Category: Student News

WAGERS IN MASSACHUSETTS

Matt Wagers, who is on sabbatical, filed this report:

I went to UMass for the 3rd American International Morphology Meeting. There I gave a tutorial workshop with Kie Zuraw on building digital resources on under-resourced languages. Essentially, we used Kie’s workflow for building her Tagalog corpus from web text to put together a Chamorro corpus; and then we attempted to cross-validate it with the behavioral data that Sandy Chung, Manny Borja, and I have been collecting in the Marianas — subjective frequency ratings, listening times, etc. In attendance were alumni Ryan Bennett (Yale) and Abby Kaplan (Utah). The notes from the workshop are available here. The next day, current Ph.D. student Jason Ostrove opened the conference with his paper “Allomorphy and Locality in the Irish Verbal Complex”. Abby gave a poster on “Paradigm (Non-)Uniformity of Continuously-Valued Features in an Exemplar Framework.” Former Foundation Fellow Scott Seyfarth talked about acoustic cues in morphologically-distinct homophones. Other Santa Cruzans spotted at the conference include undergraduate alumni Caroline Andrews and Shayne Sloggett, who are both now Ph.D. students at UMass. Shayne was one of the central student organizers of the conference.

I stuck around to plan some experiments on ambiguity resolution with Brian Dillon. I also gave a talk in their Psycholinguistics Workshop on the insertion of null pronouns in incremental structure building, using Chamorro data as the test case. Spotted roaming around the halls of the department’s new digs were Nick LeCara (M.A. 2010) and Wendell Kimper (Visiting Assistant Professor 2011-12).

ELLIPSIS AT SANTA CRUZ

The research group on ellipsis SCEC has now swung into high gear with the aid of an infusion of funding that arrived in early summer from the National Science Foundation via Project 1451819, the Implicit Content of Sluicing. The group’s initial annotation effort continues to focus on sluicing, and a group of graduate students, including Kelsey Kraus, Karen Duek, Margaret Kroll, and Deniz Rudin worked with Pranav Anand and Jim McCloskey during the summer, both on the intellectual issues raised by sluicing and on some of the hard operational problems encountered in the annotation effort. Meanwhile, a second group of undergraduate research assistants (Brooks Blair, Mansi Desai, Zach Lebowski, Lyndsey Olsen, Reuben Raff, Lydia Werthen, and Anissa Zaitsu) joined the project to train as the second-generation annotation team. Training took place during the summer, and the group began work in earnest at the beginning of Fall Quarter. M.A. student Chelsea Miller and B.A. alum Rachelle Boyson act as lead annotators and coordinators of the annotation effort. Co-PI Dan Hardt joined the group for an intense week of collaboration in early August. Later in the Fall, Ph.D. alum Jason Merchant, who wrote the book on sluicing, will be visiting for several days as a consultant and advisor on the project.

UCSC LINGUISTS AT THE 2016 LSA MEETING

Four UCSC graduate students will deliver papers at the Linguistic Society of America’s 2016 Annual Meeting, to be held January 7-10 in Washington, D.C. Lauren McGarry will give a paper on “East Slavic Paucal Constructions: A Cross-Slavic Assessment of Pesetsky 2013”. Jason Ostrove will give a paper on “Allomorphy and Locality in the Irish Verbal Complex”. Bern Samko will give a paper on “Verum Focus in Alternative Semantics”. Erik Zyman will give a paper on “Quantifier Float and the Driving Force for Movement: Evidence from Janitzio P’urhepecha”. The UCSC alums delivering papers include Eric Bakovic (B.A. 1993), Boris Harizanov (Ph.D. 2014), Aaron Kaplan (Ph.D. 2008), Eric Potsdam (Ph.D. 1996), and Jason Riggle (M.A. 1999), as well as former faculty colleagues Shoko Hamano and Lev Blumenfeld. Posters will be presented by alums Nicholas LaCara (M.A. 2010), Anya Lunden (Ph.D. 2006), Jeffrey Runner (B.A. 1989; now Professor and Chair of Linguistics, University of Rochester), and Matthew A. Tucker (Ph.D. 2013). For the full program, go here.

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.

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