Category: Faculty News

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.

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.