WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
The most recent issue of the the journal Semantics and Pragmatics includes a new paper by Pranav Anand and Valentine Hacquard entitled Epistemics and Attitudes. The paper, which is is available here, their potential interaction with mood selection, and gives an account of which attitude verbs allow epistemic modals in their complements.
Exploring the Interfaces (ETI) 3 will take place at McGill University from May 8-10, 2014. This workshop will be the last of three workshops organized by the McGill Syntactic Interfaces Research Group (McSIRG) as part of a multi-year grant to study linguistic interfaces. Following ETI 1 (Word structure) and ETI 2 (Implicatures, alternatives and the semantics/pragmatics interface), the topic of ETI 3 will be Prosody and Constituent Structure. Among the invited speakers at the event will be Judith Aissen and Jim McCloskey, as well as undergrad alum Joey Sabbagh.
In addition to the invited presentations, the organizers are soliciting abstracts for a limited number of additional talks (30 minutes, plus 10 minutes discussion) on topics related to the workshop themes, which include a particular focus on issues of prosodic and phonological structure in verb-initial languages. The abstract submission deadline is February 28th 2014. Abstracts can be submitted here and more information is available here and here.
Record freezing temperatures did not stop a sizable contingent of UCSC linguists from attending the 2014 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Minneapolis. A highlight of the meeting was the Awards Ceremony, at which Adrian Brasoveanu received the Early Career Award for 2014. Presenting or co-presenting papers were grad students Mark Norris, Boris Harizanov, Bern Samko, Clara Sherley-Appel, and Judith Fiedler; Anie Thompson and Mark Norris presented a poster, which was hard to get close to, because it seemed to have a permanent throng of attendees. Numberous alumni of the doctoral program also presented papers, including Matt Tucker (NYU), Andy Wedel (Arizona), Jason Merchant (Chicago), Ruth Kramer (Georgetown), Aaron Kaplan (Utah), Lynsey Wolter (Wisconsin-Eau-Clair), Pete Alrenga (Boston University), Chris Kennedy (Chicago), and Adam Ussishkin (Arizona). Also there were Nate Arnett, chair Sandy Chung, Matt Wagers and Jorge Hankamer, who hosted the traditionally lively Santa Cruz party, which was attended by numerous current and former Santa Cruz linguists.
Karen De Clercq and Violeta Martínez-Paricio were both LRC visitors at UCSC in the academic year 2011-2012. Both laid down solid roots in the department and contributed a lot to the life of the department while they were here. Both defended their doctoral dissertations in December (at the University of Ghent in Belgium and at the University of Tromsø in Norway respectively) and both had UCSC faculty members as external members of their dissertation committees.
Karen’s dissertation was on A Unified Syntax of Negation and the defense took place in Ghent on December 13th. The external examiners were Jim McCloskey and and Michal Starke of CASTL, the linguistics research center at Tromsø. There are some pictures of the event here. Violeta’s defense took place at Tromsø on December 11th and the two “opponents” were Junko Ito and Birget Alber of the University of Verona. The social events following the intellectual work of the defense (and a workshop on the following day) gave Junko and Armin a chance to reconnect with former LRC visitor Ove Lorentz and with alumnus Peter Svenonius, who is now director of CASTL. Go here for the picture. Johan Brandtler, who was an LRC visitor at the same time as Karen and Violeta, was also present for Karen’s defense.
Also in December Adrian Brasoveanu traveled to Amsterdam for the 19th Amsterdam Colloquium held at the University of Amsterdam on December 19th-20th. Adrian gave an invited talk reporting joint work with LRC visitor Jakub Dotlacil. Adrian and Jakub’s paper What a Rational Interpreter Would Do: Building, Ranking, and Updating Quantifier Scope Representations in Discourse is available here. The talk was part of the workshop on Quantitative Methods in Formal Semantics and Pragmatics, at which alumna Louise McNally also presented joint work with Scott Grimm in a paper entitled No ordered arguments needed for nouns. Matthijs Westera, another former LRC visitor, presented Attention, I’m violating a maxim! A unifying account of the final rise at the 17th SemDial workshop which was held this year in conjunction with the Amsterdam Colloquium. Matthijs’ paper is available here.
December also saw the publication of two papers by Adrian. He and Anna Szabolcsi coauthored the paper Presuppositional Too, Postsuppositional Too which appeared in a volume in honor of Jeroen Groenendijk, Martin Stokhof, and Frank Veltman. The volume is available here. Floris Roelofsen, another repeat LRC visitor, is one of the editors of the Festschrift. Also in December, a paper (At-issue Proposals and Appositive Impositions in Discourse) co-authored by Adrian and alumni Scott Anderbois and Robert Henderson appeared online in the Journal of Semantics.
The first S-Circle meeting of the new term will feature a talk by <bPranav Anand entitled Attitude Reports, Discourse Reports, and Factivity. The talk will be at 3:30pm on Friday (January 10th) in the Linguistics Common Room. The abstract is available here.
Junko Ito and Armin Mester meanwhile travelled to CASTL at the University of Tromsø in Norway to take part in a series of events there. Junko was second opponent in the doctoral dissertation defense of Violeta Martínez-Paricio who was a Graduate Student Visitor in the Department under the auspices of the Linguistics Research Center in the academic year 2011-2012 and much of her dissertation research began at UCSC. The title of Violeta’s thesis is An exploration of minimal and maximal metrical feet and it explores the hypothesis that natural languages might exhibit recursion at the level of the foot. The Doctoral Defense (the disputatio) will be directed by alumnus Professor Peter Svenonius, who graduated from UCSC in 1994 and is now Director of CASTL and a Professor in the Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Tromsø.
On the day following the dissertation defense, there will be a mini-worshop, at which Armin and Junko will serially present recent research on Perfect Shape vs. Exhaustive Parsing in Prosody.
All of these events take place during the Polar Twilight.
