Category: Student News

ADLER AND GUEVARA FOR LSA INSTITUTE IN CHICAGO

It was announced last week that graduate students Jeff Adler and Jed Guevara had received fellowships from the LSA to attend the 2015 Linguistic Summer Institute to be held at the University of Chicago this July.

We asked Jeff and Jed to describe their plans and hopes for the Institute and this was how they responded:

Jeff: I hope to spend the 2015 LSA Summer Institute filling in certain methodological gaps in my intellectual foundation. Specifically, I hope that courses such as Computational Phonology, Intro to Statistics with R, and Advanced Probabilistic Modeling in R can provide me with an understanding of how to use computational and statistical models to inform and shape phonological theory. In addition, I hope courses like Intonational Phonology and Prosodic Typology and Corpus Phonology will teach me some new skills, namely ToBi transcription, acoustic analysis of prosody, and corpus methods. The overall goal in taking such courses is to be able to incorporate these methodologies in my future research as a graduate student. Forming connections with other graduate students and faculty attending the institute is also a secondary, but highly desirable goal of mine. Hope to see you in Chicago!

Jed: I’m going to the Institute to generate research ideas and to learn new skills. As an aspiring Austronesianist/Philippinist, I’m really excited for Aldridge’s Topics in Austronesian syntax. I think it’ll provide me with a good theoretical foundation for core topics concerning languages in the family (verb initial word order, the robust agreement/voice system, and so on), and a good overview of what topics are currently considered “hot”. That should help me frame research questions of my own that can add to the current dialogue. I plan on building my schedule around this course. If schedule permits, I would really like to take Lidz’ Language Acquisition, Levy and Bicknell’s Computational Psycholinguistics, and Phillip’s The Psycholinguistics of Grammar. Taking Lidz’ class is a good opportunity for me to learn from an acquisitionist, and also to network with other linguists interested in language from a developmental perspective. I think the other two classes will be a good way for me to gain a better understanding of how theory, computational modeling, and linguistic data combine to further theoretical understanding. They will also help me generate more experimental project ideas that test/develop the theories that I will have absorbed in Aldridge’s course.

KALIVODA AND ZYMAN RESEARCH ROAD-TRIP

Nick Kalivoda and Erik Zyman recently gave a talk entitled On the Derivation of Relative Clauses in Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec at the 20th annual meeting of the Workshop on Structure and Constituency in Languages of the Americas, at Stanford’s Syntax and Morphology Circle, and at the 41st annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. They report that they received very helpful comments and suggestions at all these venues, and that both conferences featured a wide array of extremely interesting talks.

UNDERGRADUATES WIN RESEARCH AWARDS

It was announced late last week that four undergraduate majors in Linguistics have been honored with HUGRA Awards for 2014-2015. These awards are given by the Humanities Division at UCSC to support and recognize excellence in research by undergraduate students. The awards are made on the basis of a research proposal submitted to the Institute for Humanities Research and adjudicated by a panel of faculty members from across the division. Francisco Delgado won an award for his project on Chamorro Loanword Morphology (advised by Sandy Chung); Eileen O’Neill was recognized for her project on Phonetic and Phonological Change and the Influence of English on Modern Irish (advised by Jaye Padgett); Valery Vanegas was recognized for her project A Study in Voice Quality Using Accelerometers (advised by Grant McGuire) and Jake Vincent for his project on Chamorro Head-Internal Relative Clauses and the Linker (also advised by Sandy Chung). In addition, Jake Vincent’s project was selected to receive the Bertha N. Melkonian Prize, which goes to the most highly rated research proposal in the HUGRA competition each year. Warm congratulations to all.

LSA WINTER MEETING

Meanwhile, much of the department decamped to Portland, Oregon for the 2015 Winter meeting of the Linguistic Society of America between Thursday January 8th and Sunday January 11th. There, Sandy Chung and Matt Wagers gave a joint presentation (with their collaborator Manuel F. Borja of Saipan) on Filler-gap order and online licensing of grammatical relations: evidence from Chamorro. Maziar Toosarvandani gave a presentation to the the annual meeting of SSILA (the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas), a sister society of the LSA whose meeting coincides with the Winter Meeting. Maziar’s talk was on The semantics of durative gemination in Northern Paiute. Bern Samko presented on The emphatic implicature of English verb-phrase preposing, Nate Arnett presented a poster on Interference Effects in Subject-Verb Attachment, while Anna Greenwood had the honor of presenting one of the final papers of the meeting; Anna’s talk was on Substance bias in stress pattern learning. There were in addition many Santa Cruz alumni at the Meeting, and 15 of the presentations in Portland reported on research carried out by graduate or undergraduate alums of the UCSC program.

SAMKO AT STANFORD

A few weeks ago, Bern Samko made her way to Stanford for an invited talk.  She reports:

I traveled slightly north to present at Stanford’s Syntax and Morphology Circle. The talk was called “Topicality, focus, and intonation in English verb-phrase preposing”, and it sparked a lively discussion (which was mostly about neither syntax nor morphology).

INFORMATIONAL MEETING ABOUT THE DEPARTMENT’S AGREEMENTS WITH THE MONTEREY INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

On Friday, November 21st from 2:30-3:30 , The Department will host some representatives of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, who will run an informational workshop about the Department’s program with the Institute. The meeting will take place in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge. Undergraduate Coordinator Susan Welch has this to say about the meeting:

As you may know, the Linguistics Department recently signed a three year agreement with the Monterey Institute of International Studies that will enable students with BA’s in Linguistics or Language Studies to have certain coursework counted towards eligibility for the Institute’s Advanced Entry MATESOL or MATFL program. Please see this link for more information about the agreement. No rsvp needed, and light refreshments provided. We hope those of you who are interested in getting more information about this program will attend!

CUSP REPORT

The UCSC delegation to CUSP Seven at UCLA survived the trip to the southland and returned to Santa Cruz in more or less good order. They sent in the following report during the trek backwards:

The seventh annual meeting of CUSP (California Universities Semantics and Pragmatics) was held at UCLA this past weekend. Among the presenters were Bern Samko (Verum Focus in alternative semantics), Erik Zyman (Lake Pátzcuaro P’urhepecha and the Semantic Typology of Degree Constructions), visiting graduate student Kristen Greer (The partitive structure of quantification), and alumna and CUSP organizer Lauren Winans (Evidential restrictions of `must’ and `will’). Participants enjoyed lively discussions of semantic and pragmatic phenomena in no fewer than nine languages, as well as the balmy LA weather. Despite that balmy weather, it was determined at the meeting that CUSP Eight would be held next year at Stanford.

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