Category: Events

READING GROUPS: MRG

Santa Cruz’s own Morphology Reading Group (MRG) is off to a bang this year with a visit from Heidi Harley (Professor of Linguistics, University of Arizona), who joined their discussion of her recent paper with Jonathan Bobaljik, “Suppletion is Local: Evidence from Hiaki”. Having Heidi with them was great fun, and led to much stimulating discussion. Those interested in joining the MRG listserv should send a request to: ucscmrg@googlegroups.com. MRG meets in the LCR every Friday at 12:30 p.m.

BELLIK AND KALIVODA IN VANCOUVER

Jenny Bellik and Nick Kalivoda presented a poster on their recent work on theories of syntax-phonology mapping at the 2015 Annual Meeting on Phonology, which was held October 9-11 in Vancouver, co-hosted by the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University. Posters and talks were also presented by many others with connections to UCSC, including B.A. alums Sara Finley (Assistant Professor of Psychology, Pacific Lutheran University) and Eric Baković (Professor of Linguistics, UC San Diego), Ph.D. alums Andrew Wedel (Associate Professor of Linguistics, University of Arizona), Ryan Bennett (Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Yale), Rachel Walker (Professor of Linguistics, USC), and Aaron Kaplan (Assistant Professor of Linguistics, University of Utah), and former visiting faculty Adam Albright, Lev Blumenfeld, and Wendell Kimper. Santa Cruz B.A. and M.A. alum John Alderete (Associate Professor of Linguistics, Simon Fraser University) served as a session chair.

ALUM REPORT: RUTH KRAMER

Ruth Kramer, who was promoted in the spring to Associate Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University, submitted this update:

I had a fun and busy summer. I spent most of May at the University of Chicago — catching up with fellow alums Jason Merchant and Chris Kennedy and teaching a mini-seminar on agreement (in which we read a chapter of Mark Norris‘s dissertation). In June, I went to Roots IV in NYC with a number of Santa Cruz folks including alums Vera Gribanova and Matt Tucker, and grad student Steven Foley. In September, I traveled to Ottawa for a workshop on my (still) favorite linguistic topics ever: gender and number. I’m now on post-tenure sabbatical until late January when I take up a visiting position at NYU (where the current chair is alum Chris Barker). My book on gender — including results that I talked about at LASC 2014 — came out a few days ago. I’m hoping to see many members of the UCSC community in DC for LSA 2016!

READING GROUPS: SPLAP

The reading and discussion group SPLAP (Semantics, Pragmatics and LAnguage Philosophy) has been handed the baton for the second leg of a three-quarter relay. The relay began in Spring 2015 in Adrian Brasoveanu‘s semantics seminar, which dealt with the incremental interpretation of formal semantics, unifying work in dynamic logic, psycholinguistics, and cognitive modeling. The theme has been passed on to SPLAP for the second leg of the relay; this quarter we’re reading and discussing work on the intersection between semantics & pragmatics and cognition. Our readings so far have dealt with the way that discourse coherence and syntactic structure interact probabilistically to resolve pronoun reference, and with how domain-general Bayesian reasoning can be applied to the interpretation of semantic ambiguities and the generation of pragmatic inferences. The relay will end in spectacular fashion next quarter, with a one-day workshop on February 6. The workshop will feature two external speakers (Andrew Kehler from UCSD and Noah Goodman from Stanford) and two internal speakers (TBA, stay tuned).

ITO AND MESTER IN CHINA AND JAPAN

In June, Junko Ito and Armin Mester traveled to China to deliver a paper (“Recursive Prosody and Match Theory”) at the 1st International Conference on Prosodic Studies (ICPS1), held at Tianjin Normal University in China. (Tianjin is the city where a huge explosion occurred later in the Summer.) Afterwards they traveled to Tokyo, where they were affiliated with NINJAL (National Institute of Japanese Linguistics) in Tachikawa. There they co-authored a paper on Japanese geminates with Haruo Kubozono (LRC visitor 1994-5), and did some work trying to determine what, if anything, the interaction of syntax-prosody Match constraints with various kinds of prosodic wellformedness constraints (such as anti-lapse or binarity) tells us about the precise form and content of the latter.

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