WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Grant McGuire was recently at the combined Acoustical Society of America / International Congress of Acoustics meeting in Montréal. Grant presented two joint papers with Molly Babel and Sophie Walters entitled, “The effect of accommodation on perceived vocal aesthetics” and “The role of voice similarity in accommodation” as part of a special session on speech accommodation. A good time was had by all!
Once again our department’s undergraduates impressed at this year’s Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC). It was a fun and inspiring look at the excellent work they have accomplished. Congratulations to Laura Gilmore, Emma Peoples, Amanda Ratto, Lindsay Ress, Michael Titone, and John Zwart, Jr. for their excellent and polished presentations. And congrats and many thanks to this year’s Distinguished Alumnus Tristan Davenport (MA, UCSC, 2007), who presented on his current work as a Ph.D. student in the Cognitive Science Program at UC San Diego.
Matt Tucker will defend his doctoral dissertation Building Verbs in Maltese at 3pm on Thursday June 6th in Room 210 of Humanities One. As always, all are welcome to the event.
Angela Aiello, alum of our undergraduate Language Studies program and our MA program, offered a very successful career workshop on May 28th on the Communication Disorders Program at San Jose State. Attendees included 15 students who are interested in a career in speech pathology. In this photo you see Angela, faculty member Grant McGuire, and graduate student Anie Thompson.
Towards the end of the Spring Quarter each year, the Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC) showcases the research of undergraduate students in Linguistics and Language Studies. This year’s LURC takes place this Friday, May 31, 12:40 – 5:00 pm, in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge. This year’s undergraduate presenters are Laura Gilmore, Emma Peoples, Amanda Ratto, Lindsay Ress, Michael Titone and John Zwart, Jr.. The Distinguished Alumnus Address will be given by Tristan Davenport (MA, UCSC, 2007), who is in the Cognitive Science Program at UC San Diego. All undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty are invited to attend. Find the program here!
This year’s “Celebrating Excellence in the Humanities” Spring awards event will take place this Thursday, May 30th, 3-5 pm, in Humanities 1 rooms 202 and 210. A number of our community will be honored there, including Donka Farkas (3:15-3:30), who received this year’s John Dizikes teaching award, and the recipients of this year’s Humanities Undergraduate Research Awards (HUGRAs), who will present posters of their work (4-5 pm)!
There will be two talks this week by Ad Neeleman (University College London), both organized by the Cross-Linguistic Investigations in Syntax-Phonology (CrISP) research group. On Wednesday, May 15th (10:30-12 am, Stevenson 249), he will give an informal workshop presentation titled “e” (see abstract below). On Thursday, May 16th (4-5:30, Humanities 1 Room 210), he will give a colloquium titled “Person: Inventory and Realization”. You can find the abstract for this talk here.
Abstract for May 15 workshop talk: The copy theory of movement (Chomsky 1995), in conjunction with the fact that traces are phonologically empty, forces a filler-driven parsing strategy for movement. We argue that this parsing strategy in turn explains certain asymmetries between leftward and rightward movement, on the assumption that empty branches must be located at the leading edge of the parse. In particular, non-string-vacuous rightward movement of obligatory material causes parsing difficulties, because it requires that an empty branch is pushed away from the leading edge before it can be filled by a copy of the moved constituent. We consider two rightward movements: heavy-NP shift and rightward movement of N (or N+A) in the extended nominal protection.