WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Karen Duek will be defending her dissertation at 11:30am on Monday, June 19th, in HUM 1 Room 210. Karen’s dissertation is titled “Sorting a complex world: an experimental study of polysemy and copredication in container and committee nominals.” The committee consists of Adrian Brasoveanu (chair), Donka Farkas, and Pranav Anand.
Capping off the inaugural year of the Workshop on the Languages of Meso-America is the Symposium on Oaxacan Linguistics on Monday, June 12 from 9am-5pm in Hum 1, Room 210. The symposium will feature talks on a variety of languages by invited speakers Christian DiCanio (SUNY Buffalo) Emiliana Cruz (UMass Amherst), and Eric Campbell (UCSB), as well as UCSCers Jason Ostrove, Steven Foley, Nick Kalivoda, and Kelsey Sasaki. For more information, see the full program here.
One of the standout features of our department is the special way in which undergraduate research is encouraged and acknowledged. LURC this year represented a diversity of interests, with excellent talks delivered by Richard Bibbs, Brianda Caldera, Justin Talbott, Anny Huang, and our Distinguished Alumna speaker Maura O’Leary (UCLA), on topics in syntax, diachronic linguistics, morphophonology, sociolinguistics and semantics, in a variety of languages from Chamorro and Polynesian languages, to Spanish-English border slang, to Mandarin Chinese and English.
Front Row: Ivy Sichel, Maura O’Leary
Back Row: Anny Huang, Brianda Caldera, Richard Bibbs, Justin Talbott
(Photo by Kelsey Sasaki)
This year’s Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference
(LURC) will take place on Friday, June 2, featuring talks by four current students:
The Distinguished Alumna Address will be given by Maura O’Leary (BA, 2013), currently a PhD student at UCLA, on “Constraints on Noun Phrase Evaluation Times.” The conference will begin at 12:45pm on Friday in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge–see the full program here.
Jenny Bellik was in Vancouver May 19-21 for the Northwestern Phon{etics, ology} conference at UBC. Jenny reports that the program leaned toward the -etics, but she represented the -ology side with a poster “Danish stød in recursive prosodic words,” joint work with Nick Kalivoda, sparked by Junko & Armin’s paper 2015 “The perfect prosodic word in Danish.” BA/MA alumn John Alderete also presented a poster, “Drilling down into phonological well-formedness in the structure of speech errors.” She also notes that the campus and the weather were both beautiful!
Continuing the recent departmental trend of espousing our beliefs at UChicago were a trio of graduate student talks at the latest instantiation of the Chicago Linguistics Society, May 25-27. Jason Ostrove discussed the morphology-prosody interface in San Martín Peras Mixtec clitic doubling, Steven Foley rhapsodized on the Gender Case Constraint in Zapotec (joint work with Nick and Maziar ), and Tom Roberts contemplated the semantic nature of responsive predicates in Estonian. Under the omniscient eye of Ida Noyes, the conference was a great success, bringing together linguists of many different stripes for fruitful discussion, vigorous debate, and heartbreaking renditions of such karaoke klassics as Txoria Txori.
Last week, Junko was at WAFL (Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics) 13. Junko and Armin were on the organizing committee of this year’s WAFL, taking place at ICU (Junko’s undergraduate alma mater) in Tokyo, Japan. Junko had this to say:
“There were many interesting presentations at WAFL (on Korean, Japanese, Turkish, and related languages and dialects), and the discussions after each talk were particularly lively given the language focus. The keynote speakers were Jaklin Kornfilt (Syracuse University) and former LRC visitor, Haruo Kubozono (NINJAL, National Institute of Japanese Linguistics). Talks and posters were given by former UCSC EAP exchange students Shigeto Kawahara (Keio University) and Atsushi Oho (Tohoku University). Santa Cruz has hosted at least one ICU undergrad exchange student every year since Shigeto, but I learned that next year FOUR ICU linguistics exchange students were selected by UCEAP to come to Santa Cruz. They were all helping out with the registration and logistics at WAFL, and were *very* excited to come across the Pacific in the Fall.
On the final day of the workshop, a special Memorial session was held, dedicating WAFL 13 to Professor Emerita Kazuko Inoue, who passed away earlier this month at the age of 98. Regarded as the Mother of Theoretical Linguistics in Japan, her former ICU students and advisees, including Shigeru Miyagawa (MIT), Yoshi Kitagawa (Indiana U.), Satoshi Tomioka (Delaware), and Junko Ito (UC Santa Cruz) spoke at the Memorial Session in her honor. The GLOW obituary by another of her former ICU students, Naoki Fukui (Sophia University), is a very informative and moving account of Inoue’s life work in linguistics.”