WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
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.
Carolynn Jimenez is a senior pursuing a double major in Computer Science and Linguistics with a plan to graduate this year. She works as a Research Assistant in the Natural Language and Dialogue Systems Lab and is a UC Leads scholar. It was announced last week that Carolynn is to receive a Dean’s Award in the School of Engineering for her work in Marilyn Walker‘s lab on Evaluating Dynamic Storytelling in Fables.
Mark Norris will defend his dissertation in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge between 4pm and 6pm on Tuesday May 20th. The title of Mark’s dissertation is A Theory of Nominal Concord, the dissertation advisor is Jorge Hankamer, and the other members of the committee are Sandy Chung and Jim McCloskey.
Not to be outdone, Anie Thompson will defend her dissertation just two days later, on Thursday May 22nd in Humanities One, Room 202. Anie’s title is still under construction but will be revealed shortly. The dissertation advisor is also Jorge Hankamer, and the other members of the committee are Pranav Anand and Jim McCloskey.
Jason Ostrove travelled to the University of Kansas at the end of the week to present a paper at ACAL 2014, the 45th Annual Conference on African Linguistics. Jason’s paper (whose title was The Extended vP Domain in a Songhay Language) centered on word order variation in transitive clauses in Songhay (the topic of his recent S-circle presentation). Among the other speakers at ACAL was alumna Ruth Kramer, who gave one of the plenary talks.
We are happy to be able to announce that Mark Norris has been offered and has accepted a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Linguistic at the University of Oklahoma. At Oklahama, Mark will join alumnus Dylan Herrick who has been at Oklahoma since 2006.
We are also very happy to be able to announce that graduate student Nick Kalivoda has won an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Nick’s project centers on loanword adaptation in the Zapotec of Teotitlán del Valle and grows out of his long-term collaboration with undergraduate Teresa Martinez, who is a native speaker of the language. Nick’s fellowship is one of just ten awarded by the Foundation in the field of Linguistics this year.