Category: Faculty News

CHUNG TO REPRESENT LSA AT ACLS

The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) has just announced the appointment of Sandy Chung to a four-year term as LSA Delegate to ACLS—the American Council of Learned Societies. ACLS is a nonprofit federation of 71 national scholarly organizations, and is the preeminent representative of American scholarship in the humanities and related social sciences. Sandy succeeds Tom Wasow of Stanford, whose term in the same position concludes at the end of December, 2013. The LSA’s delegate to ACLS represents the interests of the society and of the field at large in the important work that the society does in the promotion of research, scholarly publication, and education.

WEDDINGS

There have been two weddings in the department in recent weeks. On Thursday October 24th, Matt Wagers and Vinny D’Aloia were married in Santa Cruz County Courthouse. There are pictures of the event here and here, courtesy of Sandy Chung, who was one of the witnesses at the ceremony.

Just a couple of weeks later, on November 14th, Jaye Padgett and Irena Polić were married, in a small ceremony with their family and two friends. There are pictures of the event here and here.

We wish Matt, Vinnie, Jaye, and Irena every happiness.

DONKA FARKAS TRAVELS TO CHICAGO

On November 19th Donka Farkas travelled to the University of Chicago to give a talk in the Workshop in Linguistics and Philosophy series. The goal of the workshop is to bring together philosophers and linguists working on issues of meaning in natural language, in an effort to stimulate discussion across disciplinary lines. The topic of the Workshop during the 2013-14 academic year is Information Sensitivity. Donka’s topic was Assertions, Polar Questions, and the Land in Between, and she reports: I greatly enjoyed talking to alum Chris Kennedy, colleagues in Linguistics and in Philosophy, and Chris’s grad students, all doing fascinating work.

JAYE PADGETT VISITS EDINBURGH FOR ULTRASOUND CONFERENCE

Recently Jaye Padgett flew to Edinburgh, Scotland, to attend Ultrafest VI, the latest incarnation of a conference dedicated to the use of ultrasound in phonetics and phonology. Ryan Bennett (Ph.D., 2012) was also there and led the presentation of his joint work with Jaye, Grant McGuire, and Máire Ní Chiosáin (University College Dublin) exploring quantitative measures of palatalization using ultrasound. Other people at the conference included Diana Archangeli (University of Hong Kong), Lisa Davidson (NYU), Brian Gick (University of British Columbia), Alexei Kochetov (University of Toronto), Doug Whalen (CUNY Graduate Center and Haskins Labs), and Jaye’s past co-author Marija Tabain (La Trobe University). Outside of the conference Jaye enjoyed exploring beautiful Edinburgh, including its scenic pubs.

FARKAS PRESENTS AT BERKELEY

Donka Farkas travelled to the flagship campus on Tuesday November 5th to give a presentation to the Linguistics and Philosophy Group at Berkeley. Donka’s talk was based on joint work with erstwhile LRC visitor Floris Roelofsen and was entitled Assertions, polar questions and the land in between. There was a lively discussion during and after the talk and among other things Donka was able to catch up with alumna Line Mikkelsen.

Line, meanwhile and in turn, visited the Santa Cruz department later that same week, to reconnect with her roots, finish a joint paper with Jorge Hankamer, and attend the amazing post-colloquium potluck held at the home of Amy Rose Deal and Barak Krakauer. The paper was completed before the party.

PRANAV ANAND CO-PI ON LARGE NSF-FUNDED RESEARCH PROJECT

It was recently announced that an interdisciplinary research team which includes Pranav Anand as Co-PI was to be awarded a large multi-year research award from the National Science Foundation. WHASC spoke to Pranav about the project, what it would involve, and where it fits in the larger scheme of things.

WHASC: First off: Many congratulations to you and your colleagues, Pranav, on getting funding for this project. It seems like a very large one, involving quite a few people and quite a few different groups. Could you give us a sense of who is involved and what the principal goals are?

PA: The goal for the project, in brief, is to try to understand how argumentative contexts develop. Much prior research on dialogue has emphasized collaborative environments: product meetings, helpdesk-style sites, task-oriented interaction. We are now at a watershed moment in the language sciences because we are simply awash in data from all corners. A very large portion of that interaction is decidedly non-collaborative, and the central aims of this project are to discover what aspects of what we learned in collaborative interactions transfer. The team is interdisciplinary, involving two psychologists who specialize on language (Jean E. Fox Tree and Steve Whittaker), two computer scientists who work on NLP (Craig Martell, Lyn Walker), and a linguist who looks at higher-level pragmatics (me). How we are adjudicating the work is a somewhat complicated dance, but suffice to say that we all have hands in each of the pots.

Continue Reading PRANAV ANAND CO-PI ON LARGE NSF-FUNDED RESEARCH PROJECT

MARK NORRIS PRESENTS AT STANFORD

Mark Norris also travelled recently to Stanford to present some of his current research. Mark sent in this report:

I presented some of the results of my research on concord to the Stanford Syntax/Morphology Circle (SMircle) in a talk entitled `Nominal Concord in Estonian.’ The talk was well received; I got some good feedback, and got to talk about some of the bigger questions about concord. Everyone was very friendly and helpful. To top it off, I had dinner with UCSC alumna Vera Gribanova afterwards—just days before her baby daughter was born!

Maziar Toosarvandani will be giving a talk in the same series on Tuesday November 5th at Stanford. Maziar’s title is Agreement in Zazaki and the nature of nominal concord and it reports on joint work with Coppe van Urk of MIT.

1 … 38 39 40 41 42 … 53