WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Last Tuesday (April 26), graduate student Margaret Kroll successfully defended her qualifying paper, entitled “Polarity reversals under sluicing.” The committee comprised Pranav Anand, Bill Ladusaw, and Jim McCloskey. Congratulations, Margaret!
This weekend (May 6-8) brings the 9th Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas (SULA) conference to UCSC. The three-day event will feature talks and posters by speakers from around the world on languages ranging from Algonquian to Yucatec. The sessions cover degrees, evidentiality, indexicality, mirativity, modals, nominal semantics, obviation, plurality, quantification, and tense.
The invited speakers include UCSC alumna Line Mikkelsen (PhD, 2004; Berkeley), who will speak on Friday (May 6) about “Contrastive talk in Karuk.” The other invited speakers are Lisa Matthewson (UBC), Vincent Medina (Muwekma Ohlone Tribe), Sarah Murray (Cornell), and Katie Sardinha (Berkeley). The program also features talks by alumni Scott AnderBois (PhD, 2011; Brown) and Robert Henderson (PhD 2012; Arizona).
The full program for SULA 9 can be found here. Registration is free, and all talks will take place in Humanities 1 (Room 210). There will be a conference dinner on Saturday evening (7:30-9:00) at the Cowell Provost House.
We are delighted to announce that Ivy Sichel will join the department as Associate Professor starting in July 2016. Ivy received the PhD in linguistics from CUNY in 2001. After two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, she joined the faculty there. Since 2012, she has been Senior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics, and currently she serves as Chair.
Ivy’s research investigates syntactic theory with a focus on uncovering the principles that relate syntax to semantics and morphology. She has worked extensively on nominal structure, the syntax and semantics of pronouns, and event/argument structure. In addition, Ivy has interests in language’s relationship to society and identity.
Welcome to the department, Ivy!
Welcome to the incoming graduate class for Fall 2016! Andrew Angeles, Netta Ben-Meir, Andrew Hedding, Lisa Hofmann, and Nicholas Van Handel will join the PhD program, and Mansi Desai will enter the MA program. This year’s admissions process was highly competitive, and we are excited that these excellent students will be joining our community.
This Friday (April 29), Paul Kiparsky (Stanford) will give a colloquium on “Agent nouns: The morphosyntax of mixed categories.” As usual, it will take place at 2 pm in Humanities 1 (Room 210). There will be a reception to follow in the Linguistics Common Room.
We are pleased to announce that Brian Smith will be joining the Linguistics Department in fall 2016 as a Visiting Assistant Professor in phonology. Brian’s research focuses on issues of linguistic variation at the interface between phonology and the lexicon, combining formal work with cutting-edge corpus and experimental studies. Since receiving his PhD from UMass Amherst in 2015, he has been a Lecturer at UCLA, where he has taught a variety of linguistics courses. In the upcoming year at UCSC, Brian will continue his research, as well as teach both undergraduate and graduate courses in phonology. Welcome to the Santa Cruz linguistic community, Brian!
Several graduates of the department in the winter quarter of 2016 were awarded honors. Mark Takehana received honors in the linguistics major. Carrie Collonge, Liliane Buschman, and Rebekah Wilson received honors in the language studies major. Congratulations to all four!