ADRIAN BRASOVEANU PUBLISHES IN SYNTHESE
Adrian Brasoveanu’s article, “The grammar of quantification and the fine structure of interpretation contexts”, has appeared in the latest issue of the journal Synthese. You can find the article here.
Category: Faculty News
SANDY CHUNG VISITS SAIPAN AND TINIAN ISLANDS
Sandy Chung is back from a two-week trip to the Northern Mariana Islands to work on the NSF-funded Chamorro dictionary revision project. One highlight of her trip was the opportunity to demonstrate the parser developed by Boris Harizanov to the Dictionary working groups on the islands of Tinian and Saipan. Boris’s parser enables users to locate Chamorro words in the revised Dictionary without knowing exactly how to spell them – a boon for a language with two official orthographies and a long history of non-standard spelling systems. Boris skyped in to the Saipan meeting of the dictionary working group to answer questions, and was a great hit.
GRANT MCGUIRE SPEAKS IN GERMANY
Grant McGuire recently gave a talk at the Second Conference on Sound Change in Kloster-Seeon, in Bavaria, Germany, where he presented a paper “Imitation as a mechanism for the spread of sound change” along with his colleague, Molly Babel (UBC). Alice Nicholls (BA 2011) assisted in implementing the experiment that was the backbone of the presentation, but was unable to attend. This paper examined how voices with different properties, such as social desirability and typicality, affect the degree to which voices are spontaneously imitated in speech, what acoustic properties are imitated, and how this connects to theories of sound change.
SANDY CHUNG GIVES INVITED TALK AT CLS
Sandy Chung was in Chicago on April 18-21 for CLS 48, where she gave an invited talk (‘Reaching Agreement Late’) in the Agreement parasession. While there, she spent time with alums Chris Kennedy, Jason Merchant, and Jason Riggle, all of whom are Linguistics faculty members at the University of Chicago. (Jason M. is currently Department Chair, having succeeded Chris in this position.) One of the other invited speakers was Adam Albright, who taught briefly at UCSC before joining the Linguistics faculty at MIT. Among the others who gave papers were alum Matt Barros (now in the Ph.D. program at Rutgers) and entering Ph.D. student Karen Duek (currently at the CUNY Graduate Center).
JUDITH AISSEN SPEAKS AT HARVARD LAST WEEK
Judith Aissen was in Cambridge, MA last week, visiting Harvard. She gave a talk (“Passive and the evolution of agent focus in Tzotzil”), consulted with students and post-docs working on Mayan, and caught up with old friends.
PRANAV ANAND TO GIVE STEVENSON COLLEGE LECTURE ON WEDNESDAY
About once a quarter, Stevenson College hosts a lecture by one of its faculty fellows. This quarter’s speaker is Pranav Anand, whose talk is titled “All I Want is Some Honest Answers to My Questions: Tracking Argumentation and Stance in Online Political Debate.” It will take place this Wednesday, April 25th, at 4:00 pm, in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge. These talks are meant for a general audience, and everyone is welcome, but please RSVP to Debby Joyce at dajoyce at ucsc.edu. To learn more about the talk, visit here.
SANDY CHUNG AND MATT WAGERS ON THE ROAD
Sandy and Matt have been on the road recently talking about their sentence processing research in Chamorro, in a paper entitled “WH agreement and the timing of unbounded dependency formation”. Matt gave the first talk at the 25th Annual CUNY Human Sentence Processing conference (14-16 March, in New York). Sandy and Matt together attended the Timing of Grammar workshop at GLOW (27 March, in Potsdam, organized in part by erstwhile Santa Cruzan Luis Vincente), to present the paper to a different audience. That’s where this photo came from, in front of one of the bizarre Little Red Riding Hood statues that dotted the campus.