WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Ryan and Robert’s paper “Accent in Uspanteko” has been accepted for publication at Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. The paper combines formal analysis with language description (based partially on their own fieldwork with Uspanteko, an endangered Mayan language spoken in Guatemala), and began its life as a project for Armin Mester’s pitch accent seminar in Winter 2010.
Discussing significant work in Mayan prosody, the call for papers to the Mayan Prosody Conference (April 20, 2012) mentions the work of Judith Aissen as well as more recent papers by Ryan Bennett, Robert Henderson, and Matt Tucker.
The fourth annual CUSP will take place on February 3rd and 4th, 2012 at the University of Southern California. Two of our own will be presenting: Oliver Northrup (“Japanese Discourse Particles as Markers of Relative Authority”) and Robert Henderson (“A Scalar Account of Mayan Positional Roots”). To see the full program, click here.
This year’s LSA meeting in Portland, Oregon, was a memorable one for the department in many ways. On Saturday evening, the first ever collaborative Presidential address was given by outgoing president Sandy Chung, along with Matt Wagers and their collaborator on Saipan Manny Borja. The address (Bridging Methodologies: Experimental Syntax in the Pacific) dealt with the large question of what the right relation should be between the methodologies of experimental psycholinguistics and field linguistics, and it reported specifically on the results of the collaborative research project on WH-dependencies in Chamorro on which all three have been engaged since the summer of 2011. The speakers were introduced by alumnus Jason Merchant, and the event was attended by members of the Micronesian community in the Northwest.
At the awards ceremony which preceded the Presidential Address, Matt Tucker was presented with one of three awards given for outstanding student abstracts submitted to this year’s meeting.
Meanwhile, at the Business Meeting on the preceding day Jorge Hankamer was inducted, along with nine other distinguished linguists, as a Fellow of the LSA.
In the course of the meeting, papers were presented or co-presented by Scott Anderbois, Ryan Bennett, Amy Rose Deal, Nick Deschenes, Robert Henderson. Wendell Kimper, Bill Ladusaw, Adam Morgan, Matt Tucker and many
alums, undergraduate and graduate, of the program.
All of this lent a distinctly festive air to the annual Santa Cruz party, which was held (without interruption this year) on Saturday evening in the splendor and isolation of the Presidential Suite on the 22nd floor. The party was attended by numerous students, faculty, visitors, alums, friends and hangers-on and featured, for the first time but probably not for the last, an arm-wrestling competition between distinguished alumnae and current faculty members.
Next year, Boston.
Mark Norris has been in Estonia all Fall quarter. As he prepares to come home, he sends us this update on his experiences.
My three months in Estonia have flown by! As with all adventures, there were some difficult times, but overall, my time here has been great. My Estonian language skills have gotten a lot better in addition to my general knowledge about the language. I worked through the “beginner-intermediate” textbook that I have, met with friends at coffee shops, met with a tutor once a week for the last six weeks, watched Estonian TV and listened to Estonian radio. I think the most memorable experience I had actually came during the first weekend here, when my roommate, Külli, invited me to come with her to her family’s farm in the country to help with the harvest of their potato crop.
Work-wise, I finally got some experience doing fieldwork (and later realizing all the things I forgot to ask), I gave a guest lecture to some Intro to Syntax students, and I gave a presentation in English to a group of 10-15 Estonian linguists. The presentation was in English, but there were many lively conversations about the data between audience members in Estonian, much of which I understood. The linguistics community in Estonia is quite vibrant, but also not generative. Apparently, I was even able to bring some new data to the discussion. I also had the pleasure of meeting Mati Erelt, who is basically the father of modern Estonian linguistics.
While Estonia has been very good to me, I have really, really missed all the friendly and intelligent (non-restrictive) members of the UCSC linguistics community! Looking forward to lots of good conversation in the new year, both work-related and not!
Anyone who wants to take a look at pictures and some random discussion of what I’ve been doing here can check out my tumblr.
Our first-year graduate student Adam Morgan is an accomplished cellist, and on Friday, November 18, he performed (together with a few other people…) Beethoven’s Mass in C Major. The house was full, and the orchestra was in excellent form.
Last Friday Ryan Bennett presented his work “Foot structure and cognitive bias: An artificial grammar investigation” at the Phonetics and Phonology Workshop, Stanford University. You can learn about P-Interest, and read Ryan’s abstract, here!