Category: Student News

SUMMER ADVENTURES

Nate Arnett travelled to AMLaP XX, the 20th annual Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing conference at The Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in Edinburgh, Scotland. Nate delivered a poster Case and finiteness versus clausal position in subject-verb attachment, presenting research that grew out of his dissertation research and collaborative work with Matt Wagers. The poster presented the results of a series of experiments and computational simulations. In addition to the many excellent talks and posters on bleeding-edge Psycholinguistics research, Nate caught up with other members of the UCSC Linguistics community, including alumni Matt Tucker, Adam Morgan, Shayne Slogget, as well as former speakers, friends, and colleagues too numerous to list (you know who you are). Along the way, Nate participated in a workshop on the role of (working) memory in sentence processing, generously hosted by the Maryland Language Science Center at
Kiplin Hall in the north of England. (The connections between Kiplin and (U)MD are interesting, and are well worth a look.)

Nick Kalivoda presented joint work with Erik Zyman at a September meeting of the University of Gothenburg’s Grammar Seminar (Grammatikseminariet). The talk was entitled On the Derivation of Relative Clauses in Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec.

September saw the nineteenth meeting of Sinn und Bedeutung, which was held at the Georg August University in Göttingen, the German town where Frege lived from 1871 to 1873. Among the presenters there were Karen Duek, who reported on joint work with Adrian Brasoveanu (The polysemy of container pseudo-partitives), and Erik Zyman, who presented On the semantics of P’urhepecha degree constructions. The complete program may be viewed here. Participants enjoyed the great variety of semantics and pragmatics talks they had to choose from and the conference’s vibrant international atmosphere.

Jim McCloskey stopped off at MIT on his way back from Ireland to California for a three-day visit, in the course of which he gave a colloquium and met with faculty and graduate students.

Clara Sherley-Appel gave an invited talk at the Linguistics Department of Stony Brook University on September 10th as part of their Brown Bag series. Her talk centered on her ongoing work on the analysis of Turkish relative clauses and the abstract is available here.

MOVING ON

Peter Fabian will enter the Master’s Program in Education at Stanford University starting at the end of June, 2014.

Brianna Kaufman will be traveling around the US, Mexico, and Chile, and then will be entering the Peace Corps.

Rachel Hart will enter the Master’s Program in Speech Pathology at CSU East Bay in Fall 2014.

Michelle Laszlo-Rath is going to the Master’s program in Speech Pathology at the University of Memphis.

Alice Nicholls, who graduated in 2011, will be starting a program in Speech and Language Pathology at CSU East Bay in the fall.

Arianna Puopolo will enter the Master’s Program in Education at the University of California, Berkeley.

Lindsay Ress is moving on to the Master’s program in Speech Pathology at San Jose State University.

Saskia Salm will enter the Master’s Program in Social Work at the University of Southern California.

Jennifer Scott will start the Master’s Program in Applied Linguistics at Boston University in January 2015.

Devin Tankersley will enter the MA program in Linguistics at Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, having won a competitive scholarship from the Taiwanese Ministry of Education for the program.

Mallory Turnbull will begin the Master’s program in Speech Pathology at San Jose State University in the coming Fall.

Nicholas Winter will be entering the PhD program in Linguistics at Rutgers in the coming Fall semester.

Congratulations and good luck to all.

ENDLESS SUMMER

Nick Kalivoda will be traveling to Oaxaca to conduct fieldwork on Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec. Nick’s work will focus on the language’s agreement system, and on a continuing investigation of relative clause structure and binding non-connectivity—part of an ongoing project with Erik Zyman.

Bern Samko will travel to Leuven/Louvain in Flanders (Belgium) on June 13th to give an invited presentation to the FEST group at the University of Leuven on her ongoing research on syntax and information structure in English.

Erik Zyman will be traveling to Janitzio, an island on Lake Pátzcuaro in the state of Michoacán in central-western Mexico, to continue his work on P’urhepecha. He will be investigating the clause structure of this language, and specifically the syntax of the verb phrase.

Amy Rose Deal will travel to Israel in July for the workshop Allomorphy: its logic and limitations, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Also expected to be in attendance are alums Ruth Kramer and Peter Svenonius. Amy Rose’s paper for the conference deals with certain interesting patterns of plural marking and double reduplication in Nez Perce.

Grant McGuire will be presenting at the upcoming LabPhon 14 conference at the NINJAL Institute in Tachikawa, Japan on July 24-27th. The oral presentation program is here. Grant’s talk is titled Stereotypes predict memory effects for voices. Junko Ito and Armin Mester will also be at the conference.

Jaye Padgett will be in Ireland for the last two weeks of June to do more ultrasound fieldwork in Conamara, together with collaborator Máire Ní Chiosáin of University College Dublin. Also involved in this ongoing project are Grant McGuire and alumnus Ryan Bennett of Yale.

Maziar Toosarvandani will be devoting the summer to some intense fieldwork on Northern Paiute with the Mono Lake community near Bridgeport in eastern California.

Matt Wagers and Sandy Chung will return twice to the islands of Saipan and Rota in the Northern Mariana Islands to continue their psycholinguistic work on Chamorro. They will collect new data on relative clause comprehension in June, and relative clause production in September. Back in Santa Cruz, the Digital Chamorro Group will be working hard: Scarlett Clothier-Goldschmidt, the 2013-2014 NSF REU fellow, will continue her corpus-based research on person-animacy constraints in Chamorro, while Karl DeVries, the NSF Graduate Research Associate, will resume his work on building digital tools for using the Chamorro dictionary database.

FIEDLER DEFENSE

The final PhD defense of the season took place when Judith Fiedler successfully defended her dissertation on Germanic It-Clefts on Tuesday afternoon June 3rd. The committee consisted of Donka Farkas and Jim McCloskey as co-chairs along with Jorge Hankamer as third member.

HONORS IN THE MAJOR

It was announced that seniors Chase Dontanville and Vicky (Ji Sun) Lee had been awarded honors in the Language Studies major, while Will Buchanan, Scarlett Clothier-Goldschmidt, Chelsea Miller and Michael Titone all received Honors in Linguistics.

HUMANITIES AWARDS CEREMONY

At the Humanities Spring Awards celebration on Thursday May 29th, Abbey Katz presented her HUGRA-award winning poster on Hebrew Nicknames and Phonology, while Michael Titone presented the paper that won him a Dean’s Undergraduate Research Award (On the Semantics of the `Nothing if Not’ constructions). Also at the event Chelsea Miller celebrated her Chancellor’s Award for Undergraduate Research (on the processing of ellipsis in English) with her advisor Matt Wagers and chair Sandy Chung. Also celebrating was the Syntax Five Gang (Tony Zavala, Nich Eggert, Sean Johnson, Vince Del Prado, Hannah Elston, Kristen Sheets, Rachelle Boyson, Chelsea Miller, and Britt Fadelli) who had also just received a Dean’s award for their collaborative project on English causatives. A subset of the group paused to have their picture taken with Jorge Hankamer who, along with Jim McCloskey, advised the project.

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