WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Mark Norris will defend his dissertation in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge between 4pm and 6pm on Tuesday May 20th. The title of Mark’s dissertation is A Theory of Nominal Concord, the dissertation advisor is Jorge Hankamer, and the other members of the committee are Sandy Chung and Jim McCloskey.
Not to be outdone, Anie Thompson will defend her dissertation just two days later, on Thursday May 22nd in Humanities One, Room 202. Anie’s title is still under construction but will be revealed shortly. The dissertation advisor is also Jorge Hankamer, and the other members of the committee are Pranav Anand and Jim McCloskey.
Julie Legate of the University of Pennsylvania will give the second colloquium of the Spring Quarter on Friday April 18th. The event will take place in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge at 4pm and the title will be Noncanonical Passives. The abstract is available here.
Also at UC Davis, the Third Annual Native American Studies Graduate Student Symposium will take place from Thursday through Friday, April 17-18 2014. The symposium is free and open to the public. A poster is available here. The program for the symposium is available here.
John Gumperz, one of the most distinguished sociolinguists of the post-war generation, died in March of 2013. The Department of Anthropology at Berkeley is organizing a memorial workshop in his honor on Friday, April 4th (1:00pm — 6:00pm) at the Alumni House on the Berkeley campus. Panelists include Susan Ervin-Tripp, Susan Gal, Marco Jacquemet, Stephen Levinson, Elinor Ochs, Deborah Tannen, and Jef Verschueren among many others. All are invited; those wishing to attend should RSVP here.
One of the high-points of the year for the department rolls around again on Saturday March 15th when LASC 2014 takes place in the recently refurbished Stevenson Fireside Lounge. This annual celebration of graduate student research has been a feature of the department’s intellectual life since the late 1980’s at least and this year features seven talks by second and third year students, as well as the Distinguished Alumna lecture by Ruth Kramer of the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University. Graduate Director Pranav Anand will open the conference at 9:20 on Saturday morning, and Department Chair and LASC Coordinator Sandy Chung will bring the event to a close around 5pm. Program, abstracts, and more detailed information are all available here.
Jaye Padgett spent the weekend in LA, where he was an invited speaker at WCCFL 32. Jaye’s talk was titled Word-edge effects as overphonologization of phrase-edge effects, and those interested can find the abstract here. Also at the conference were alums Rachel Walker (PhD 1998), who is now Professor of Linguisics at USC, and Sara Finley (B.A. 2003), who is now Assistant Professor of Psychology at Waldorf College. Being at WCCFL also gave Jaye the chance to reunite with his NYI-St. Petersburg summer institute pals Rajesh Bhatt, Sabine Iatridou (also an invited speaker), and Roumi Pancheva.