WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
S-Circle will have its final meeting of the year at 3:30 on Friday June 6th (D-Day and also Sweden’s National Day), when LRC visitor Filippa Lindahl from the University of Göteborg in Sweden will present her ongoing work on island-violating movement in Swedish.
Among the most important events of the week ahead are two dissertation defenses. Mark Norris will defend his dissertation A Theory of Nominal Concord on Tuesday May 20th in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge. Anie Thompson follows suit on Thursday May 22nd in Humanities One, Room 202, defending her dissertation Beyond Deep and Surface: Explorations in the Typology of Anaphora. Next up is Oliver Northrup who will be defending his dissertation on Grounds for Commitment on Wednesday May 28th, at 10am also in Humanities One, Room 202.
It was announced in the course of the week that two undergraduate research projects in Linguistics had won Dean’s Awards for Undergraduate Research. One of them was Michael Titone‘s project on The Semantics of Nothing If Not Constructions, which was advised by Adrian Brasoveanu. The other was a joint project on The Causative Construction produced by participants in Jorge Hankamer and Jim McCloskey‘s Syntax Four class (or was it Syntax Five?) in Winter 2014. The collaborators on this second project were Rachelle Boyson, Nich Eggert, Hannah Elston, Britt Fadelli, Sean Johnson, Cecilia Lopez, Chelsea Miller, Vince Del Prado, Kristen Sheets, and Tony Zavala. The honorees will receive their awards from Dean Bill Ladusaw at the Spring Awards Ceremony on Thursday, May 29th, 4—6pm, Humanities One, Room 210.
This past weekend saw the eighth meeting of SULA (Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas), which took place at the University of British Columbia in mountainous Vancouver. Among the speakers were Maziar Toosarvandani, Amy Rose Deal, and Erik Zyman. Attendees enjoyed stimulating talks and posters on semantic and pragmatic phenomena in a wide variety of American languages, as well as the atmosphere of lively conviviality. The program is available here. Some of the talks were held at UBC’s Museum of Anthropology, in a room surrounded by beautiful Pacific Northwest First Nations art.
Chelsea Miller has been selected to receive a 2014 Chancellor’s Award for Undergraduate Research. Chelsea is to receive the award for her project Parallel Subject Identification in Ellipsis Resolution, which was directed by Matt Wagers. Chelsea’s project was ranked among the top 15 selected from among 100 nominations.
Erik Zyman will be giving an informal talk on Tuesday, May 13, at 3:30 in the Linguistics Common Room. The title is On the Semantics of P’urhepecha Degree Constructions and this is a practice talk for Erik’s upcoming presentation at SULA 8 in Vancouver. Amy Rose Deal and Maziar Toosarvandani will also be presenting at the conference.
Oliver Northrup will be among those PhD students defending their doctoral dissertations in coming weeks. The working title of Oliver’s dissertation (soon to be finalized) is Grounds for Commitment and the committee consists of Donka Farkas (Chair), Pranav Anand, and Adrian Brasoveanu. The defense will take place in Humanities One, Room 202 on Wednesday May 28th.