryan Bennett)
  • Nate Clair: “Differential object marking in spoken Persian: Towards an enriched typology” (Donka Farkas, chair, Adrian Brasoveanu, and Maziar Toosarvandani)
  • Ben Mericli: “Modeling indirect evidence” (Donka Farkas, chair, Adrian Brasoveanu, and Jorge Hankamer)
  • Jason Ostrove: “The prosody of agreement in San Martín Peras Mixtec” (Junko Ito, chair, Judith Aissen, and Armin Mester)
  • Jed Pizzaro-Guevara: “The role of Tagalog verbal agreement in processing filler-gap dependencies” (Matt Wagers, chair, Sandy Chung, and Grant McGuire)

DUEK AND MERICLI RECEIVE IHR FELLOWSHIPS

Karen Duek received news last week that she has been awarded a Graduate Dissertation Fellowship from the Institute for Humanities Research (IHR) for 2016-2017. The competitive fellowship comes with a year-long stipend ($21,000), as well as tuition and fee remission.

At the same time, Ben Mericli was notified that he will receive an IHR Summer Research Fellowship to support his research this coming summer. With the $2,500 award, Ben will be traveling to Istanbul to gather phonetic data for his second QP.

MARY ZAVELLINI TRIBUTE

On Saturday, July 9, a performance — The Voice Bank — will be held in tribute to Mary Zavanelli, a teaching professor of biology who was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gherig’s disease) in 2014. The performance will chronicle the journey of ALS from the patient’s perspective and educate people on the benefits of vocal coaching and voice banking. Admission is free, and the performance begins at 2 pm in the Digital Arts Research Center (Room 108).

WHAT’S HAPPENING THIS SUMMER?

The department’s traditional end-of-the-year celebration will take place this Friday (June 10) from 11:30 am to 1 pm in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge. After that, Santa Crucians have a busy summer ahead of them. Many students and faculty will be travelling, presenting at conferences, and doing fieldwork around the world. Some will stay put, enjoying a more quiet and contemplative summer:

  • Jeff Adler will spend the summer conducting linguistic fieldwork in Santiago Laxopa, Oaxaca on the Zapotec variety spoken there. This continues the work he began in the field methods course this spring. The consultant from the course, Fe Silva-Robles, invited him to stay with her during the summer, when she will be there as well. Along with Maho Morimoto, he will be looking at various phonological issues in the language, including the interaction of tone, length, stress, and phonation. In collaboration with other students from the class, he will also examine various other topics in phonology, syntax, and semantics.
  • Jennifer Bellik will participate in UCSC’s Science Internship Program. She will mentor a high school student, who will help her process the data from her ultrasound investigation of onset clusters in Turkish.
  • Steven Foley will travel to Tbilisi, Georgia to conduct fieldwork and pilot a psycholinguistic experiment for his second QP. At the end of the summer, he will present a poster in Paris at the South Caucasian Chalk Circle, a workshop on Georgian and related languages.
  • Nick Kalivoda will attend the Effects of Constituency on Sentence Phonology workshop at UMass Amherst this summer, where he will present a poster.
  • Sandy Chung will travel to Germany in early August, where she and Matt Wagers will give a paper on Chamorro at the Sentence Processing in Multilingual and Other Less Commonly Studied Populations workshop in Potsdam. Early in September, she will be back in the CNMI, where she, Matt, and Manuel F. Borja will conduct their latest experiment.
  • Donka Farkas is planning an uneventful summer in Santa Cruz reading and writing. This past spring while she was on sabbatical, she spent four weeks as a Royal Netherlands Academy for Arts and Sciences (KNAW) Visiting Professor at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, Amsterdam, working with former LRC visitor Floris Roelofsen. During her stay, she gave two colloquia (Utrecht University and ILLC) and met with colleagues and graduate students, including former LRC visitor Matthijs Westera.
  • Junko Ito and Armin Mester will be in Tokyo from mid-June to mid-August to conduct research on prosody and grammar at the National Institute of Japanese Linguistics (NINJAL) with Professor Haruo Kubozono (former LRC associate) and at Keio University with Associate Professor Shigeto Kawahara (former EAP student at UCSC). In the middle of their summer stay in Japan, they will fly to UMass Amherst to participate in the Effects of Constituency on Sentence Phonology workshop (July 29-31). They look forward to meeting up with the other participants from Santa Cruz: Jim and Nick.
  • Margaret Kroll will participate in the Science Internship Program for the first half of the summer. In September, she will attend Sinn und Bedeutung 21, where she will give a talk on polarity reversals under sluicing.
  • Jim McCloskey will spend the first half of the summer in Ireland, and then at the very end of July will join Junko Ito, Armin Mester, and Nick Kalivoda in Amherst for the
    The Effects of Constituency on Sentence Phonology workshop.
  • Grant McGuire will attend LabPhon 15 this July at Cornell University, where he will present a poster entitled “Cross-linguistic gender priming in speech processing,” along with Molly Babel and Alexandra Bosurgi. Then, in early September, he will head to County Kerry in Ireland to collect ultrasound data from native speakers of Munster Irish as part of his NSF grant, assisted by Máire Ni Chiosáin of University College Dublin. This trip is the final round of data collection for the grant.
  • Ben Mericli will be spending most of the summer in Istanbul, where he’ll be searching for P-side answers to S-side questions about questions and answers in Turkish. He hopes to both elicit and answer those questions en masse.
  • Jaye Padgett will be in Ireland for a week in July, working on a study of the unusual Irish “tense” sonorants with Máire Ní Chiosáin.
  • Jed Pizzaro-Guevara will be in Tokyo in June to give a presentation about the role of Tagalog voice morphology in processing wh-questions at the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. After a week of nom-noming in Japan, he will return to Santa Cruz to participate in UCSC’s Science Internship Program, along with Jenny, Maho, and Margaret. He will be working with Eustina Kim from Leigh High School to expand his investigation of the role of verbal agreement in processing to other A-bar dependencies.
  • Bern Samko will continue her UCSC career by teaching Syntactic Structures (Linguistics 111) in the summer session.
  • Maziar Toosarvandani will spend most of the summer writing and doing fieldwork in California. Towards the end, he will travel to Edinburgh with Pranav Anand to present at Sinn und Bedeutung 21 on present tense.
  • Erik Zyman will return to the island of Janitzio in Michoacán, Mexico to continue working with native speakers of Janitzio P’urhepecha to elucidate aspects of the language’s syntax. He will be investigating hyperraising to subject, object shift, and their implications for the theory of movement, with a focus on what they reveal about the driving force for movement.

ANAND TO RECEIVE DIZIKES AWARD

This Tuesday (May 31), Pranav Anand will receive the Dizikes Faculty Teaching Award in the Humanities. It recognizes Pranav for his ability to inspire and engage students over the years and for creating an inclusive learning environment that challenges and encourages all students. In his teaching statement, Pranav writes:

“For me, successful teaching begins in imaginative engagement, in divining the epistemic state of my students, both as I am designing materials weeks before meeting them and in answering questions in the classroom. To be sure, this process is partly atavistic communion with my earlier scholarly self. However, I have found that my teaching has improved as I have down-weighted impressions of my own experience and concentrated simply on understanding the psyches of the persons directly in front of me. Such a process is indelibly empathic, and it is for this reason that all the potentially tired analogies of teaching and parenting ring so true for me. Both cases are virtually unique in granting one the longitudinal privilege of beholding someone mature in real time over several years.”

Each year’s recipient selects a student to receive a scholarship in their name. The 2016 Pranav Anand Scholarship will go to linguistics undergraduate Dhyana Buckley. Both Pranav and Dhayana will be honored at the Celebrating the Humanities event, which will take place on Tuesday from 4 to 6 pm at the Cowell Provost House.

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