WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
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.
This past weekend, 40 some philosophers of language (including SCLP visitors past Sam Cumming, John Macfarlane, and workshop organizer Seth Yalcin) descended on UCB’s Moses Hall for a spirited discussion on some of the foundational issues in the semantics of natural language at the Metasemantics workshop. Issues discussed included the division between semantics and pragmatics, the relationship between natural language content and the content of cognitive states, and the roles of convention and rule-following in natural language productivity. Our very own Amy Rose Deal delivered a talk on the degree to which various languages are expressively equivalent, given their differing semantic resources. In addition to Amy Rose, scattered among the philosophers were a number of card-carrying linguists: Pranav Anand, Ryan Bochnak, Peter Jenks, and alumna Line Mikkelsen.
This year’s graduate research symposium, LASC 2014 will take place in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge on Saturday March 15th 2014. This year’s distinguished alumna speaker will be Ruth Kramer, Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University. Ruth’s title is A new approach to the morphosyntax of gender and her abstract can be found here. Ruth graduated with the PhD in 2009 and has been at Georgetown since the Fall of that year.
This year’s SALT (Semantics and Linguistic Theory 24) will take place at NYU and the prelimary program is now available here. Among those taking part will be Adrian Brasoveanu and Matthijs Westera who will present a poster based on joint work started while Matthijs was an LRC visitor last year. Giving talks are alumni Chris Kennedy (Chicago) and Scott AnderBois (Brown). Also presenting a poster will be former LRC visitor Luis Vicente.