MATT TUCKER GIVES IHR GRADUATE FELLOW COLLOQUIUM THIS FRIDAY

Ph.D. student Matt Tucker has been a Graduate Fellow of the Institute for Humanities Research this year. This Friday, May 4th, at 4:00 pm Matt will give a colloquium talk presenting some of his research supported by the IHR. The talk will take place in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge and is entitled “Variable Agreement: The Morphosyntax of Syntactic Binding”. To read the abstract, click here.

PRANAV ANAND TO GIVE STEVENSON COLLEGE LECTURE ON WEDNESDAY

About once a quarter, Stevenson College hosts a lecture by one of its faculty fellows. This quarter’s speaker is Pranav Anand, whose talk is titled “All I Want is Some Honest Answers to My Questions: Tracking Argumentation and Stance in Online Political Debate.” It will take place this Wednesday, April 25th, at 4:00 pm, in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge. These talks are meant for a general audience, and everyone is welcome, but please RSVP to Debby Joyce at dajoyce at ucsc.edu. To learn more about the talk, visit here.

DAY-LONG EVENT ON NATIVE AMERICAN LANGUAGE REVITALIZATION THIS FRIDAY

The Amah Mutsun Speaker Series is sponsoring a day-long event on Native American Language Revitalization this Friday, April 27th, 9:30am – 5:00pm, in the BayTree Conference Rooms. This event is also sponsored by the Cowell Gary Licker Memorial Chair, in the person of our own Sandy Chung. The event will feature a film, workshops, and several speakers including keynote speaker Jessie Little Doe Baird. To learn more, click here.

WHAT ARE WE DOING WHEN WE DO THE HUMANITIES?

If you’ve ever wondered what it means to do the Humanities, or why the Humanities matter to the world – and to you – you are invited to the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH) on Saturday, April 21 for an afternoon of exploration.

Starting at 1:00 p.m., the UC Santa Cruz Institute for Humanities Research will host a series of panels and poster presentations at the MAH to answer your questions about the Humanities, and to showcase the research of the Faculty and Graduate Fellows in the Humanities from across the University of California. Panel topics include the power of language, religion and modernity, and empire and nation. Poster presentations cover research on the ethnography of disasters, feminist art, slavery and cannibalism, the criminalization of religious practice, party-crashing in Arabic medieval literature, the inevitable fate of the novel, and more. The moderator of the panel on the power of language (2:00 – 2:45) will be the Linguistics Department’s own Pranav Anand.

The event and the museum will be free and open to the public. In conjunction with ‘What Are We Doing When We Do the Humanities’, the MAH is featuring the highly anticipated ‘All You Need Is Love’ exhibition, which explores the many ways that love is manifest in our everyday lives. Find out more about the event here.

UCSC HOSTS WEST COAST CONFERENCE ON FORMAL LINGUISTICS THIS WEEKEND

On the weekend of Friday April 13th to Sunday April 15th, the Department will host WCCFL 30, the Thirtieth Meeting of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. The first WCCFL took place at Stanford in 1982 and the conference has been held every year but one (2009) since then, hosted by departments of linguistics up and down the west coast of North America, very broadly construed (it has been in Arizona three times). UC Santa Cruz hosted the third WCCFL (in 1984) and hosted it again in 1993 (WCCFL 12) and in 2002 (WCCFL 21). It is generally regarded as one of the most prestigious and selective conferences in theoretical linguistics in the world.

Planning for the conference began almost a year ago, initiated by former LRC Coordinator Debbie Belville, and has continued under the stewardship of the current LRC Coordinator Maggie Bardacke, with the assistance of just about everyone in the department. The program looks stellar: 27 talks and 13 poster presentations in all areas of theoretical linguistics by linguists from all over the world, including plenary lectures by alum Chris Potts of Stanford, Kie Zuraw of UCLA, and Jeff Lidz of the University of Maryland.

We’re looking forward to welcoming colleagues and friends to Santa Cruz for the event and especially looking forward to the WCCFL 30 party in the Stevenson Event Center on Saturday evening, April 14th.

Linguistics At Santa Cruz Conference

On Saturday, the linguistics department hosted its annual graduate student research conference, LASC. The second- and third-year graduate students (and a visitor!) presenting work were Nate Arnett, Kendra Buchanan, Nick Deschenes, Yasuhiro Iida, Katia Kravtchenko, Oliver Northrup, Bern Samko, and Allan Schwade. These presentations spanned the subfields of linguistics and dealt with aspects of a variety of languages, including English, Hindi, Japanese, Maltese, Russian, and Turkish. (Find the program here, and some photos below.) Chris Barker gave the Distinguished Alumnus Lecture, “How to Sprout”, which engaged with the long tradition of UCSC work on sluicing and sprouting. After the conference, the discussion continued over dinner at a party at the home of Pranav Anand (who deserves thanks and congratulations for organizing Saturday’s events).

As usual, LASC coincided with the department’s Open House weekend for visiting prospective PhD students. A total of seven admitted students were here this week (five of them on Friday and Saturday), attending classes and reading group meetings, meeting with faculty, and being treated to the beauty of campus. Friday’s events culminated in a delicious pizza party hosted by Mark Norris.

Getting started

Bern Samko

Microbe catch

Nate Arnett

Chris Barker

Conference participants

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