Category: Faculty News

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 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.

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.

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.

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.