WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Last weekend Judith Aissen and Jorge Hankamer presented papers at the Workshop on Suspended Affixation at Cornell University. Their talks were called “Suspended Affixation in Tzotzil” and “Ad-Phrasal Affixes and Suspended Affixation in Turksh” (respectively). Click on the link above to learn more about the workshop and their papers.
Jim McCloskey travelled to Ghent, in Belgium, to present a paper at GIST 6, which was held at Universiteit Gent between October 17th and October 19th. GIST 6 consisted of two back-to-back workshops, one on complementizer agreement and one on subject positions. Jim’s paper (Objecthood in Irish and the Origin Point of Subjects) was an invited contribution to the second. (See the handout here!) Besides enjoying the workshops and the beauty of the city, Jim had a chance to re-connect with old Santa Crucians Karen Lahousse, who was an LRC visitor in the spring of 2009 and now has a faculty position in Linguistics at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Louvain) and who also presented a paper at the workshop, and Karen De Clercq, who is a doctoral student affiliated with the GIST project and who was an LRC visitor in 2011-12.
Just before the Fall quarter started, Junko and Armin were invited speakers at the GLOW-IN-ASIA conference (September 4-6, 2012, Mie University, Japan), where they presented their recent work on “Recursive Prosody and Match Theory”. Other invited speakers included Anders Holmberg (Newcastle University), Uli Sauerland (ZAS),and Akira Watanabe (University of Tokyo). Many of the GLOW attendees had presented at the Santa Cruz FAJL5 in 2010 (see below), and made a point of mentioning what a great time they had had on that occasion, and thanking the Santa Cruz department and organizers.
In August 2012, Issues 1 and 2 of Volume 38 of the journal Theoretical Linguistics was published online by de Gruyter. These issues of the journal consist of a target article by Sandy Chung (‘Are lexical categories universal? The view from Chamorro’) accompanied by a series of commentaries on the paper by William Croft, David Embick, Martin Haspelmath, Andrew Koontz-Garboden, and Eva van Lier. Sandy’s paper and the debate among her commentators deals with the question of whether or not the stock of lexical categories is language-particular or universal.
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.
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 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.