Category: Faculty News

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.

PADGETT IN NEW HALF-TIME JOB AS ‘CHAMPION’

Jaye Padgett recently accepted a half-time administrative position at UCSC as Faculty Assistant to the Executive Vice Chancellor, with a focus on undergraduate retention and time to degree. (During Fall and Winter quarters he will be on sabbatical the other half of his time.) Viewed in terms of an output constraint (so to speak), the charge couldn’t be simpler: ensure that students graduate and graduate quickly. But since many things affect whether students graduate (quickly), the job is also complicated. (To really strain the OT metaphor, it may raise the problem of too many solutions.) The task force that recommended that this position be created called it a Champion of Undergraduate Success, and Jaye finds that people do sometimes call him ‘champion’. When he talked to the EVC about it for the first time, there was discussion of a possible cape and tights.

We wish Jaye well in this new and challenging position.

MORGAN IN AIX-MARSEILLE

Adam Morgan graduated with the MA in Spring 2013 and is now in the PhD program in Psychology at UC San Diego, working in the Language Production Lab. Adam travelled to the University of Aix-Marseille in early September to present joint research with Matt Wagers (on resumption in English) at the annual AMLaP conference (Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing). AMLaP is an international conference which has established itself as the premier European venue for interdisciplinary research into how people process language. Adam and Matt’s poster (Gap Acceptability Predicts Resumption Rates in English) is available in PDF format here.

The research was well-received in a spectacular setting. Adam and Matt’s poster is in the right foreground, with the emblematic banana slug just visible at the top left corner.

COLLOQUIUM

Jim McCloskey will open the year’s colloquium series on Friday October 4th at 4pm in Humanities One, Room 210. Jim’s title is Preverbs, Phases, and Objecthood: an Irish Perspective on Some Old Problems and, as always, all are welcome. The abstract is available here.

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