Category: Faculty News

DEAL IN CHICAGO

Amy Rose Deal travelled to Chicago last week for the Workshop on Semantic Variation, at which she gave a talk about the mass/count distinction in Nez Perce. (You can read the paper here.) The workshop was a lively occasion with many interesting papers on the semantics of under-studied languages and the ramifications for universals in semantics. Also presenting at the workshop was undergraduate alumna Lauren Winans, now a doctoral student at UCLA, who gave a paper on Disjunction in Egyptian Arabic.

IHR AWARDS

WHASC is slowly catching up with news and announcements made during the summer. Last July, for example, IHR announced its research awards and fellowships for the 2013-2014 Academic Year. Among the awardees were Clara Sherley-Appel, who won a research fellowship for her project Differential Object Marking in Turkish, and Amy Rose Deal who won a Faculty Research Fellowship for a research project on Types of Ergative Case (announced in WHASC on January 15th last). Also funded was the Santa Cruz Ellipsis Consortium a research group convened by Pranav Anand and Jim McCloskey which brings together faculty, graduate students and undergraduate students around the goal of creating a richly annotated corpus of naturally occurring data concerning ellipsis.

CUSP 6 AT BERKELEY

CUSP 6 was held on Friday Oct 11 and Saturday Oct 12 on the campus of UC Berkeley. Donka Farkas went along and describes the event this way:

Lots of good papers, a lively audience, great discussion. UCSC was represented on the program by Karen Duek, talking about the polysemy of container pseudo-partitives. Great paper, very well delivered. In the audience there was LRC visitor Filippa Lindahl and a record number of faculty: Adrian Brasoveanu, Amy Rose Deal, myself and Maziar Toosarvandani. Alumni Chris Potts (Stanford) and Line Mikkelsen (Berkeley) were also there.

ITO AND WAGERS MEET NEW PRESIDENT

Janet Napolitano was the first woman to serve as the
United States Secretary of Homeland Security. She held the office from 2009 to 2013 and in August 2013 was appointed as the first woman president of the University of California. President Napolitano visited the UCSC campus on Thursday and Friday October 17th and 18th. Among the small group of faculty who had the opportunity to meet with the new President were Junko Ito and Matt Wagers. Junko and Matt took advantage of their time to give the new president a sense of the kind of work being done in the department and on the campus.

MCCLOSKEY AT NORTHWESTERN

Jim McCloskey travelled to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois on Friday, to give a colloquium at the Linguistics Department there (more or less a repeat performance of the first UCSC colloquium of the year). Being in Evanston, Jim was able to connect with Tommy Denby who graduated with the MA from Santa Cruz in June 2013 and is now in the PhD program at Northwestern. While settling in at Northwestern, Tommy has continued to blog at the New Yorker. A contingent also came out for the talk from the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago, led by alumnus Jason Merchant, who sends his greetings via WHASC to all at Santa Cruz.

ITO AND MESTER AT MIT CONFERENCE

Junko Ito and Armin Mester attended M@90 (a conference on metrical structure: text-setting and stress) (Sept. 20-21), a celebration of Morris Halle’s 90th birthday organized by Mike Kenstowicz and Donca Steriade, where they presented some of their recent work on the role of supersized units in prosody (like superheavy syllables or HL trochees). Armin reports:

Besides the many fascinating talks and the sheer enjoyment of a splendidly organized conference, there was a whole group of UCSC-related folks to catch up with (Adam Albright, Ryan Bennett, Lev Blumenfeld, and Takashi Morita). The high point of the conference was Morris Halle’s closing presentation (on the morphophonology of the Latin verb). The speaker was not only very graciously introduced by Noam Chomsky (with touching reminiscences going back to their days as graduate students at Harvard many years ago), but went on to give a very lucid and well-argued talk, and defended his position very well in the ensuing question period. An amazing performance “@90”!
Some pictures here.

CHUNG, WAGERS, AND BORJA AT THE PAROLE BOARD

Matt Wagers and Sandy Chung traveled twice to the Mariana Islands this summer in connection with their NSF-funded research project The real-time comprehension of wh-dependencies in a Wh-Agreement language. In June, they and their third collaborator, Manuel F. Borja, developed the stimuli for an experiment on the real-time comprehension of Chamorro relative clauses. In September, the three gave the experiment to a total of 135 participants on the islands of Saipan, Rota, and Tinian, Among other places, their travels brought them to the NMI Board of Parole on Saipan, which they visited with Ando Agulto, one of their Chamorro student assistants. Photos of the four waiting for their appointment with the Parole Board staff can be seen here.

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