WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
The first meeting of S-Circle for Spring Quarter will take place on Friday April 3rd in the Linguistics Common Room at 2pm. Adrian Brasoveanu will be presenting joint work with Jakub Dotlačil on Incremental and Predictive Interpretation: Experimental Evidence and Possible Accounts. The abstract for the talk is available here.
![[LASC15 Presenters]](http://ohlone.ucsc.edu/LASC15/970.jpg)
The quarter ended and LASC 2015 took place. Ten research presentations were given on a wide variety of phenomena in a wide variety of languages by Nick Kalivoda, Karen Duek, Erik Zyman, Kelsey Kraus, Jason Ostrove, Maho Morimoto, Jenny Bellik, Scarlett Clothier-Goldschmidt, Deniz Rudin, and alumna Vera Gribanova. The pictures that tell all are here thanks to photographer Karl Devries. LASC Coordinator Junko Ito summed up the event so eloquently in her closing remarks that they have to be preserved for posterity here.
An innovation at this year’s event was that each presenter also prepared a poster for display during the conference. The posters themselves were expertly prepared by undergrad alumnus Matt Bearden who is now Production Manager of Real Color of Santa Cruz.
While most of us take a well-earned end of quarter break, Adrian Brasoveanu, Scarlett Clothier-Goldschmidt and Matt Wagers head south to give presentations at this year’s CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing to be held at the University of Southern California in LA. Matt and Scarlett will present jointly on Grammatical Person, Pronouns and the Subject-Object Asymmetry in Relative Clauses, while Matt will be involved in two additional presentations — one jointly with Julie Franck of the University of Geneva on a Speed Accuracy Trade-Off study of agreement attraction errors (Hierarchical Structure and Memory Retrieval Mechanisms in Attraction: an SAT Study) and one with Sandra Villata, Brian McElree and Julie Franck on the Temporal Dynamics of Weak Islands. Adrian meanwhile will present joint work with Jakub Dotlačil on Processing Pluralities: Syntax and the Lexicon. Alongside these current members of the community, recent PhD alumnus Matt Tucker (now at NYU Abu Dhabi) will give two presentations at the meeting–Resumption ameliorates but does not repair island violations: Evidence from Modern Standard Arabic acceptability (with Ali Idrissi, Jon Sprouse and Diogo Almeida) and Plural Type Matters for on-line Processing (with Idrissi and Almeida). In addition, undergrad alumnus Shayne Sloggett, now a graduate student at UMass Amherst, will be involved in two presentations: one with Brian Dillon (Interference in reflexives is the result of a logophoric interpretation) and one with Dillon, Charles Clifton and Lyn Frazier (Not all Relative Clauses Interfere Equally in Filler-Gap Processing).
As part of the 50th Anniversary Celebration of UC Santa Cruz, the Department will host a day-long symposium entitled Linguistics@Santa Cruz: Theory and Practice on Saturday April 4th in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge, beginning at 11:00am. There will be talks, discussions, photographs, and interactive demonstrations illustrating the history and current directions of linguistics at UCSC. Discussion will focus particularly on the Department’s past and present research on endangered languages and linguistic theory, new experimental methodologies, and linguistic training as a bridge to careers in language technology. The event will feature talks by Judith Aissen, Amy Rose Deal, Maziar Toosarvandani, Junko Ito, Grant McGuire, and Matt Wagers along with many excruciatingly embarrassing photographs of the `good old days’. Detailed information is available here.
This year’s LASC (Linguistics at Santa Cruz) will take place on Saturday March 12th in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge. This year’s conference is coordinated by Junko Ito and the program features nine talks by current graduate students. Among the languages discussed will be Zapotec, Brazilian Portuguese, P’urhepecha, German, Irish, Japanese, Turkish, and English. Among the topics considered will be the semantics of modals, vowel harmony, the pragmatics of modal particles, the processing of relative clauses, loan-word phonology, locality conditions on allomorphy, quantifier float, external possession, and subject clitics. The conference will end with this year’s distinguished alumna speaker Vera Gribanova of the Department of Linguistics at Stanford, who earned the PhD at UCSC in 2010. Vera’s talk is on Head Movement, Ellipsis, and Russian Polarity Focus. The conference will be opened at 8:50am by chair Sandy Chung and closed at 5:00pm by Graduate director Pranav Anand. All of the details (speakers, titles, times, abstracts and so on) are available on the conference web-site. All are very welcome at LASC.
Meanwhile on Thursday March 12th, the Philosophy Department will host a talk by Felipe de Brigard of the Imagination and Modal Cognition Lab and the Institute for Brain Sciences at Duke University. De Brigard works both in philosophy and in neuroscience and his research focuses on how memory and imagination interact, especially in the domain of counterfactual thinking. His title for the Thursday talk is The Explanatory Indispensabilty of Memory Traces and it aims to show that there is a wide range of memory phenomena for which explanations in terms of memory traces are crucial. The talk will begin at 4:15pm on Thursday (March 12th) and it will take place in Humanities Two, Room 259. The abstract and other details are here.
Preparations are now well advanced for one of the most important events in the department’s calendar: the annual celebration of graduate student research known as LASC (Linguistics at Santa Cruz). This year’s instantiation of the conference will take place on Saturday March 14th and the distinguished alumna speaker for this year will be Vera Gribanova, who graduated from UCSC in 2010 and is now Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Stanford. All of the crucial details will be announced in next week’s WHASC.