Category: Events

WE HOLD THESE LINGUISTIC TRUTHS TO BE LEGALLY RELEVANT

On October 5th, alum Jason Merchant delivered a University of Chicago Harper Lecture for UChicago friends and alumni in New York City. Jason spoke about his interdisciplinary project “Historical Semantics and Legal Interpretation” with UChicago law professor Alison LaCroix. Their aim is to enrich contemporary textual analysis in law with insights from theoretical linguistic analysis and large-scale historical corpus analysis, to precisely investigate the syntactic and semantic distributions of important legal terms throughout history in order to understand the use of such terms both at a law’s enactment and as language changed.

AN EXCEPTIONAL DEFENSE, IN SCOPE AND DYNAMISM

Our congratulations to Karl DeVries, who successfully defended his dissertation, Independence Friendly Dynamic Semantics: Integrating Exceptional Scope, Anaphora and their Interactions, on Thursday, September 29th. Despite the witching-hour timeslot, Karl kept the audience riveted with his exploration of the semantics of wide-scope, distributivity, and maximization. In the 77 hours since his talk finished, Karl has found the time to pack up and move down to Los Angeles, where he starts a job as an Analytical Linguist in Ads Human Evaluation and Experiment Design at Google today, alongside alums Brianna Kaufman and Oliver Northrup! Good luck, Karl. Check out the porridge at Gjustia! Only $7.50, plus tax!

PHRENDLY NEWS

On Saturday Sept. 24, the Department hosted the first meeting of PHREND (Phonology/Phonetics Research Weekend), an informal phonology/phonetics workshop of the three departments in the Bay Area (Berkeley, Santa Cruz, and Stanford). PHREND 1 was very well attended, with 12 participants from Berkeley, 3 from Stanford, 20 Santa Cruzers, and alum Eric Bakovic from UC San Diego as a surprise visitor. The meeting was an all-around success thanks to a series of fascinating papers, including ones by our own Grant McGuire and grad students Jeff Adler and Nick Kalivoda. Thanks to Nick for the superb organization as well. Stay tuned for Berkeley’s PHREND 2 in Spring 2017!

STANFORD WORKSHOP ON HEAD MOVEMENT

Just before the new academic year opened (September 16th and 17th), our neighbors in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University hosted a Workshop on the Status of Head Movement in Linguistic Theory. The workshop, which was organized by alums Vera Gribanova and Boris Harizanov, engaged some of the difficult questions surrounding head movement and the phenomena it describes in the contemporary theoretical landscape. Among the presenters were Vera and Boris, Jim McCloskey, and MA alumnus Nick LaCara. Nick had just successfully defended his dissertation Inversion, Focus, and Ellipsis at Amherst and now holds a teaching position there.

AMHERST WORKSHOP ON SYNTAX-PROSODY INTERACTIONS

At the end of July 2016, a workshop on interactions between syntax and prosody took place at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Organized principally by Lisa Selkirk and Emily Elfner, the workshop (The Effects of Constituency on Sentence Prosody) grew out of (and was funded by) the NSF project ‘The effects of constituency on the phonology and phonetics of tone’ of which Selkirk is the PI, with collaborators Gorka Elordieta, Seunghun Lee, and Elfner.

Several Santa Cruzers spoke, converging on Northampton from around the globe. Junko Ito and Armin Mester, arriving from Tokyo, gave a presentation on the implications of certain interactions between syntax and prosody in English; Nick Kalivoda, coming from Sweden, presented a poster on his ongoing research developing a command-based alternative to Match Theory. Jim McCloskey (on his way back from Ireland to California) succeeded in driving a rented car from Logan airport into the depths of rural Massachusetts in order to participate in the event. Also attending was alum Ryan Bennett. The program (along with other information about the event) is available here.

NELS SLUGVASION 2016

The 47th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 47) will take place at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on October 14th – 16th, and Santa Cruzers will have a strong presence at the meeting:

New faculty member Ivy Sichel will present a paper on Extraction from Relative Clauses; and visiting professor Brian Smith will give a joint paper (with Claire Moore-Cantwell) on Emergent Idiosyncracy in English Comparatives.

Among the grad student presenters are Deniz Rudin and Margaret Kroll, who will present a paper growing out of their participation in Pranav Anand and Jim McCloskey’s ellipsis project: Licensing and Interpretation: A Comprehensive Theory of Sluicing, and Jeff Adler, who will present a joint paper with Jesse Zymet of UCLA on Irreducible Parallelism in Process Interactions.

Graduate alums Matt Tucker, of Oakland University and Erik Potsdam, of the University of Florida, along with undergrad alum Shayne Sloggett of UMass Amherst are also in the lineup.

The entire NELS program is available here.

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