Category: Faculty News

Many congratulations to Donka Farkas, who has won the Dizikes Faculty Teaching Award in Humanities this year! This is the sole teaching award covering the entire Humanities Division, offered to only one faculty member in a year. (A linguist has won two of the last three years!) The award will be presented to Donka at the “Celebrating Excellence in the Humanities 2013” Spring Awards Event on Thursday, May 30th, 3-5 pm in Humanities 1, rooms 202 and 210. (Presentation of the Dizikes Award will be at 3:15.)

Sandy Chung spent a few days in New Haven, Connecticut. She visited the renovated Yale Art Gallery (which she tells us is truly fantastic), gave a colloquium at Yale, avoided snow (despite weather forecasts to the contrary), and spent some most enjoyable time with Ryan Bennett (Ph.D. alum, 2012, now Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Yale). Then, on April 5-7, she traveled to Lawrence, Kansas, where she gave the Frances Ingemann lecture at the University of Kansas, and again avoided snow.

The 35th California Celtic Colloquium took place on the weekend of March 15th to March 17th at UC Berkeley. The conference is hosted in alternate years by UCLA and by Berkeley and brings together each year researchers from all over the world interested in Celtic languages and literatures. Jim McCloskey was one of this year’s invited speakers. His talk was on How to Make an Inflected Verb: Verum Focus in Irish.

Last week’s article in the Santa Cruz Sentinel about Matt Wagers’ and Sandy Chung’s NSF project to study language comprehension in the Mariana Islands also appeared in the San Jose Mercury News, the Oakland Tribune, and the Long Beach Press-Telegram. Congratulations, Matt and Sandy!

Judith Aissen spent several days in Austin, TX last month. In addition to meeting with students and giving a colloquium on “partial agreement” in Tzotzil, she visited with friends, listened to some good music, and ate far too much BBQ. Judith presented a version of the same talk to S-Circle last week.

Matt Wagers and Sandy Chung received a three-year award from the National Science Foundation to support the Chamorro Psycholinguistics Project. This will support the development of the existing work they’ve done on culturally-sensitive, field-appropriate methods for investigating the psycholinguistics of understudied languages. (This includes this earlier NSF White Paper in collaboration with Pranav Anand). It builds on their completed study on the comprehension of WH-agreement. The project is conducted with their colleague Manuel Borja, a native speaker-educator from Saipan, and they hope to involve local Chamorro students in research internships. In the coming years, Matt and Sandy will be looking at how lexical vs. syntactic sources of information guide grammatical dependency formation, the relation between positive and negative evidence in comprehension, and at ways of documenting microvariation in agreement paradigms, argument ordering and clause combination. For more information see this article.