WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
For language studies and linguistics majors who are thinking about a linguistics-related job in technology, three UCSC alumni — Rachelle Boyson (BA, 2015), Cecilia Lopez (BA, 2014) and Tony Zavala (BA, 2013) — will be available on campus this Thursday (February 25) to talk about their careers. The event will take place in Stevenson 249, starting at 6pm.
In the department’s phonetics and phonology discussion group Phlunch this Friday (February 26), Sarah Bakst (Berkeley) will give a talk on “The role of palate shape in individual articulatory and acoustic variability in American English /r/ and /s/”:
This ultrasound and acoustics study considers the role of individual anatomy in articulatory and acoustic variation and variability in the production of American English /r/ and /s/. Individual variation in the production of these consonants is a well-documented phenomenon (Mielke et al., 2010; Lawson et al., 2011; Bladon and Nolan 1977). /r/ falls on a continuum whose two endpoints are retroflex, in which the tongue tip points up, and bunched, where the primary constriction is formed by a raised tongue body (DeLattre and Freeman 1968); /s/ lies on a similar continuum from apical (tip points up) to laminal (tip points down).
In their study of front vowels, Brunner et al. (2009) found that flatter palates require greater articulatory precision than domed palates to achieve acoustic consistency because, all else being equal, smaller changes in articulation result in greater changes in acoustics for flatter palates than for domed. In this talk, I will present data indicating that palate shape does indeed influence variability in the production of /r/ and /s/, but the effect on articulation vs. acoustics varies depending on the segment.
As usual, Phlunch will take place from 11am to 12pm in the Linguistics Common Room.
The Science Internship Program (SIP) is looking for graduate students in linguistics to mentor one or more high school students over the summer, involving them in a current research project. This is a great opportunity for graduate students to advance their own research, while improving their advising skills and showing young people how exciting linguistics is. Mentors receive a stipend for working with interns during at least eight weeks in the summer. The deadline for submitting a project is March 5, and applications must be submitted through the mentor portal on the SIP website.
This Tuesday (February 16), Itamar Kastner (NYU) will give a talk entitled “On the syntactic reflexes of lexical semantics: The case of reflexives.” The colloquium will take place in Humanities 1 (Room 202), starting at 2:30 pm (note new time).
The campus has approved a program that will enable graduate students to have a Designated Emphasis (DE) in Human-Language Media and Modeling added to their MS or PhD degree. The DE, which is administered by the Department of Computational Media, is primarily associated with Computational Media, Linguistics, and Technology Management, but faculty and graduate students from all degree programs are invited to participate. The program will enhance the training of master’s and doctoral students in conducting research around issues relating to theories and computational models of human language data in a range of media. The program faculty from Linguistics are Pranav Anand and Bill Ladusaw. This winter quarter, there were two DE courses in the linguistics department (Linguistics 245 and 248).
Alumnus Jeff Runner (Rochester; BA, 1989) alerted WHASC to a new MS program in computational linguistics. This program at Rochester trains students to be conversant both in the analysis of language and in computational techniques applied to natural language. The curriculum consists of courses in linguistics and computer science for a total of 32 credit hours. Graduates from the MS program will be prepared for both further training at the PhD level in computer science and lnguistics, and for computational linguistics positions in industry. For fullest consideration, applicants should submit completed applications by March 1, though applications will continue to be considered as space permits. For more information, go here, or direct questions by email to Jeff.
Drew Knochenhauer recently received a 2015-2016 Humanities Undergraduate Research Award (HUGRA) for his project on “Unbounded dependencies and specifier competition in Spanish.” The award is highly selective — no more than ten are given out each year — and comes with a $500 stipend. Drew will present the results of his research at a poster session later this year. Congratulations, Drew!