Category: Events

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.

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.

Max Corbin graduated with the BA in Linguistics in Spring 2014 and has been building a career in data analysis ever since. Max will give a career talk for undergraduate majors in Linguistics and Language Studies on Monday, February 23rd from 5-6pm in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge. Max describes the plan for the talk as follows:

I’m currently working as a data collections assistant, report writer, and analyst at the Santa Cruz Women’s Health Center, here in downtown Santa Cruz. I’ll be talking broadly about the growing need for analysts for all kinds of data in many industries, and we’ll drill down to discuss the speech technology industry as an exciting case study that is likely to be of particular interest to our undergraduate linguists. I’ll also cover some of the skills students will need to work as a data analyst; some are taught as part of the degree program, but others they may have to pick up as they go.

Light refreshments will be served, and a reception will be held afterward in the Fireside Lounge. All are welcome; no RSVP required.

We have been asked to spread the word about a conference to be held in Vancouver between April 24th and April 26th 2015. Sponsored by the Department of Philosophy at Simon Fraser University, the title of the conference is Language at the Interface and the invited speakers include Peter Carruthers (Maryland), Wolfram Hinzen (Barcelona and Durham), Friederike Moltmann(CNRS and NYU), and Anna Papafragou (Delaware). Detailed information is available here but in brief the aim of the workshop is to explore a wide range of questions at the intersection of linguistics, psychology, and philosophy that might be raised in connection with the place of language in the architecture of the mind. The organizers (Ashley Atkins (SFU) and James Martin(Princeton/SFU)) invite 1—-2 page abstracts on any topic related to the language-mind interface, broadly construed. The abstract submission deadline is January 15, 2015. Anonymized abstracts should be sent to latkins@sfu.ca; the email message should include personal information (name, institution, contact information). More information is available at the conference website.