WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
The current issue of Linguistic Inquiry (42.4, Fall 2011) sees the publication of Aaron Kaplan‘s paper Harmonic Improvement without Candidate Chains in Chamorro, a paper which grew out of Aaron’s dissertation Noniterativity is an Emergent Property of Grammar completed at UCSC in 2008. The abstract for the paper is available here.
When the New York Times posted an article on errors in number agreement (“Number Trouble”, October 11, 2011), Matt Wagers posted a comment. See his quote from Trollope!
Amy Rose Deal’s article, Modals without scales, has just been published in Language, the journal of the Linguistic Society of America. You can see the abstract at Amy Rose’s website. In case you hadn’t heard, Amy Rose will be joining our faculty in January!
On Wednesday, October 12, Sandy Chung spoke at UC Berkeley’s Fieldwork Forum (FForum), a group that meets weekly to discuss fieldwork methodologies. Her title was “Investigating Indefinites in Chamorro”. She was delighted to see Line Mikkelsen (Ph.D. 2004, now Associate Professor of Linguistics, UC Berkeley) in the audience.
Judith Aissen and Scott AnderBois (PhD 2011, currently Assistant Professor in Residence at the University of Connecticut) were in Austin, TX last weekend to participate in the fifth CILLA (Conference on Indigenous Languages of Latin America). Judith spoke on passive and agent focus in Tzotzil (“El pasivo y el enfoque de agente en tzotzil”), Scott on attitude reports in Yucatec Mayan (“Las atribuciones actitudinales en maya yucateco: Sintaxis y semántica”). High points of the conference included a keynote by Roberto Zavala (LRC visitor in Spring 2006), reporting on a newly discovered Zoquean language spoken in Chiapas, Mexico (Jitolteco), and one by Frank Seifart (MPI, Leipzig) on Manguaré, communication by drums among the Bora of the Amazons. CILLA is held every two years, always at UT. Spanish is the preferred language for the conference, with English and Portugese as alternatives.
Between August 1st and August 5th this summer, the National University of Ireland, Maynooth hosted the 14th International Congress of Celtic Studies, a global gathering of researchers in various disciplines concerned with Celtic Studies. The Congress takes place every four years. Jim McCloskey gave the first plenary lecture at this year’s Congress and used the occasion to present his joint work on syntax and prosody with Ryan Bennett of UCSC and Emily Elfner of UMass.
At the same conference, on Friday August 5th, Jaye Padgett and Máire Ní Chiosáin of University College Dublin presented Irish Palatalization: an Ultrasound Study, a report on their collaborative ultrasound project with Ryan Bennett and Grant McGuire.