WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Jaye Padgett was at this year’s Phonology Forum at the City University of New York, called the Conference on the Segment. He presented the latest results from the Irish ultrasound project in collaboration with Ryan Bennett, Grant McGuire, and Máire Ní Chiosáin (University College Dublin). You can see the slides of their joint talk at the link above.
This year’s LSA meeting in Portland, Oregon, was a memorable one for the department in many ways. On Saturday evening, the first ever collaborative Presidential address was given by outgoing president Sandy Chung, along with Matt Wagers and their collaborator on Saipan Manny Borja. The address (Bridging Methodologies: Experimental Syntax in the Pacific) dealt with the large question of what the right relation should be between the methodologies of experimental psycholinguistics and field linguistics, and it reported specifically on the results of the collaborative research project on WH-dependencies in Chamorro on which all three have been engaged since the summer of 2011. The speakers were introduced by alumnus Jason Merchant, and the event was attended by members of the Micronesian community in the Northwest.
At the awards ceremony which preceded the Presidential Address, Matt Tucker was presented with one of three awards given for outstanding student abstracts submitted to this year’s meeting.
Meanwhile, at the Business Meeting on the preceding day Jorge Hankamer was inducted, along with nine other distinguished linguists, as a Fellow of the LSA.
In the course of the meeting, papers were presented or co-presented by Scott Anderbois, Ryan Bennett, Amy Rose Deal, Nick Deschenes, Robert Henderson. Wendell Kimper, Bill Ladusaw, Adam Morgan, Matt Tucker and many
alums, undergraduate and graduate, of the program.
All of this lent a distinctly festive air to the annual Santa Cruz party, which was held (without interruption this year) on Saturday evening in the splendor and isolation of the Presidential Suite on the 22nd floor. The party was attended by numerous students, faculty, visitors, alums, friends and hangers-on and featured, for the first time but probably not for the last, an arm-wrestling competition between distinguished alumnae and current faculty members.
Next year, Boston.
Grant McGuire is one of three faculty throughout Humanities to receive a fellowship for next year from the UCSC Institute for Humanities Research. The fellowship provides funding to support research, and fellows give a public talk on campus during their fellowship year. Congratulations, Grant!
After their half-year sojourn in Japan, Junko Ito and Armin Mester are back in Santa Cruz! While in Tokyo, Junko continued her directorship at the UC Tokyo Study Center, which oversees the Japan UC Education Abroad Program, and Armin was visiting professor at NINJAL (National INstitute of JApanese Language and Linguistics), working with Professor Haruo Kubozono (former LRC associate). Besides continuing their research on the prosodic hierarchy and the syntax-phonology interface, Armin and Junko gave presentations at the Japanese-Korean Conference in Seoul on “the Perfect prosodic word and the sources of unaccentedness”, and at the International Conference on Phonetics and Phonology in Kyoto on “Nonprominent positions”. During their stay in Tokyo, they were able to meet up with Shigeto Kawahara (Rutgers University, last year’s keynote speaker at LURC, and former undergraduate visitor), as well as other UCSC(-related) folks: Matt Wagers, Ryan Bennett; former LRC associates Ryuji Harada (Otsuma University), Takeru Homma (Tokyo Metropolitan University), and Shin Ishihara (University of Frankfurt).
Several members of the department were at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America a few days ago, where Sandy Chung gave the presidential address (along with Matt Wagers and Manuel F. Borja). Look for a report on the conference next week!
The 18th Amsterdam Colloquium took place December 19-21, and you can guess where. Besides a rich regular program, there were three workshops: on inquisitiveness, on semantic evidence, and on the semantics and pragmatics of Sign Language. One of the four invited speakers was Donka Farkas, who gave a talk titled “Polarity Particles in English and Beyond”, based on work with past and future LRC visitor Floris Roelofsen. In addition, Adrian Brasoveanu and Jakub Dotlacil had a very well-received poster; alumna Louise McNally, currently at Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, gave two co-authored talks, one of them with former LRC associate Henriette de Swart; alumna Line Mikkelsen was a co-author on a talk given by Daniel Hardt; and alumnus Chris Potts and co-authors had a poster.
Adrian Brasoveanu’s paper “Correlatives” has just appeared in the Language and Linguistics Compass. You can find the abstract (and the paper) here.