Category: Events

UNDERGRAD CAREER WORKSHOP NEXT WEEK: APPLYING TO GRAD SCHOOL

The Department will offer a career workshop for Language Studies and Linguistics majors on ‘Applying to Grad School’ next week, from 5:00-6:00 p.m. on Wednesday, November 18, in the Linguistics Common Room (Stevenson 249). The workshop is intended for students interested in applying to M.A. or Ph.D. programs in linguistics. (A workshop for those interested in applying to speech pathology programs will be held later in the academic year.) Grad student Jason Ostrove, who has led this workshop twice before, will give advice about how to figure out if you want to attend grad school, how to choose grad programs to apply to, and how to make your way successfully through the application process. Light refreshments will be served. All Linguistics and Language Studies majors are welcome!

LINGUA → GLOSSA

In a move that is making waves around the world, all 6 editors and all 31 editorial board members of the journal Lingua resigned two weeks ago in protest over the publisher Elsevier’s refusal to turn the journal into a completely free open-access journal, with no charges for authors or readers. Once the resignations take effect (at the end of 2015), the editors plan to start a new open-access journal to be called Glossa, which will be funded for five years by the Association of Dutch Universities (VSNU) and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). The resignations are the latest move in the larger debate over whether, and to what extent, commercial publishing houses should benefit financially from scholarly research. Articles on the resignations appear in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and the Independent. A statement of support was issued by the Association of Public & Land-Grant Universities. Johan Rooryck, the (future former) executive editor of Lingua, posted a description of the new open-access organization that will host Lingua, LabPhon, and the Journal of Portuguese Linguistics here.

TOOSARVANDANI GOES EAST

Maziar Toosarvandani, who is on research leave this Fall, filed this report:

I have been making regular trips to Mono Lake in eastern California to continue my work with speakers of Northern Paiute, an endangered Uto-Aztecan language. I have also done some traveling farther afield. Last week, I attended NELS 46 at Concordia University in Montreal, where I presented a poster on verb suppletion in Northern Paiute, using it to probe the locality conditions on vocabulary insertion in Distributed Morphology. In attendance were a couple of alumni: Robert Henderson (Arizona) gave a joint talk on “When adverbs embed clauses: An explanation of variability in Kaqchikel agent focus,” and Kyle Rawlins (Johns Hopkins) gave a joint talk called “Or what? Challenging the speaker”. I got a chance to chat with Idan Landau (Ben-Gurion University), who recalled spending a fun and productive year at Santa Cruz in 2009-2010 as an LRC Research Associate.

On my way to Montreal, I stopped off in Boston to see old colleagues and friends at MIT and to give a colloquium at BU. I talked about the process of durative gemination in Northern Paiute, which conveys an aspectual category of some kind. I located it within a typology of imperfective aspect, shedding light on certain unexpected uses of the imperfective in better-studied languages. The discussion period afterwards was very productive with a number of questions from alumnus Pete Alrenga, who is now an Assistant Professor there.

FARKAS IN THE NETHERLANDS AND BEYOND

Donka Farkas, who is on sabbatical this quarter, has also been on the road. She reports:

Between September 3 and October 12 I visited the Inquisitive Semantics group at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation at the University of Amsterdam, as a Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) visiting professor. I worked with former LRC visitor Floris Roelofsen on a paper we had started during his last visit to UCSC, in February. The goal was to get it ready for submission and, after intense work, we managed to reach it. Floris was recently awarded a five year ERC grant, so things are looking up for the Inquisitive Semantics group there.

From Amsterdam I flew to Tel Aviv for the 31st annual meeting of the Israel Association for Theoretical Linguistics, where I gave an invited talk based on the work done with Floris, entitled “Assertions, polar questions and the land in-between”. The conference was extremely enjoyable: high quality talks, lively discussion, collegial atmosphere. It was small enough not to need parallel sessions and so I had the pleasure of listening not only to the many excellent talks on semantics and pragmatics but also to great work in other subfields. Former LRC visitors Nomi Erteshik-Shir, Outi Bat-El, and Olga Kagan send their warm greetings to the department. Next week I will be on the road again, for a workshop at Yale organized in honor of Larry Horn. But after that I won’t have to get on a plane for quite some time.

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