WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
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.
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.
Meanwhile it was also announced that graduate students Nick Kalivoda and Erik Zyman had won Summer Research Fellowships from the Institute for Humanities Research at UCSC. Both awards are meant to fund summer field trips.
Now that Mark Norris and Anie Thompson have survived the ordeal and successfully defended their dissertations, Oliver Northrup and Judith Fiedler are up next. Oliver defends his thesis Grounds for Commitment on Wednesday morning May 28th at 10.00am in Humanities One, Room 202. Judith’s turn comes on Tuesday June 3rd at 4.00pm in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge, when she will present and defend her dissertation Germanic It-Clefts: Structural Variation and Semantic Uniformity.
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.