Category: Student News

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.

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.

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!)

Continue Reading SAMKO IN POTSDAM

Filippa Lindahl is a visiting graduate student in the department this year, under the auspices of the LRC. WHASC spoke to Filippa about herself, her research and her plans for her time in Santa Cruz.

WHASC: Could you tell us something about your background, Filippa—how you came to linguistics and so on?

Filippa Lindahl: I actually started out thinking I was going to become a librarian, but got more and more interested in language and grammar. I studied Swedish at the University of Gothenburg, and had Elisabet Engdahl and Lars-Gunnar Andersson as professors. After that I was basically hooked and decided to apply to the PhD program.

WHASC: Could you give us a sense of what questions interest you or what your research program is?

FL: My dissertation project, which I am just about to start, is on relative clause extraction in Swedish, and more specifically on what role information structure could play in relative clause extraction. I’m also interested in placement of object pronouns, and in learning more about how structures with preposed objects are processed.

WHASC: What brought you to Santa Cruz?

FL: I was very helpfully nudged in this direction by Elisabet.

WHASC: What do you hope to get done while you’re here—academically and beyond?

FL: Right now, I’m collecting data for my dissertation and am planning to start writing during my stay, but I also want to use as much of my time as possible to participate in classes and seminars. One thing I’m hoping to do while I’m here is to learn more about psycholinguistics and experimental work. I am also working hard on introducing Swedish fika in the Cave.

WHASC: Well, good luck with that and everything else.