Category: Faculty News

TSUNAMI RELIEF EFFORT AND UCEAP

UCEAP students and the Study Center staff of Japan – headed by Junko Ito – were recently featured in the March/April issue of the NAFSA International Educator. The cover article, entitled “Overcoming Chaos”, discusses the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and highlights the involvement of UCEAP students and Study Center staff in the relief effort. UCEAP is very proud of how the events were handled on the ground and is delighted to see the efforts of students and staff recognized.

WHAT ARE WE DOING WHEN WE DO THE HUMANITIES?

If you’ve ever wondered what it means to do the Humanities, or why the Humanities matter to the world – and to you – you are invited to the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH) on Saturday, April 21 for an afternoon of exploration.

Starting at 1:00 p.m., the UC Santa Cruz Institute for Humanities Research will host a series of panels and poster presentations at the MAH to answer your questions about the Humanities, and to showcase the research of the Faculty and Graduate Fellows in the Humanities from across the University of California. Panel topics include the power of language, religion and modernity, and empire and nation. Poster presentations cover research on the ethnography of disasters, feminist art, slavery and cannibalism, the criminalization of religious practice, party-crashing in Arabic medieval literature, the inevitable fate of the novel, and more. The moderator of the panel on the power of language (2:00 – 2:45) will be the Linguistics Department’s own Pranav Anand.

The event and the museum will be free and open to the public. In conjunction with ‘What Are We Doing When We Do the Humanities’, the MAH is featuring the highly anticipated ‘All You Need Is Love’ exhibition, which explores the many ways that love is manifest in our everyday lives. Find out more about the event here.

DONKA FARKAS PRESENTS AT YALE

Over break, Donka Farkas traveled to New Haven to give a colloquium at Yale University entitled “Assertions and Polar Questions: The default case and beyond” based on recent work done in collaboration with LRC visitor Floris Roelofsen. Alumnus Scott AnderBois was in the audience, and asked a typically perceptive and insightful question. Scott is looking forward to being back in Santa Cruz for WCCFL next week.

MATT WAGERS AND COLLEAGUES PUBLISH IN LANGUAGE

The most recent issue of Language (88.1, March 2012) contains an article co-authored by
Jon Sprouse, Matt Wagers, and Colin Phillips. Entitled A test of the relation between working memory capacity and syntactic island effects, the paper presents two studies designed to test the predictions of theories which understand island effects as emergent consequences of non-grammatical constraints on the human sentence parser. Specifically, the studies test whether the strength of island effects varies across speakers depending on individual differences in processing resources (for example working memory capacity). They find that there is no such covariance, a result which suggests that island-sensitivity is a grammar-particular phenomenon rather than a reflection of more general cognitive capacities.

JIM MCCLOSKEY SPEAKS AT UC DAVIS AND CATCHES UP WITH ARIEL LORING

In the final week of Winter Quarter, Jim McCloskey travelled to UC Davis for a talk jointly sponsored by the Departments of Linguistics and English on the cultural politics of language attrition and their expression in Irish literature. While in Davis, Jim re-connected with alumna Ariel Loring. Ariel is a fourth year student in the PhD program in linguistics at Davis and advanced to candidacy at the beginning of this year. She graduated from UCSC in 2008, with a B.A. in linguistics, and in her last quarter she took Ling 80C (Language, Society, and Culture) to satisfy a general education requirement. She was sufficiently taken with the material of that course to decide that she wanted to be an applied sociolinguist and that is why she entered the program at Davis. Her first qualifying paper was on monolingual English-only ideologies in the U.S. and its effect on bilingual education policies, a topic she was first introduced to in 80C. Ariel’s dissertation research is centered on a set of issues around citizenship and language policy and she expects to defend her thesis at the end of the 2012-13 academic year. She hopes to go on to work in applied sociolinguistics either in an academic or public policy setting.

Negation at Santa Cruz Workshop

The first ad hoc Negation at Santa Cruz (NASC) workshop took place last Monday afternoon to allow some of our current visitors to share ongoing work connected to negation. We heard from Johan Brandtler on preposed negation in Swedish, from Karen De Clercq on tag questions in English, and from Floris Roelofsen (in collaboration with Adrian Brasoveanu and Donka Farkas), on polarity particles and negative indefinites. “Many far less ad hoc workshops are far less cohesive”, Matt Tucker commented. After the workshop there was an equally ad hoc (and equally enjoyable) pizza dinner at the home of Peter and Donka. The organizers wish to thank presenters and participants and apologize to any who could not make it due to the ad hoc nature of the scheduling.

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