WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
We are very happy to be able to report that Boris Harizanov has been offered and has formally accepted a tenure-track position in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University. Boris will take up his new position in the coming academic year and he will join fellow alums Chris Potts and Vera Gribanova on the Stanford faculty.
Jason Ostrove will be giving a talk entitled “The Extended vP Domain in a Songhay Language” for the first S-Circle of the quarter. The talk will be given this Friday, April 4, at 3:30pm in the LCR.
The quarter finally ended and LASC 2014, the department’s annual celebration of graduate student research, took place. The pictures are here (courtesy of Oliver Northrup). Karl DeVries, Clara Sherley-Appel, Brianna Kaufman, Erik Zyman, Karen Duek, Anna Greenwood, Nick Kalivoda, along with guest speaker Ruth Kramer of Georgetown University delivered papers on an impressively wide range of topics in current linguistics—real-time processing of agreement, sublexical coordination, the acquisition of unproductive morphological processes, the typology of degree constructions, polysemy and reference, phonological acquisition, loanword adaptation, and the morphosyntax of gender—all under the watchful eye of LASC Czarina Sandy Chung. A party of considerable proportions ensued at the midtown home of Sandy and Jim McCloskey.
Meanwhile, Matt Wagers and Emily Pendleton travelled to CUNY 2014, the 27th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio to give research presentations. Matt gave a poster on Relative clause processing and competing pressures in an agreement-rich language, which presented some of the results emerging from the NSF-funded research project he is engaged in in collaboration with Sandy Chung and Manuel F. Borja. Emily presented collaborative work that she and Matt have been engaged in on Animacy and the active construction of filler-gap dependencies in relative clauses. Also presenting at the conference was alumnus Chris Potts of Stanford, who gave an invited talk on Characterizing expressive and social meaning with large corpora as part of the Special Session on Experimental Pragmatics. To learn more about all of these papers, have a look at the abstract booklet for the conference, which is available here.
Jason Ostrove will be giving a presentation at ACAL 45 (Annual Conference on African Linguistics) this April. His talk is called “The Extended vP Domain in a Songhay Language.” Wish him luck!
Record freezing temperatures did not stop a sizable contingent of UCSC linguists from attending the 2014 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Minneapolis. A highlight of the meeting was the Awards Ceremony, at which Adrian Brasoveanu received the Early Career Award for 2014. Presenting or co-presenting papers were grad students Mark Norris, Boris Harizanov, Bern Samko, Clara Sherley-Appel, and Judith Fiedler; Anie Thompson and Mark Norris presented a poster, which was hard to get close to, because it seemed to have a permanent throng of attendees. Numberous alumni of the doctoral program also presented papers, including Matt Tucker (NYU), Andy Wedel (Arizona), Jason Merchant (Chicago), Ruth Kramer (Georgetown), Aaron Kaplan (Utah), Lynsey Wolter (Wisconsin-Eau-Clair), Pete Alrenga (Boston University), Chris Kennedy (Chicago), and Adam Ussishkin (Arizona). Also there were Nate Arnett, chair Sandy Chung, Matt Wagers and Jorge Hankamer, who hosted the traditionally lively Santa Cruz party, which was attended by numerous current and former Santa Cruz linguists.
Congratulations to Language Studies majors Kiirsti Hensle-Peterson and Kati Teague both of whom graduated in Fall 2013 and earned Honors in the major.