WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Congratulations to Sage Meadows (B.A. in Linguistics), Miranda Ying (B.A. in Linguistics), Katharina Pierini (B.A. in Language Studies), and Sydney Roberts (B.A. in Language Studies) for graduating in Spring 2021 and receiving departmental honors!
This spring, Linguistics PhD candidate Margaret Kroll received the Chancellor’s Dissertation-Year Fellowship for the 2019-20 academic year. The university writes, of the fellowships:
These state-funded, merit-based fellowships are awarded on a competitive basis to doctoral graduates who have overcome significant social or educational obstacles to achieve a college education, and whose backgrounds equip them to contribute to intellectual diversity among the graduate student population.
Congratulations, Margaret!
This summer, Linguistics PhD candidates Margaret Kroll and Tom Roberts received fellowships from the UCSC Humanities Institute, Kroll as a Summer Research Fellow, and Roberts as a Summer Dissertation Fellow. You can read more about these research fellowships on the Institute’s website. Congratulations, Margaret and Tom!
This summer, Linguistics major Henry Von Dollen received his BA with departmental honors in Linguistics. Congratulations, Henry!
A number of UCSC faculty, students, and affiliates attended the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in Melbourne, Australia. These included Linguistics faculty members Amanda Rysling, Ryan Bennett, and Grant McGuire; Applied Linguistics faculty member Mark Amengual; post-doc Jenny Bellik; graduate students Maho Morimoto and Andrew Hedding; former PhD student Robert Henderson (PhD, 2012); and former LRC affiliate Haruo Kubozono.
Tom Roberts spent the summer writing, reading, and thinking about attitude verbs and clausal complementation, including several weeks of fieldwork and travel in Estonia. There, in addition to unraveling the mysteries of complementizers, he was able to see a moving Arvo Pärt concert in the rural island province of Hiiumaa, alongside 2018 PhD alum and Estonian choral music enthusiast Kelsey Kraus. The event took place in the historic Pühalepa Church, the island’s oldest at a respectable 764 years old, just shy of the median age of concert attendees.
In August, the 31st European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI) convened at the University of Latvia in Riga. Many of our own linguists decamped to the Baltics to participate, including PhD students Jack Duff, Lisa Hofmann, Morwenna Hoeks, and Stephanie Rich, and faculty member Maziar Toosarvandani.
More details on their exploits in logic, language and information are given below.
Lisa presented a talk titled “Sentential negativity and Polarity-Sensitive-Anaphora.”
Jack and Morwenna presented posters titled “The locus of commitment: Flipping judges in a commitment-based discourse model” and “The alternatives in disjunctive questions and where they come from.”
Maziar delivered a course titled “Semantics and pragmatics of temporal sequencing,” developed with Pranav Anand (Pranav also contributed to colleague Natasha Korotkova‘s (Konstanz) course “Speech reports”).
Pictured from left are Lisa Hofmann, Maziar Toosarvandani, Morwenna Hoeks, Jack Duff, and Stephanie Rich.