WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Amy Rose Deal is one of three faculty throughout Humanities to receive a fellowship for next year from the UCSC Institute for Humanities Research. The fellowship provides funding to support research, and fellows give a public talk on campus during their fellowship year. (Look for one from Grant McGuire this year.) Congratulations, Amy Rose!
Jorge Hankamer gave two invited talks at Boǧaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey. According to Jorge, one of the talks was about suspended affixation and the other was about pseudo-sluicing. These talks were for faculty and graduate students in the Linguistics program at Boǧaziçi University, an English-language university on the Bosphorus. Jorge has also been invited to teach a course on Distributed Morphology next summer at Boǧaziçi.
During winter break Donka Farkas traveled to snow-covered Bucharest to participate in a conference on the syntax and semantics of specificity, organized by Alexandra Cornilescu. She gave a paper co-authored with her fellow invited speaker, Adrian Brasoveanu. (This was a special honor, given that both Adrian and Donka started their careers in linguistics as students of Alexandra’s in Bucharest.) UCSC was further represented at this conference by two former LRC visitors, Klaus von Heusinger (University of Cologne), and Larisa Avram (University of Bucharest). Donka was particularly pleased to see a whole new crop of bright young linguists doing first rate work at the University of Bucharest.
In a rare honor, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has just elected Sandy Chung a fellow. In the words of AAAS, “Fellows are recognized for meritorious efforts to advance science or its applications”. Of the 701 fellows elected this year, only one, Sandy, was a linguist. There are only 35 AAAS fellows total in the AAAS “linguistics and language science” categories. There are roughly 8,000 AAAS fellows in all categories.
Sandy was honored “for distinguished contributions to teaching and research in linguistics, advancing syntax through insights from under-studied languages, notably Chamorro, and engaging minority communities in linguistic research.”
For more on Sandy’s recognition, see this UCSC news story. Congratulations, Sandy!
Junko Ito gave a talk at the Stanford Phonology Workshop on Friday, November 9th, on “Matching Prosodic Constituents”. If you’d like to know more about the talk, check out this page.
And last Friday Amy Rose Deal gave a talk at Stanford’s SMircle (Syntax and Morphology Circle) on “A-scrambling and agreement in Nez Perce.” Find the abstract on this page!
An article by Armin Mester and Junko Ito, called “Prosodic subcategories in Japanese”, has been published on line in LINGUA. Amy Rose Deal recently contributed a paper on Nez Perce embedded indexicals and indexical shift to a proceedings of the Semantics of Under-represented Languages in the Americas (SULA) volume, which can be found on her website or on the semantics archive. Finally, recent alum Scott AnderBois has published a paper called “Focus and uninformativity in Yucatec Maya questions” in Natural Language Semantics, available here.
The fifth California Universities Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop (CUSP 5) was held this past weekend at UC San Diego. The workshop featured a number of excellent talks, including two by our own Donka Farkas and Karl DeVries. Donka launched the second day of the conference with “Assertions and polar questions: Default and non-default cases” (joint work with frequent LRC visitor Floris Roelofsen), and Karl gave the penultimate talk of the conference, “Number words and aspectual modifiers.” Oliver Northrup drove and sampled every flavor of muffin at the conspicuously well-stocked snack table. The department’s legacy was also well-represented: PhD Alumnus Chris Potts (Stanford) chaired a session, and undergraduate alumna Lauren Winans (UCLA) presented on “Inquisitive and non-inquisitive disjunctions.” CUSP 6 will be closer to home, at either Berkeley or Stanford.