Category: Faculty News

PLOS One, the open-access online scientific journal, released a new issue on February 19th 2014. Among the articles published in that issue was Towards a more nuanced view of vocal attractiveness by Grant McGuire, Molly Babel and undergrad alum Joseph King. The paper provides an analysis of the acoustic features which contribute to perceptions of vocal attractiveness, suggesting in particular that such judgments are more complex than previously described. The abstract is available here and the paper is available for download here.

Maziar Toosarvandani travelled to Houston to give a talk (on February 6th) in the colloquium series of the linguistics department at Rice University in Houston. Maziar’s talk was on The temporal semantics of clause chaining in Northern Paiute and it led to a lively discussion with faculty and students afterwards. Maziar reports: I had the unexpected opportunity to meet Professor Emeritus Sydney Lamb, who reminisced with me about his important fieldwork in the 1950’s documenting the speech of some of the last fluent speakers of Mono, the most closely related language to Northern Paiute.

Adrian Brasoveanu visited CNRS (Paris) for two days as one of the invited speakers for the Co-Distributivity Workshop organized by Patricia Cabredo Hofherr and Brenda Laca. The other invited speaker was former LRC research associate Jakub Dotlacil. On February 13th, Adrian and Jakub gave a brief tutorial on their joint experimental work concerning distributivity (the difficulties, the choices to be made and so on). On February 14th, Adrian gave an invited talk based on some of that work, entitled Sentence-internal same and its quantificational licensors: A new window into the processing of inverse scope. Slides for the talk are available here.

Matt Wagers and Sandy Chung joined their Saipan colleague Manuel F. Borja for a long weekend in Chicago at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancenent of Science) in Chicago. On Monday, February 17, Matt gave a presentation on their joint psycholinguistic research in the symposium The Large Cognitive Implications of Small Languages, organized by Doug Whalen of CUNY. Matt’s presentation, Language Processing in Chamorro: Theoretical Lessons from a Language of the Pacific, was praised later by the other speakers for its clarity, accessibility, and great visuals. The weather responded with a major snowstorm. The remarkably heavy snowfall included thundersnow and caused the cancellation of many flights leaving Chicago on Monday afternoon, including Matt’s and Sandy’s. They hope to make it back to Santa Cruz at some point.

The annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) takes place in Chicago between Friday February 13th and Tuesday February 20th. Sandy Chung and Matt Wagers will both travel to the meeting—Sandy because the end of the meeting marks the beginning of her term as Chair of Section Z of the society (Linguistics and Language Science), Matt because he is to give a presentation on Monday February 17th in a symposium on The Large Cognitive Implications of Small Languages. Matt’s title is Language Processing in Chamorro: Theoretical Lessons from a Language of the Pacific and the abstract is available here.

Donka Farkas travelled to Mexico City at the end of the week to give a talk in the Seminario de Sintaxis y Semántica of the Colegio de Mexico. The talk itself was on Thursday January 30th and Donka’s title was Yes and no in English and beyond. On the day following the colloquium, an informal workshop was held in which members of the research-group led by Josefina Garcia Fajardo presented their work—on indefinites in Spanish and in Yucatec-Maya. Donka provided this report on her trip:

I just got back from a brief trip to Mexico City where I gave a talk at the Colegio de Mexico, and listened to fascinating work on indefinites done by a lively group led by Josefina Garcia Fajardo, which includes our own Rodrigo Gutiérrez Bravo. It was a great joy to see how well Rodrigo is doing, and meet the cohesive group he is working in. He sends his warm regards to the linguists at UCSC.

Jim McCloskey was also traveling at the end of the week—into the heart of the polar vortex to visit the Linguistics Department of the University of Connecticut in Storrs, CT. Besides meeting with many graduate students, Jim gave a talk on Phasehood, the Maximal Verbal Projection, and Preverbs in Irish.