Category: Events

WAGERS IN MASSACHUSETTS

Matt Wagers, who is on sabbatical, filed this report:

I went to UMass for the 3rd American International Morphology Meeting. There I gave a tutorial workshop with Kie Zuraw on building digital resources on under-resourced languages. Essentially, we used Kie’s workflow for building her Tagalog corpus from web text to put together a Chamorro corpus; and then we attempted to cross-validate it with the behavioral data that Sandy Chung, Manny Borja, and I have been collecting in the Marianas — subjective frequency ratings, listening times, etc. In attendance were alumni Ryan Bennett (Yale) and Abby Kaplan (Utah). The notes from the workshop are available here. The next day, current Ph.D. student Jason Ostrove opened the conference with his paper “Allomorphy and Locality in the Irish Verbal Complex”. Abby gave a poster on “Paradigm (Non-)Uniformity of Continuously-Valued Features in an Exemplar Framework.” Former Foundation Fellow Scott Seyfarth talked about acoustic cues in morphologically-distinct homophones. Other Santa Cruzans spotted at the conference include undergraduate alumni Caroline Andrews and Shayne Sloggett, who are both now Ph.D. students at UMass. Shayne was one of the central student organizers of the conference.

I stuck around to plan some experiments on ambiguity resolution with Brian Dillon. I also gave a talk in their Psycholinguistics Workshop on the insertion of null pronouns in incremental structure building, using Chamorro data as the test case. Spotted roaming around the halls of the department’s new digs were Nick LeCara (M.A. 2010) and Wendell Kimper (Visiting Assistant Professor 2011-12).

UCSC LINGUISTS AT THE 2016 LSA MEETING

Four UCSC graduate students will deliver papers at the Linguistic Society of America’s 2016 Annual Meeting, to be held January 7-10 in Washington, D.C. Lauren McGarry will give a paper on “East Slavic Paucal Constructions: A Cross-Slavic Assessment of Pesetsky 2013”. Jason Ostrove will give a paper on “Allomorphy and Locality in the Irish Verbal Complex”. Bern Samko will give a paper on “Verum Focus in Alternative Semantics”. Erik Zyman will give a paper on “Quantifier Float and the Driving Force for Movement: Evidence from Janitzio P’urhepecha”. The UCSC alums delivering papers include Eric Bakovic (B.A. 1993), Boris Harizanov (Ph.D. 2014), Aaron Kaplan (Ph.D. 2008), Eric Potsdam (Ph.D. 1996), and Jason Riggle (M.A. 1999), as well as former faculty colleagues Shoko Hamano and Lev Blumenfeld. Posters will be presented by alums Nicholas LaCara (M.A. 2010), Anya Lunden (Ph.D. 2006), Jeffrey Runner (B.A. 1989; now Professor and Chair of Linguistics, University of Rochester), and Matthew A. Tucker (Ph.D. 2013). For the full program, go here.

LINGUISTIC INSTITUTE REPORT

Jeff Adler and Jed Guevara attended the LSA’s 2015 Linguistic Institute, which was held July 6-31 at the University of Chicago. Here are their reports:

Jeff:

The LSA Linguistic Institute was a fantastic time. The courses were intellectually engaging in introducing me to unfamiliar areas of linguistics. I took Computational Phonology, Intonational Phonology, Intro to Statistics with R, Word Prosody, and Intro to Morphosyntax (co-taught by UCSC alum Vera Gribanova). These courses were great, but perhaps the most exciting part of the LSA Institute was being introduced to the greater community of linguists. I spent many a late night discussing linguistics and whatever else with grad students and professors alike. Overall, attending the institute imparted to me a sense of the fun of doing linguistics.

Jed:

I had a fabulous experience at the LSA Summer Institute! I got to take courses that gave me a good primer on the subfields I’m interested in, like morphosyntax and psycholinguistics; courses that provided an overview of “hot” topics in the language family I work on (Austronesian); and courses that taught me skills I can incorporate into my own research, like Exploiting Freely Available Web Data for Linguistic Research and Generalized Additive Modeling. The Summer Institute was a good venue to network with professors and fellow grad students, to see what they are doing, and perhaps to make contacts for future collaborations. What better way to do all that than over wine, food, and live music? (Context: the reception after each keynote address had karaoke, a live band, finger foods, beer and/or wine!) Looking forward to the 2017 Institute. 😀

MIDDLEBURY INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL STUDIES: FALL VISIT DAY

Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS) will have its Fall Visit Day for prospective graduate students on Friday and Saturday, Oct. 16-17. To register, go here. MIIS offers master’s degrees in TESOL, TFL, and other areas. UCSC undergraduates who have completed certain courses and received the B.A. in Linguistics or Language Studies are eligible for advanced entry into the MATESOL and MATFL programs; read the details here.

S-CIRCLE ON OCTOBER 2: HIDEKAZU TANAKA

Hidekazu Tanaka, a syntactician from the Faculty of Letters at the University of Okayama in Japan, will be visiting UCSC from September 26 to October 4, to learn more about American teaching styles in linguistics and other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. As part of his visit, he will give a talk in S-Circle at 2:00 p.m. on Friday, October 2. His title is: “Why (*to)?”

Here is the abstract:

In this talk, I show that the impossible sequence why to in English gets ameliorated when the infinitive marker to is elided. An account is developed that assimilates the observation to a much better known syntactic fact: island repair. To establish this, I will examine two constructions that remain poorly studied in the literature; coordinated wh-infinitives and antecedent-contained sluicing.

UCSC LINGUISTS ON THE ROAD

UCSC linguists will travel from drought-stricken California to three conferences in October. Matt Wagers and UCLA’s Kie Zuraw will open the American International Morphology Meeting (AIMM3) to be held Oct. 2-4 at UMass Amherst, with a tutorial on building digital resources for research on under-resourced languages. Jason Ostrove will give a paper (“Allomorphy and locality in the Irish verbal complex”) the next day. Also presenting papers at AIMM3 are former Foundation Fellow Scott Seyfarth and Ph.D. alum Abby Kaplan.

Donka Farkas will give an invited talk at the annual meeting of the Israel Association for Theoretical Linguistics (ITAL31), to be held Oct. 13-14 at Bar-Ilan University. Donka’s talk (“Assertions, polar questions, and the land in-between”) is based on joint work with ILLC’s Floris Roelofsen. The same day, Maziar Toosarvandani will give a colloquium at Boston University (“How imperfect is the imperfective aspect? Durative gemination in Northern Paiute and crosslinguistic variation in aspectual semantics”). Maziar will go on to present a poster (“Vocabulary insertion and locality: Verb suppletion in Northern Paiute”) at the North East Linguistics Society (NELS46), to be held Oct. 16-18 at Concordia University.

1 … 24 25 26 27 28 … 39