Category: Events

THE RIGHT HONORABLE SANDRA CHUNG

Sandy received the 2016-2017 Faculty Research Award at this year’s Founders Celebration Dinner, a festive ceremony this past Saturday that was attended by over 200 students, faculty, alumni, university representatives, and state and local elected officials. In her remarks after accepting the honor, she acknowledged her father and the Chamorro people. A short video was shown describing her influential research on the syntax and processing of Chamorro. As part of the award, Sandy will give the Faculty Research Lecture on February 7th.

Luckily for some attendees, a shrewdness of semanticists on hand for CUSP was available for consultation on the extension of the term “festive cocktail attire“.

NELS RECAP (NOW WITH RASHOMON EFFECT!)

NELS 47 was held one weekend ago, featuring (as we noted) talks by our own Jeff Adler, Margaret Kroll, Deniz Rudin, and Ivy Sichel (among others). In the interest of experiential intersubjectivity, here are their perspectives, unedited:

via Jeff:

NELS 47 was a great experience! While phonologists may have been few in number, the quality of the p-side talks more than made up for the scarce quantity. Jesse Zymet, my co-author, and I, received useful feedback on our talk. And, I also felt very strong about my karaoke performance of the Elton John classic ‘Tiny Dancer.’

UCSC Lang studies undergraduate alum (’06) and recent USC PhD (’16), Ellen O’Connor gave a really nice talk on ‘The accidental ambiguity of Inversion Illusions.’

per Deniz:

A veritable invading army of current and former UCSC affiliates descended upon sleepy little Amherst, MA to stare at its trees’ firecolored fall leaves and talk about linguistics. Current grads Margaret Kroll & Deniz Rudin talked (jointly) about sluicing, and current grad Jeff Adler talked (with Jesse Zymet) about irreducible parallelism in process interactions; freshly-hired associate professor Ivy Sichel spoke on extraction from relative clauses, and though he was not an enfleshed presence, visiting assistant professor Brian Smith’s spirit was palpably apprehendable as his collaborator Claire Moore-Cantwell discussed emergent idiosyncracy in English comparatives. Former faculty member Amy Rose Deal gave a talk (and chaired a session), and former visiting faculty members Wendell Kimper and Michela Ippolito gave posters, as did former visiting students Andreas Walker and Annemarie van Dooren; graduate alumnus Eric Potsdam gave a talk (with Daniel Edmiston), and graduate alumnus Matt Tucker gave a poster (with Diogo Almeida). Undergraduate alumnus Shayne Sloggett gave a talk (with Brian Dillon). The circle expands; our tendrils reach ever further. Many former UCSC prospective graduate students were sighted, and whenever possible chastised for their inexplicably misguided life choices. A significant amount of merriment managed to seep into the cracks between somber discussions of our mutual intellectual concerns: Facebook friends were accumulated; startlingly generously-portioned drinks were drunk; stories were recounted; songs were sung, with a uniform degree of confidence and enthusiasm shared by performers possessing wildly various quantities of skill. It was a nice weekend.

from Ivy:

The talks that I attended at NELS were, as a whole, very good. A surprising range of languages were represented, new data was presented, and new generalizations were formulated. In general, the work seemed to be engaging with broad theoretical and empirical issues, and a little bit less with implementation, compared to the last few years. Kudos to Margaret Kroll and Deniz Rudin who gave an excellent, super intelligent and 100% professionally-delivered talk!

CUSP 9 @ UCSC

This Friday and Saturday, October 21-22, the 9th installment of California Universities Semantics and Pragmatics (CUSP) will happen here, in Humanities 2 (not Humanities 1!), Rm. 259. The program is available here, and features our own Hitomi Hirayama, Margaret Kroll, and Deniz Rudin (squared, no less), as well as visiting postdoc Lavi Wolf. Come one, come all, as semanticists descend on our campus and refill our depleted reservoirs, much as the rain did this past weekend.

ADLER & SMITH @ AMP

As semanticists migrate northward in preparations for winter, phonologists will be heading south. Graduate student Jeff Adler will be presenting two posters at the 2016 Annual Meeting in Phonology Conference (AMP), at USC: “The moraic trochee in the Mohawk stress-epenthesis interactions”, based on his QP last year and, alongside Jesse Zymet from UCLA, “Irreducible parallelism in process interactions”, which extends the claims of Adler’s QP, both cross-linguistically and theoretically. Visiting faculty Brian Smith will be presenting the poster “Emergent idiosyncrasy in English comparatives” with UConn’s Claire Moore-Cantwell.

Speakers at the conference include alum Ryan Bennett, who is delivering the co-authored talk on Kaqchikel entitled “Against phonetic realism as the source of root co-occurrence restrictions”, and other poster presenters include former visitors Adam Albright and Lev Blumenfeld, and alum Andy Wedel.

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!

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