Category: Student News

LINGUISTIC INSTITUTE REPORT

Jeff Adler and Jed Guevara attended the LSA’s 2015 Linguistic Institute, which was held July 6-31 at the University of Chicago. Here are their reports:

Jeff:

The LSA Linguistic Institute was a fantastic time. The courses were intellectually engaging in introducing me to unfamiliar areas of linguistics. I took Computational Phonology, Intonational Phonology, Intro to Statistics with R, Word Prosody, and Intro to Morphosyntax (co-taught by UCSC alum Vera Gribanova). These courses were great, but perhaps the most exciting part of the LSA Institute was being introduced to the greater community of linguists. I spent many a late night discussing linguistics and whatever else with grad students and professors alike. Overall, attending the institute imparted to me a sense of the fun of doing linguistics.

Jed:

I had a fabulous experience at the LSA Summer Institute! I got to take courses that gave me a good primer on the subfields I’m interested in, like morphosyntax and psycholinguistics; courses that provided an overview of “hot” topics in the language family I work on (Austronesian); and courses that taught me skills I can incorporate into my own research, like Exploiting Freely Available Web Data for Linguistic Research and Generalized Additive Modeling. The Summer Institute was a good venue to network with professors and fellow grad students, to see what they are doing, and perhaps to make contacts for future collaborations. What better way to do all that than over wine, food, and live music? (Context: the reception after each keynote address had karaoke, a live band, finger foods, beer and/or wine!) Looking forward to the 2017 Institute. 😀

WELCOME!

A special welcome to incoming graduate students Lauren McGarry, Tom Roberts, Kelsey Sasaki, and Jake Vincent!

Please also welcome the Department’s LRC visitors for 2015-16. Jun Yang, who is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, does research on phonology and the syntax-prosody interface. Andreas Walker, a graduate student from the University of Konstanz, is writing a dissertation on counterfactual donkey sentences. Three other LRC visitors will be on campus from time to time: Dan Hardt, who is Associate Professor of IT Management at the Copenhagen Business School, is co-PI with Pranav Anand and Jim McCloskey on their NSF project, The Implicit Content of Sluicing. Craig Martell is Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Naval Postgraduate School. Dick Oehrle is former Chief Linguist and Senior Manager at Ernst & Young LLP.

UCSC LINGUISTS ON THE ROAD

UCSC linguists will travel from drought-stricken California to three conferences in October. Matt Wagers and UCLA’s Kie Zuraw will open the American International Morphology Meeting (AIMM3) to be held Oct. 2-4 at UMass Amherst, with a tutorial on building digital resources for research on under-resourced languages. Jason Ostrove will give a paper (“Allomorphy and locality in the Irish verbal complex”) the next day. Also presenting papers at AIMM3 are former Foundation Fellow Scott Seyfarth and Ph.D. alum Abby Kaplan.

Donka Farkas will give an invited talk at the annual meeting of the Israel Association for Theoretical Linguistics (ITAL31), to be held Oct. 13-14 at Bar-Ilan University. Donka’s talk (“Assertions, polar questions, and the land in-between”) is based on joint work with ILLC’s Floris Roelofsen. The same day, Maziar Toosarvandani will give a colloquium at Boston University (“How imperfect is the imperfective aspect? Durative gemination in Northern Paiute and crosslinguistic variation in aspectual semantics”). Maziar will go on to present a poster (“Vocabulary insertion and locality: Verb suppletion in Northern Paiute”) at the North East Linguistics Society (NELS46), to be held Oct. 16-18 at Concordia University.

FOLEY IN GEORGIA

Steven Foley, who is just back from a trip to Tbilisi, reports:

Having been studying the Georgian language in one way or another since I was in middle school, it’d been high time for me to actually visit the place it’s spoken. And I finally got my excuse this summer, when I had a paper accepted to the 11th Tbilisi Symposium on Logic, Language, and Cognition (TbiLLC). I arrived in the capital city two weeks before the conference to see some of the country I’ve been interested in for so long — and Georgia did not disappoint. It’s a land of rugged beauty, delicious cheap food, intimidating hospitality, and (of course) linguistic richness. Tbilisi itself is quite charming, if you manage to avoid being run over by speeding taxis. Just around the corner from one another are ancient churches, stark Soviet monuments, and modern homes of new oligarchs. I also got a few chances to trek outside the city. One such excursion was to Vardzia, an 11th century cave city hewn into a mountainside. Oh, and the conference was pretty fun. I presented in a workshop on obligatoriness organized by UMass’s Rajesh Bhatt & Vincent Homer. Also on the TbiLLC program were some enlightening tutorials on semantic fieldwork by UBC’s Lisa Matthewson, a presentation on a syntactically- & morphologically-annotated Georgian corpus I’m itching to use, and some logic talks. But undoubtedly the best part of my trip was the food. I gorged myself daily on exquisite produce, hearty fist-sized dumplings, eggplant slathered with walnut paste, tarragon soda, fried garlicky chicken, tannic orange wines fermented in clay pots, and all manner of cheese-filled breads. After a 20-hour blur of travel it’s hard to believe I’m already back in Santa Cruz. It sure took me a while to finally get to Georgia, but I don’t think it’ll be long before I’m there again.

CLOTHIER-GOLDSCHMIDT DEFENDS MA THESIS

When not acting as LURC photographer, Scarlett Clothier-Goldschmidt found time, on June 2, to successfully defend her MA Thesis: The distribution and processing of referential expressions: evidence from English and Chamorro. Her committee was Matt Wagers (chair), Sandy Chung and Adrian Brasoveanu. The thesis was a broad investigation of how nominal expressions are mapped to argument positions, both as a function of morphological constraints (Chamorro’s person-animacy hierarchy), incremental processing principles (English relative clause processing), and discourse goals and functions (an analysis of blogposts in terms of Centering Theory). It draws upon diverse sources of evidence, including Chamorro-to-English translations of bible verses, a reading time study, and an annotated corpus of blogposts. The committee praised the research for its thoughtfulness and intellectual breadth.

UNDERGRADUATE HONORS

Also honored this week are undergrads Abbey Katz, Eileen O’Neill, Jake Vincent and Chantale Yunt, all of whom were awarded Honors in the Linguistics Major. Particular congratulations go to Eileen, who won Highest Honors, a rare achievement indeed. Adam Fox, Lauren Jaffe-O’Malley and Hannah Malone all won Honors in the Language Studies major. Many congratulations to all.

GREENWOOD, OSTROVE AND ZYMAN WIN SUMMER RESEARCH AWARDS

Graduate students Anna Greenwood, Jason Ostrove, and Erik Zyman also received the good news this week that they had won summer research awards from the Institute for Humanities Research. Anna won a summer dissertation research award for work towards her thesis on The Role of Channel Bias in Naturalness Effects. Jason’s award will go to support his work with the local Mixtec community on the complex tonal system of that language, work which has both a theoretical component and a practical and community-based component (the development of a viable writing system for this largely unwritten language). Erik’s award will fund his return to the island of Janitzio on Lake Pátzcuaro in the state of Michoacán, Mexico, to continue working with native speakers of P’urhepecha to elucidate aspects of the language’s syntax. In particular, he will be investigating apparent raising to object out of finite clauses in this language and its implications for the theory of movement.

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