Category: Faculty News

ITO AND MESTER IN JAPAN

Junko Ito and Armin Mester spent their spring sabbatical and summer at NINJAL (National Institute of Japanese Linguistics) in Tokyo doing collaborative research with former LRC visitor Haruo Kubozono. They gave invited talks at NINJAL and at Keio University on their ongoing work on Japanese accent in OTWorkplace; and as organizers of FAJL 7 (Formal Approaches to Japanese Linguistics 7), in Tokyo, they met up with many UCSC-related people who were presenting at the conference—Ph.D. alum Ryan Bennett (now Assistant Professor at Yale University), BA alum Sean Johnson, EAP alumni Shigeto Kawahara (UMass Ph.D., now Professor at Keio University), Atsushi Oho (Rutgers Ph.D. grad student), and Takashi Morita (MIT Ph.D. grad student), as well as former LRC visitor Shin Ishihara (Frankfurt U.). Go here for the picture.

MCGUIRE AND PADGETT WIN NSF RESEARCH AWARD

Exciting news came in early September when the National Science Foundation announced that it was to fund a collaborative research project involving Grant McGuire and Jaye Padgett (along with alumnus Ryan Bennett, who is now Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Yale). The grant will provide support for the ongoing ultrasound study of palatalization and velarization of consonants in Irish and will also involve Máire Ní Chiosáin of University College Dublin as a collaborator. The project description is available here and a shorter description of the proposed research can be read here.

Announcement of the award generated a great deal of excitement and positive publicity for the researchers, for the department, and for UCSC—first in the campus newsletter, then in the San Jose Mercury News, then on BBC radio (8:02—15:12) and in an article to be published soon in the Irish Times.

SUMMER ADVENTURES

Nate Arnett travelled to AMLaP XX, the 20th annual Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing conference at The Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in Edinburgh, Scotland. Nate delivered a poster Case and finiteness versus clausal position in subject-verb attachment, presenting research that grew out of his dissertation research and collaborative work with Matt Wagers. The poster presented the results of a series of experiments and computational simulations. In addition to the many excellent talks and posters on bleeding-edge Psycholinguistics research, Nate caught up with other members of the UCSC Linguistics community, including alumni Matt Tucker, Adam Morgan, Shayne Slogget, as well as former speakers, friends, and colleagues too numerous to list (you know who you are). Along the way, Nate participated in a workshop on the role of (working) memory in sentence processing, generously hosted by the Maryland Language Science Center at
Kiplin Hall in the north of England. (The connections between Kiplin and (U)MD are interesting, and are well worth a look.)

Nick Kalivoda presented joint work with Erik Zyman at a September meeting of the University of Gothenburg’s Grammar Seminar (Grammatikseminariet). The talk was entitled On the Derivation of Relative Clauses in Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec.

September saw the nineteenth meeting of Sinn und Bedeutung, which was held at the Georg August University in Göttingen, the German town where Frege lived from 1871 to 1873. Among the presenters there were Karen Duek, who reported on joint work with Adrian Brasoveanu (The polysemy of container pseudo-partitives), and Erik Zyman, who presented On the semantics of P’urhepecha degree constructions. The complete program may be viewed here. Participants enjoyed the great variety of semantics and pragmatics talks they had to choose from and the conference’s vibrant international atmosphere.

Jim McCloskey stopped off at MIT on his way back from Ireland to California for a three-day visit, in the course of which he gave a colloquium and met with faculty and graduate students.

Clara Sherley-Appel gave an invited talk at the Linguistics Department of Stony Brook University on September 10th as part of their Brown Bag series. Her talk centered on her ongoing work on the analysis of Turkish relative clauses and the abstract is available here.

ENDLESS SUMMER

Nick Kalivoda will be traveling to Oaxaca to conduct fieldwork on Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec. Nick’s work will focus on the language’s agreement system, and on a continuing investigation of relative clause structure and binding non-connectivity—part of an ongoing project with Erik Zyman.

Bern Samko will travel to Leuven/Louvain in Flanders (Belgium) on June 13th to give an invited presentation to the FEST group at the University of Leuven on her ongoing research on syntax and information structure in English.

Erik Zyman will be traveling to Janitzio, an island on Lake Pátzcuaro in the state of Michoacán in central-western Mexico, to continue his work on P’urhepecha. He will be investigating the clause structure of this language, and specifically the syntax of the verb phrase.

Amy Rose Deal will travel to Israel in July for the workshop Allomorphy: its logic and limitations, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Also expected to be in attendance are alums Ruth Kramer and Peter Svenonius. Amy Rose’s paper for the conference deals with certain interesting patterns of plural marking and double reduplication in Nez Perce.

Grant McGuire will be presenting at the upcoming LabPhon 14 conference at the NINJAL Institute in Tachikawa, Japan on July 24-27th. The oral presentation program is here. Grant’s talk is titled Stereotypes predict memory effects for voices. Junko Ito and Armin Mester will also be at the conference.

Jaye Padgett will be in Ireland for the last two weeks of June to do more ultrasound fieldwork in Conamara, together with collaborator Máire Ní Chiosáin of University College Dublin. Also involved in this ongoing project are Grant McGuire and alumnus Ryan Bennett of Yale.

Maziar Toosarvandani will be devoting the summer to some intense fieldwork on Northern Paiute with the Mono Lake community near Bridgeport in eastern California.

Matt Wagers and Sandy Chung will return twice to the islands of Saipan and Rota in the Northern Mariana Islands to continue their psycholinguistic work on Chamorro. They will collect new data on relative clause comprehension in June, and relative clause production in September. Back in Santa Cruz, the Digital Chamorro Group will be working hard: Scarlett Clothier-Goldschmidt, the 2013-2014 NSF REU fellow, will continue her corpus-based research on person-animacy constraints in Chamorro, while Karl DeVries, the NSF Graduate Research Associate, will resume his work on building digital tools for using the Chamorro dictionary database.

SUSAN WELCH EARNS DIVERSITY CERTIFICATE

Linguistics staff member, Susan Welch, participated all year in the UCSC Diversity and Inclusion Program and received her certificate of completion from Chancellor Blumenthal on Monday, May 19th, at University House. The Diversity and Inclusion Certificate Program is designed to offer participants an in-depth education in diversity issues so that they can gain a greater understanding of how to build a stronger and more inclusive UC Santa Cruz community. Susan completed the entire eight course program in one academic year, while continuing to coordinate and oversee advising for the two undergraduate majors sponsored by the department. There are pictures of the awards ceremony here.

PADGETT’S BUSY WEEK

Last week, Jaye Padgett presented at two conferences. First, he was a panel discussant at the Agreement by Correspondence Conference at UC Berkeley. Also presenting at that conference were alums Rachel Walker (Ph.D., 1998, now at USC) and Eric Baković (B.A., now at UC San Diego), along with Wendell Kimper, who was recently a visiting faculty member in the department. Jaye then got on a plane to Dublin, where he presented a talk called On the origins of the prosodic word in Russian at the
Speech Prosody 2014 conference at Trinity College Dublin.

CHUNG AND WAGERS AT AFLA IN HAWAII

Just as Jaye was flying into SFO from the east from Ireland, Sandy Chung and Matt Wagers were flying westwards out of SFO towards the sunnier climes of Hawai’i, to present a paper at AFLA 21, hosted this year by the University of Hawai’i. Matt presented the paper—Constituent order, grammatical licensing and parser control processes in Chamorro— which develops one strand of the collaborative research project that Matt and Sandy are engaged in with their collaborator on Saipan Manuel F. Borja.

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