Category: Faculty News

Just as the summer ended, Jim McCloskey travelled first to the University of Tromsø in northern Norway to take part in a thesis defense on September 15th and a
Workshop on Agreement on September 16th, then on to Paris to take part in a Workshop on Impersonal Pronouns at CNRS Pouchet on September 20th and to give an invited talk at CSSP 2011, held at Université Paris 8 in St. Denis. In Tromsø, Jim had a chance to re-connect with alumnus Peter Svenonius, who is Professor and Senior Researcher at CASTL, and in Paris with alumnus Eric Potsdam of the University of Florida, who gave a paper at CSSP on the syntax of comparatives in Malagasy.

This summer Jaye Padgett taught a 3-week course called Perception and Phonology at the New York-St. Petersburg Institute of Linguistics, Cognition and Culture (NYI). Also teaching at the institute were John Bailyn (Stony Brook University), Caroline Heycock (University of Edinburgh), Robert Hoberman (Stony Brook University), Roumi Pancheva (USC) and Sabine Iatridou (MIT).

Below is a picture of hedgehog pastries.

Adrian Brasoveanu attended the Sinn und Bedeutung conference in Utrecht this month, presenting two talks co-authored with other members of our department:

• Polarity particles and the anatomy of negative quantifiers
  Adrian Brasoveanu, Donka Farkas & Floris Roelofsen
   
• The Pragmatics of Quantifier Scope: A Corpus Study
  Scott Anderbois, Adrian Brasoveanu & Robert Henderson

Adrian also gave a version of the second talk at a colloquium last Friday at UCLA.

Jaye Padgett visited New York University last week, presenting a colloquium talk entitled “Explaining Dispersion Effects”, as well as a presentation to the phonetics lab on his joint work with Ryan Bennett and Grant McGuire on an ultrasound study of Irish palatalization. He and a friend happened upon the David Letterman studio (see photo) Thursday afternoon and joined the waiting list on a whim. They were 56th and 57th on the list, but only 55 waitlisters were let in.

Congratulations to Matt Wagers, who has been awarded funding from the Hellman Fellows Program. The purpose of the Hellman Fellows Program is to support the research of “promising assistant professors who show capacity for great distinction in their research.” Congratulations, Matt!

The Institute for Humanities Research recently announced its funded Research Clusters (funded by the UC Humanities Network) for the 2011-2012 year. These include two Linguistics endeavors:

Crosslinguistic Investigations in Syntax-Phonology (CrISP)

• Sandra Chung, Professor of Linguistics
• Vera Gribanova, Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Stanford
• Matthew Wagers, Assistant Professor of Linguistics

Santa Cruz Linguistics and Philosophy Group (SCLP)

• Adrian Brasoveanu, Assistant Professor of Linguistics
• Donka Farkas, Professor of Linguistics
• Jonathan Ellis, Associate Professor of Philosophy