HONORS IN THE MAJOR
Congratulations to Language Studies majors Kiirsti Hensle-Peterson and Kati Teague both of whom graduated in Fall 2013 and earned Honors in the major.
Category: Student News
UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH AWARDS
Congratulations also go to Mike Titone and to Abbey Katz, two undergraduate majors in Linguistics. It was announced on January 7th that Abbey and Mike had both won 2013-2014 Humanities Undergraduate Research Awards (HUGRA). Abbey’s project (directed by Junko Ito) is on Modern Hebrew Nicknames and Phonology while Mike’s, directed by Adrian Brasoveanu), deals with The Semantics of Nothing if Not Constructions
HARIZANOV DEFENDS DISSERTATION
Congratulations to Boris Harizanov for a spirited and successful defense of his doctoral dissertation On the Mapping from Syntax to Morphophonology on Friday December 6th. A large crowd of faculty, graduate students, undergraduate students and friends quizzed and supported Boris on the occasion. There was an equally spirited and lively party at Sandy Chung and Jim McCloskey’s house following the event, during which there was an unprecedented outburst of Balkan dancing late in the evening. The cat somehow survived these traumatizing events.
HARIZANOV DISSERTATION DEFENSE
Boris Harizanov will defend his doctoral dissertation on Friday, December 6th at 3:30pm in Humanities One, room 210. Boris’ title is “On the Mapping from Syntax to Morphophonology”. The dissertation advisor is Sandy Chung and the members of the committee are Jim McCloskey and Jorge Hankamer.
BRIANNA KAUFMAN PRESENTS AT STANFORD
Brianna Kaufman traveled to Palo Alto this week to give a talk at Stanford’s P-interest reading group. Her talk was entitled Reduplicating in Turkish and Consequences for Distributed Morphology and stemmed from a project developed in Jorge Hankamer‘s morphology seminar last quarter. The talk was followed by a lively discussion.
MARK NORRIS PRESENTS AT STANFORD
Mark Norris also travelled recently to Stanford to present some of his current research. Mark sent in this report:
I presented some of the results of my research on concord to the Stanford Syntax/Morphology Circle (SMircle) in a talk entitled `Nominal Concord in Estonian.’ The talk was well received; I got some good feedback, and got to talk about some of the bigger questions about concord. Everyone was very friendly and helpful. To top it off, I had dinner with UCSC alumna Vera Gribanova afterwards—just days before her baby daughter was born!
Maziar Toosarvandani will be giving a talk in the same series on Tuesday November 5th at Stanford. Maziar’s title is Agreement in Zazaki and the nature of nominal concord and it reports on joint work with Coppe van Urk of MIT.
SAMKO IN POTSDAM
Graduate student Bern Samko is spending most of this year at Potsdam University in Germany. After she got settled, Bern took some time to update us on how things are going for her.
WHASC: What are you doing in Germany? What do you hope to gain from your experience there?
Bern: I’m in Germany because I have the opportunity to work with a whole group of people whose work is related to information structure and my dissertation project is an exploration of the linkages between syntax and the expression of information structure concepts. Everyone involved in the research group that I am associated with (Sonderforschungsbereich 632) works on some aspect of the syntax or semantics or prosody or processing or acquisition (or etc …) of information structure. So I hope that I’ll get new ideas and perspectives on my own work from being surrounded by people who are doing related research. (So far, only one person has laughed when I told them I work on the information structure of English!)