Category: Student News

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.

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.

Also not too long ago, graduate student Jeff Adler returned from attending the Southern California April Meeting on Phonology (SCAMP) at UCSD (April 8-9). He had this to report:

I gave a talk on “Parallelism and conspiracy,” which was a more developed version of my talk from LASC this year. It was a really fun conference that included speakers from across California. I represented UCSC, but Jaye Padgett was also in the audience, and the conference was organized by UCSC undergrad alum Eric Bakovic and included a talk by UCSC grad alum Rachel Walker!

Lydia Werthen, who has just entered the department’s BA-MA program, travelled to Los Angeles a couple weeks ago to present a paper at the Southern California Undergraduate Linguistics Conference (SCULC), which took place at UCLA on Friday, April 2. Lydia presented on her ongoing work on what she calls wh-continuations (true in-situ wh-questions). She sent in this report on her travels:

The SCULC conference was a great experience overall, with many very interesting presentations! We had speakers from many parts of the world, including Canada and even Russia. Our faculty/keynote speaker was Robert Daland, who spoke about speech perception and loanwords — quite fascinating indeed. My presentation went smoothly and I just barely finished in the 12 minutes I was allotted, though I had to rush a bit towards the end. Although I think that the portion of my presentation on ellipsis and the Minimalist Program went over some heads, I really enjoyed the conference, and it was exciting to have this opportunity to present my research!