Category: Faculty News

FORMER LRC VISITORS DEFEND DISSERTATIONS IN EUROPE

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.

BRASOVEANU IN AMSTERDAM AND IN PRINT

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.

ANAND IN S-CIRCLE

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.

ITO AND MESTER IN TROMSØ

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.

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.

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