WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Welcome to the incoming graduate class for Fall 2016! Andrew Angeles, Netta Ben-Meir, Andrew Hedding, Lisa Hofmann, and Nicholas Van Handel will join the PhD program, and Mansi Desai will enter the MA program. This year’s admissions process was highly competitive, and we are excited that these excellent students will be joining our community.
Graduate student Jason Ostrove recently received a Fulbright Gaeltacht Summer Award. Distributed through the Irish Government, these competitive grants allow Americans who study and work on Irish to travel to Gaeltachtaí regions in Ireland, where Irish remains the daily language. Jason was awarded the grant to fund research that will contribute to his dissertation work, as well as to study the language in its natural setting.
This past weekend (April 21-23), graduate student Steven Foley attended the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Upon his return, Steven had this to report:
I gave a talk on my QP research titled “Morphological conspiracies and the nature of Vocabulary Insertion.” I got some helpful and positive feedback from audience members, including UCSC alum Jason Merchant. But probably what I was most proud of was tricking people into thinking my all-Microsoft Word handout was made with LaTeX. All in all it was a fun and rewarding weekend — spring was springing in Chicago, I saw some old friends, rubbed elbows with fancy linguists, and even saw Haj Ross singing karaoke at the conference banquet.
Several graduates of the department in the winter quarter of 2016 were awarded honors. Mark Takehana received honors in the linguistics major. Carrie Collonge, Liliane Buschman, and Rebekah Wilson received honors in the language studies major. Congratulations to all four!
This past week saw Jenny Bellik mount an excellent and successful defense of her second qualifying paper, “Turkish onset repair: An ultrasound study.” The committee was chaired by Jaye Padgett and included Jorge Hankamer and Grant McGuire. Congratulations, Jenny!
A couple weeks ago, a couple members of the UCSC linguistics department attended Generative Linguistics in the Old World (GLOW) 39 in Göttingen, Germany (April 5-8). Natasha Korotkova (UCLA) presented joint work with Pranav Anand in a talk on “Predicates of personal taste and de re construal,” and graduate student Erik Zyman presented a poster on “Adjunct stranding, late merger, and the timing of syntactic operations.” Erik reported an interesting venue for the conference: the Paulinerkirche, whose initial construction was completed in 1304.
Graduate student Margaret Kroll traveled to nearby Berkeley a couple Fridays ago (April 8) for their linguistic department’s Syntax and Semantics Circle. She gave a talk on “Polarity reversals under sluicing.” Margaret reported that she received a warm welcome and a variety of interesting questions and comments on her paper. After the talk, she and her accompanying UCSC-ers joined their hosts for drinks and food at a local establishment.