WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
The 10th installment of California Universities Semantics and Pragmatics (CUSP) will be held at UC Irvine on October 21 & 22, 2017. CUSP is an informal venue for semanticists and pragmaticians in California; the official call for submissions will be later in the summer, so stay tuned!
This year’s Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference
(LURC) will take place on Friday, June 2, featuring talks by four current students:
The Distinguished Alumna Address will be given by Maura O’Leary (BA, 2013), currently a PhD student at UCLA, on “Constraints on Noun Phrase Evaluation Times.” The conference will begin at 12:45pm on Friday in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge–see the full program here.
This Friday, May 26th, at 2:40pm in Humanities 2, Room 259, there will be a colloquium by Susan Lin (Berkeley). Her talk is entitled “Gradience from variation in articulatory magnitude and timing,” and the abstract is given below:
Gradient synchronic variation in speech has long been proposed to be at the root of most sound change, whether through the generation of phonemically ambiguous speech or the creation of phonological innovations available to language learners. However, there exists a disconnect between this form of gradient variation and its typically discrete resulting phonological form. In this talk, I examine two articulatory factors thought to contribute to gradient variation: the magnitude and relative timing of articulations. Using ultrasound data, I focus on the relationship between articulatory magnitude and timing in post-vocalic laterals in English, while exploring some of the factors, including lexical frequency and speech speed, which contribute to that relationship.
In a special joint meeting of S-Circle and LaLoCo, we have this week a talk by Daniel Altshuler (Hampshire College/UMass Amherst) at 11:45am on Tuesday, May 23rd, in Stevenson 217. He’ll be presenting on “Temporal cataphora and revision,” details of which can be found in the abstract below:
Inferring a rhetorical relation between two discourse units (DUs) is non-monotonic: given a discourse context C and two DUs π1, π2 to be related by a relation R, it may be that C makes R(π1, π1) the most plausible inference, but an extension of C may make it more plausible that a distinct R'(π1, π1) is preferred (Asher and Lascarides 2003). Since rhetorical relations often entail temporal constraints, anaphoric connections between eventualities often undergo revision. This is especially apparent in the French novella, Sylvie, where, famously, the reader chooses a resolution strategy that she later finds to be incoherent and is thus forced to revise. The goal of this talk is to derive the incoherence and model the revision that the reader is forced to make. To do so, we extend Haug’s (2014) PCDRT to the temporal domain and to temporal cataphora in particular, taking important strides to synthesizing this framework with Asher and Lascarides’s (2003) SDRT, something that we think is necessary to model (in)coherence and the provisional nature of phoric expressions
This year’s UCSC Outstanding Staff Award goes to Irena Polić, managing director of UCSC’s Institute for Humanities Research. Irena has long been a major part of our department, both as a student (BA 2001, MA 2003) and for her countless hours of work connecting linguists to the many opportunities afforded by the IHR, which supports much of the work done by students and faculty alike. Read more about Irena’s journey, and why she believes the humanities still play a vitally important role in our society, here.
Former LRC Visiting Scholar (2013-14) Filippa Lindahl defended her dissertation Extraction from relative clauses in Swedish last weekend, May 13th at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. A few Santa Crustaceans were in attendance for the festivities (Nick Kalivoda, Kelsey Kraus and alum Paul Willis), and they all agree that Filippa did an outstanding job during the defense, fielding thoughtful and theoretically sound questions from Opponent Peter Sells as well as from an audience trained in various generative and non-generative syntactic traditions. The photo here is of Filippa and Elisabet after a toast to a successful defense. Grattis, Filippa!
Filippa with her advisor, Elisabet Engdahl
We are delighted to announce that Ryan Bennett will join the department as Assistant Professor starting in July 2017. Ryan received his PhD in Linguistics from UC Santa Cruz in 2012, and since then has been a faculty member at Yale University.
Ryan’s research is in formal and experimental phonology, with an emphasis on prosody and theoretically motivated phonetic analysis. He has worked extensively on phenomena at the intersection of phonological theory and other grammatical domains, including phonetics, morphology and syntax. His investigation focuses on these topics in the context of lesser-studied languages, particularly Irish and K’ichean branch Mayan languages.
Welcome (back) to the department, Ryan!