Category: Talks

As previously reported, last week saw California hosting two specialized linguistics conferences. In continuing coverage, we have first-hand reports from both events.

First, graduate student Jeff Adler reports from SoCal:

The 2016 Annual Meeting in Phonology at USC was an inspiring affair. The talks ranged in topic from Variation, to Maximum Entropy Learning, to the reality of various phonological representations. Jesse and I received very positive feedback on our poster, and I also received positive feedback on my own poster. Fellow Santa Cruzers included Brian Smith, who presented a poster with Claire Moore-Cantwell, Ryan Bennett, who gave a talk, Rachel Walker, who did a great job organizing the conference, and Eric Bakovic, who was a valiant audience participant. Rachel strongly hinted that UCSC should host the conference sometime…

For a debrief on what happened in Santa Cruz, we turn to professor Adrian Brasoveanu:

California Semantics and Pragmatics (CUSP) 9 took place on our campus last weekend (October 21-22, 2016) and it was a smashing success: great talks, very interesting discussions and the usual very warm and supportive CUSP atmosphere. Special thanks to the local UCSC organizers professor Pranav Anand and graduate students Kelsey Kraus and Margaret Kroll for making this one of the best CUSPs to date, as well as Daniel Lassiter from Stanford who generously hosted the CUSP bbq party. See you next year!

For those who weren’t there, you can experience CUSP in 10 seconds, thanks to pictures taken by Stanford graduate student and CUSP presenter Lelia Glass (thanks Lelia!).

*Sadly, it appears that all English words containing CUSP are too toothsome for a headline. A shame it wasn’t shark week.

NELS 47 was held one weekend ago, featuring (as we noted) talks by our own Jeff Adler, Margaret Kroll, Deniz Rudin, and Ivy Sichel (among others). In the interest of experiential intersubjectivity, here are their perspectives, unedited:

via Jeff:

NELS 47 was a great experience! While phonologists may have been few in number, the quality of the p-side talks more than made up for the scarce quantity. Jesse Zymet, my co-author, and I, received useful feedback on our talk. And, I also felt very strong about my karaoke performance of the Elton John classic ‘Tiny Dancer.’

UCSC Lang studies undergraduate alum (’06) and recent USC PhD (’16), Ellen O’Connor gave a really nice talk on ‘The accidental ambiguity of Inversion Illusions.’

per Deniz:

A veritable invading army of current and former UCSC affiliates descended upon sleepy little Amherst, MA to stare at its trees’ firecolored fall leaves and talk about linguistics. Current grads Margaret Kroll & Deniz Rudin talked (jointly) about sluicing, and current grad Jeff Adler talked (with Jesse Zymet) about irreducible parallelism in process interactions; freshly-hired associate professor Ivy Sichel spoke on extraction from relative clauses, and though he was not an enfleshed presence, visiting assistant professor Brian Smith’s spirit was palpably apprehendable as his collaborator Claire Moore-Cantwell discussed emergent idiosyncracy in English comparatives. Former faculty member Amy Rose Deal gave a talk (and chaired a session), and former visiting faculty members Wendell Kimper and Michela Ippolito gave posters, as did former visiting students Andreas Walker and Annemarie van Dooren; graduate alumnus Eric Potsdam gave a talk (with Daniel Edmiston), and graduate alumnus Matt Tucker gave a poster (with Diogo Almeida). Undergraduate alumnus Shayne Sloggett gave a talk (with Brian Dillon). The circle expands; our tendrils reach ever further. Many former UCSC prospective graduate students were sighted, and whenever possible chastised for their inexplicably misguided life choices. A significant amount of merriment managed to seep into the cracks between somber discussions of our mutual intellectual concerns: Facebook friends were accumulated; startlingly generously-portioned drinks were drunk; stories were recounted; songs were sung, with a uniform degree of confidence and enthusiasm shared by performers possessing wildly various quantities of skill. It was a nice weekend.

from Ivy:

The talks that I attended at NELS were, as a whole, very good. A surprising range of languages were represented, new data was presented, and new generalizations were formulated. In general, the work seemed to be engaging with broad theoretical and empirical issues, and a little bit less with implementation, compared to the last few years. Kudos to Margaret Kroll and Deniz Rudin who gave an excellent, super intelligent and 100% professionally-delivered talk!