WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
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.
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.
Over the summer, the department, along with SlugPubs, the publishing arm of the graduate student population, and the LRC released a volume dedicated to Professor Jorge Hankamer. The first-ever Morphology at Santa Cruz (MASC) is subtitled Papers in Honor of Jorge Hankamer and contains a collection of papers inspired by Jorge’s Seminar in Morphology held in the fall of 2009. The volume is published entirely online with the UC’s eScholarship initiative and is therefore available online for free.
Additionally, stay tuned for announcements concerning a time and place for a celebration where printed copies of MASC will be available for viewing. Alumni who are interested in attending (and therefore scheduling) this celebration are urged to contact Matt Tucker at matucker (at) ucsc (dot) edu.