WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Anie Thompson presented work on adjunct mismatches at the Workshop on (Mis)matches in Clause Linkage, held at Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) on April 13-14. The presentations were excellent and the discussion lively. Anie brings back greetings from a number of friends of UCSC Linguistics, including Luis Vicente and Shinichiro Ishihara (among others).
Many congratulations to first-year Ph.D. student Adam Morgan, who was just awarded a prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation. In its own words, the NSF program “recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines”. For this three-year fellowship Adam proposes to investigate through psycholingustic experimentation the strategies by which the parser deals with resumptive pronouns in English and Irish. Another of our department’s graduate students, Katia Kravtchenko, received an honorable mention from the NSF for her proposal. Congratulations, Adam and Katia!
The Institute for Humanities Research has announced the recipients of the Humanities Undergraduate Research Awards (HUGRAs) for academic year 2011-2012. Out of 10 recipients, three were from our department! Congratulations to Shawna Mattison, Matilda Morrison, Nataliya Munishkina, and to their advisors!
Shawna Mattison, Linguistics
“New Methodologies in Psycholinguistics Research”
Mentor: Matthew Wagers, Assistant Professor of LinguisticsMatilda Morrison, Linguistics
“A Dummy in German”
Mentor: Jorge Hankamer, Professor of LinguisticsNataliya Munishkina, Linguistics
“Interaction Across Grammatical Categories: Verbs and Prepositions”
Mentor: Donka Farkas, Professor of Linguistics
Katherine Bruce, a third year undergraduate in the department, accepted a computational linguist position at Fluential, a silicon valley language tech company working on spoken dialogue systems and speech to speech translation. Katherine tells us she is ecstatic about the opportunity to use her training in a cutting-edge field and is looking forward to working with Beth-Ann Hockey, a former member of UCSC’s faculty!
On Saturday, the linguistics department hosted its annual graduate student research conference, LASC. The second- and third-year graduate students (and a visitor!) presenting work were Nate Arnett, Kendra Buchanan, Nick Deschenes, Yasuhiro Iida, Katia Kravtchenko, Oliver Northrup, Bern Samko, and Allan Schwade. These presentations spanned the subfields of linguistics and dealt with aspects of a variety of languages, including English, Hindi, Japanese, Maltese, Russian, and Turkish. (Find the program here, and some photos below.) Chris Barker gave the Distinguished Alumnus Lecture, “How to Sprout”, which engaged with the long tradition of UCSC work on sluicing and sprouting. After the conference, the discussion continued over dinner at a party at the home of Pranav Anand (who deserves thanks and congratulations for organizing Saturday’s events).
As usual, LASC coincided with the department’s Open House weekend for visiting prospective PhD students. A total of seven admitted students were here this week (five of them on Friday and Saturday), attending classes and reading group meetings, meeting with faculty, and being treated to the beauty of campus. Friday’s events culminated in a delicious pizza party hosted by Mark Norris.
The department’s annual Linguistics at Santa Cruz (LASC) conference will take place this Saturday, March 10th, 8:15-4:30, in Humanities One, room 202. The program for the conference is available here. Our guest alum speaker this year is Chris Barker of New York University. As in previous years, LASC overlaps with our Prospective Graduate Student Open House. Please welcome any and all visiting prospectives!
Ryan Bennett recently returned from Yale, where he gave an invited talk entitled “On the prevalence of footing”. The talk focused on formal and experimental evidence for the presence of foot-structure in languages that do not obviously have foot-based stress (based partially on Ryan’s forthcoming dissertation). You can find out more about this work on Ryan’s web page.