Category: Events

The department is recovering from last week’s extremely successful Semantics and Linguistic Theory Conference. Many people commented on the consistently high quality of the talks, and the conference was carried off without a hitch. There is a reason world-class conferences are organized rarely, and many people deserve thanks and praise for hard work. Our graduate students, faculty, and many undergraduate students gave a good deal of their time. So did many faculty, especially Sandy Chung, Amy Rose Deal, Jim McCloskey, and Matt Wagers, and most especially our faculty SALT organizers Pranav Anand, Adrian Brasoveanu, and Donka Farkas. SALT could not have happened without our outstanding staff as well: many, many thanks to Maggie Bardacke, Susan Welch, and especially Ashley Hardisty for coordinating the staff efforts and Maria Zimmer, who has specialized in SALT for many weeks now.

The Language and Natural Reasoning Group at CSLI and the 2012-2013 Cognition & Language Workshop are pleased to announce the workshop “Perspectives on Modality”.

The study of modality lies at the intersection of reasoning and natural language. In linguistic theory and in logic modality has received intensive study. In NLP it has recently become relevant, as the field is moving beyond the identification of events and their participants towards making inferences about the (likelihood of) occurrence or non-occurrence of events. This workshop assembles linguists, logicians and computer scientists to assess standard and non-standard models of the meaning and inferential properties of modal expressions and to discuss the potential compatibility of seemingly disparate formal frameworks and the way their results can be integrated in NLP.

The workshop will take place this Friday, April 12th, 9:30am-5:50pm, at Stanford’s Cordura Hall 100. For more information, please visit their website.

On Saturday, the linguistics department hosted its annual graduate student research conference, LASC. The graduate students presenting work were Sara Cantor, Tommy Denby, Karl DeVries, Peter Fabian, Anna Greenwood, Adam Morgan, Matt Ong, Allan Schwade, and Clara Sherley-Appel. Andy Wedel gave the Distinguished Alumnus Lecture, “Lexical Competition and the Evolution of Phoneme Inventories”. (Find the LASC program here!) The talks were excellent. After the conference, there was a happy gathering over dinner and drinks at the home of Adrian Brasoveanu, who deserves credit for orchestrating LASC this year.

As always, LASC coincided with the department’s Open House weekend for visiting prospective PhD and MA students. A total of seven admitted students were here last week, attending classes and reading group meetings, meeting with faculty, and being treated to the beauty of campus. Friday’s events culminated in a party hosted (again!) by Mark Norris.

The department’s annual Linguistics at Santa Cruz (LASC) conference will take place this Saturday, March 9th, 8:15-4:30, in Humanities One, room 210. The program for the conference is available here. Our guest alum speaker this year is Andy Wedel of the University of Arizona. As in previous years, LASC overlaps with our Prospective Graduate Student Open House. Please welcome any and all visiting prospectives!

The UCSC Department of Linguistics will host the 23rd annual Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) conference on May 3-5, 2013. SALT is the premier venue in the world for presentations on formal semantics. This year’s invited speakers are Maria Aloni (University of Amsterdam), Cleo Condoravdi (PARC/Stanford University), Philippe Schlenker (Institut Jean-Nicod), and Roger Schwarzschild (Rutgers University). To see the program and learn more about the conference, visit the SALT 23 web page.