WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Congratulations to Nick Kalivoda, who advanced to candidacy last Friday (May 27) by passing his Qualifying Exam. Nick’s committee consisted of Jim McCloskey (chair), Armin Mester, and Junko Ito, along with Arto Anttila (Stanford). Junko will chair Nick’s dissertation committee, while Armin and Jim will constitute its other members.
This year’s Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC) will take place on Wednesday (June 1). It will feature talks by five current students:
Shayne Sloggett (BA, 2010), who is currently a graduate student at UMass Amherst, will give the Distinguished Alumnus Address on “Do comprehenders violate binding theory? Depends on your point of view.” The conference will run from 12:45 to 4:45 pm in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge. The complete program can be found here.
This Friday (June 3), Anna Greenwood will defend her dissertation, entitled “An experimental investigation of phonetic naturalness”:
The goal of this dissertation is to use experimental methods to investigate the driving force behind typological asymmetries that are based on phonetic naturalness. It has been widely observed that patterns that are grounded in phonetics are common, whereas the unnatural equivalents of these patterns are either rare or unattested. I argue that these observed naturalness asymmetries can be explained entirely by perception and production, as opposed to an ingrained learning bias against unnatural patterns. The experiments in this dissertation support this: participants do struggle to learn the unnatural pattern, but not when the experimental stimuli are exceptionally clear. This account also provides some explanation for the discrepancies between previous research on naturalness in the lab. The findings of this dissertation pave the way for a better understanding of how to accurately recreate naturalness-based asymmetries in the lab.
The defense will take place at 2 pm in Humanities 1 (Room 210).
Once again this year, an impressive number of seniors with linguistics or language studies majors have been elected to Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest undergraduate honors organization in the United States. Graduands are invited to join on the basis of their academic records, which must include a broad program of study in the liberal arts and sciences. Seven linguistics majors were elected to Phi Beta Kappa this year: Francisco Delgado, Mansi Desai, Zaid Aaron Galvez, Zoe Kirsh, Tyler Lewis, Katie Rees, and Mark Takehana. An equal number of language studies majors were also elected: Laura Bates, Lilian Buschmann, Ysabel King, Jason Marrott, Tenavi Erin Nakamura-Zimmerer, Rebekah Wilson, and Benjamin Youngstrom. Congratulations and best wishes to all of them!
Honors in the major were awarded to three seniors who are graduating this spring: Mansi Desai (Linguistics), Lyndsey Olsen (Linguistics), and Benjamin Youngstrom (Language Studies). Congratulations!
On Wednesday (May 18), the Committee on the Faculty Research Lecture announced their selection of Sandy Chung as Faculty Research Lecturer for 2016-2017. The nomination cites how Sandy’s research “combines theoretical analysis with field research and documentation” and her “pioneering” work with Matt Wagers in exploring “syntactic questions by means of psycholinguistic behavioral experiments with Chamorro participants.” It also recognizes Sandy’s “outstanding” teaching and the Excellence in Teaching and Innovations in Teaching awards that she has received. We look forward to this “world-renowned researcher and teacher’s” lecture next year!
Also last Wednesday (May 18), Bern Samko endured her final trial in the long journey towards the doctorate. Bern defended (successfully and in style) her dissertation — “Syntax and information structure: The grammar of English inversions” — before a large crowd of well-wishers and critics. The dissertation investigates some important theoretical questions about the driving forces of movement and, more broadly, about how syntactic processes and discourse-centered information structural processes interact with one another. The questions are addressed by way of a focus on some non-canonical word orders in English (participle preposing and VP preposing) and is notable both methodologically (it combines theoretical work with large-scale corpus work) and theoretically (informed equally by current strands in minimalist thinking about syntax and by the work in theoretical pragmatics that the SPLAP group has been reading and doing). Bern has been a leading member of SPLAP since its inception and her presence at its meetings will be sorely missed.