Category: Faculty News

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.

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.

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