WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Graduate student Tommy Denby has written with passion, insight, and tenderness about an important relationship in his life in a piece published in the September edition of The New Yorker (online version). Thanks to diehard Mets fan Judith Fiedler for the link.
WHASC Co-editor Oliver Northrup has made changes to our newsletter that (we think) significantly improve its look and functionality. We hope you like it!
Please send any feedback on this new design directly to Oliver.
This Wednesday (October 12) at 5 pm Boris Harizanov will present his recent work on clitic doubling at the Stanford Syntax and Morphology Circle. The title of his talk is “Clitic Doubling as Movement: An analysis of object clitics in Bulgarian”, and more information (including an abstract) can be found here.
Ryan Bennett has returned from a two-week research trip to Japan. While in Tokyo, Ryan ran more than 40 subjects in a dissertation-related artificial grammar experiment. The experiments were conducted at International Christian University (where our department’s own Junko Ito is stationed as director of the UC’s EAP Japan program), and at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL). Ryan also presented his experimental research at the September meeting of the Tokyo Circle of Phonologists, and gave another talk at ICU on pronoun postposing in Irish (joint work with Jim McCloskey and Emily Elfner of UMass Amherst).
Other highlights of the trip included a Seibu Lions baseball game, a surprisingly fierce typhoon, and many good meals with Japanese friends and colleagues.
Congratulations to Mark Norris, who passed his Qualifying Exam, based on his paper titled “The Emergence of Locality in Concord”, on Thursday June 9. The Examining committee consisted of Jorge Hankamer (dissertation advisor), Jim McCloskey, Sandra Chung, and Eric Potsdam of the University of Florida (and Ph.D. alumnus) as external member.
Grad Matt Tucker’s recent successful submission to the LSA annual meeting, An ergative analysis of Acehnese tripartite voice, was honored as the third runner-up of the 2011 LSA Annual Meeting Student Abstract Award. The award aims to highlight student abstracts of high quality which were accepted for presentation at the LSA meeting this January in Portland, Oregon. Matt will present his paper as well as be honored at the awards ceremony on January 7th during the conference.
In connection with their Humanities Undergraduate Research Awards (HUGRAs), Sam Corbin and Devin Tankersley presented their research at the annual HUGRA Symposium last spring. Caroline Andrews, who also received a HUGRA, was not able to present at the Symposium, because she was presenting at the Experimental Pragmatics Conference in Barcelona, Spain!
Congratulations are also due to our five student presenters at last spring’s Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC), who gave outstanding presentations: Saralynn Emery, Joseph King, Matilda Morrison, Lauren Negrete, and Devin Tankersley. During the conference, Matilda Morrison was seen to sneak out – in order to attend the Deans’/Chancellor’s Award ceremony, where she was honored for her Chancellor’s Award.