WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
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).
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!
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.
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!
HUGRA awards support undergraduate research projects in the humanities. Up to 10 awards in the amount of $500 each are given each year. There are no constraints on the expenditure of the stipend. The top proposal receives the Bertha N. Melkonian prize, an additional $500. Any project involving research within or including any of the humanities disciplines is eligible for consideration. Proposals must be for research to be performed during the 2014-2015 academic year.
Proposals will be judged on the basis of:
Applications consist of:
Thinking about going to graduate school? The Linguistics department is offering a workshop, Applying to Graduate School for Linguistics and Language Studies majors, with Linguistics PhD student Jason Ostrove as presenter. Please note that this workshop is not for Speech Pathology programs, but for students thinking about applying to graduate programs similar to the one here at UCSC. It will take place on Thursday, Nov. 6th from 4-5pm in Humanities 1, room 210. No RSVP needed, just show up!
In the course of the week, the University of Minnesota Press published Deaf Gain, a volume of essays which argue from various perspectives against the deficit view of deafness and which instead frame deafness as a distinct way of being, one which brings intellectual and cultural benefits. Among the contributors to the volume is grad student Clara Sherley-Appel, who coauthored one of the chapters in the book along with John Bonvillian of the University of Virginia. The title of their paper is Manual Signs and Gestures of the Inuit of Baffin Island: Observations during the Three Voyages Led by Martin Frobisher and Clara has this to say about the paper:
The chapter is part of a project I worked on with John Bonvillian at UVA on the use of manual signs and gestures in first contact situations. The primary case study in this chapter concerns the journeys of a privateer of the Elizabethan era named Martin Frobisher. Frobisher was commissioned by Elizabeth to seek a Northwest Passage to what was then known as Cathay. He didn’t find a Northwest Passage (because it doesn’t exist), but the logs and diaries of the crew from the three voyages he led mention using signs and gestures to facilitate contact and trade, and there is some additional evidence that the Inuit of Baffin Island had elaborated sign systems used for hunting and other purposes, making it an interesting case study.