WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Undergraduate linguist Paula Ledesma recently earned an Undergraduate Research Fellowship from The Humanities Institute at UCSC for her project entitled “Clitic placement and clitic climbing in Spanish.” Her advisor is Jorge Hankamer. Congratulations, Paula!
The Humanities Institute at UCSC recently highlighted Syntax-Prosody in OT, a project spearheaded by UCSC linguists Nick Kalivoda and Jennifer Bellik, as well as UCSC undergraduate linguists Alyssa Scarsciotti, Andrew “Wayne” Holmes, Sam Gillespie, and Hoa Nguyen. The project is funded by an NSF Grant awarded to Junko Ito and Armin Mester. You can find the article and learn more about SPOT here.
The Linguistics Department’s December 2018 newsletter highlighted second-year PhD student Jérémie Beauchamp’s fieldwork on Jê languages in Brazil, supported by funding from outside donations to the department. To learn more, click here.
Thanks to everyone who participated in this year’s Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC) on Friday, June 8. Three undergraduates in Linguistics and Language studies — Alejandro Garcia, Kevin Sanders, and Emily Martinez-Figueroa — presented original research dealing with topics in ellipsis, movement, focus, comparatives, reduplication, and prosody. The conference was capped off with a lovely presentation by UCSC undergraduate alumna Meredith Landman, entitled “The pragmatics of the sentence-final particle o in Yoruba”. Congratulations to our student presenters for a job well-done!
Thanks also to Hitomi Hirayama, who provided photo coverage of the event. Some highlights are included below.
Pictured: Kevin Sanders
Pictured: Meredith Landman
Pictured: Alejandro Garcia
Pictured: Emily Martinez-Figueroa
Pictured (Left to right): Alejandro Garcia, Kevin Sanders, Ryan Bennett, Emily Martinez-Figueroa, Meredith Landman
Junko Ito and Armin Mester have been successfully awarded a 2-year NSF grant for Syntax-Prosody in Optimality Theory (SPOT), an ongoing collaborative research project with Jenny Bellik, Nick Kalivoda, and Ozan Bellik, which aims to develop new tools for rigorously investigating the mapping from syntactic to prosodic structure in Optimality Theory.
SPOT has also received workshop funding as a Humanities Institute research cluster for 2018-19. The first SPOT workshop took place in Fall 2017.
Congratulations also to Nick Kalivoda, who will be holding a one-year postdoc position during 2018-19 on the SPOT NSF grant at UCSC.
Last Tuesday, graduate student Erik Zyman gave a talk at the University of Chicago entitled “On the Timing of Adjunction.” He reports that he received a warm welcome and numerous helpful questions and comments, and had productive meetings with faculty and graduate students about both their work and his, for all of which he’s grateful to his UChicago hosts (not to be confused with adjunction hosts).