WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
This Friday and Saturday, October 21-22, the 9th installment of California Universities Semantics and Pragmatics (CUSP) will happen here, in Humanities 2 (not Humanities 1!), Rm. 259. The program is available here, and features our own Hitomi Hirayama, Margaret Kroll, and Deniz Rudin (squared, no less), as well as visiting postdoc Lavi Wolf. Come one, come all, as semanticists descend on our campus and refill our depleted reservoirs, much as the rain did this past weekend.
As semanticists migrate northward in preparations for winter, phonologists will be heading south. Graduate student Jeff Adler will be presenting two posters at the 2016 Annual Meeting in Phonology Conference (AMP), at USC: “The moraic trochee in the Mohawk stress-epenthesis interactions”, based on his QP last year and, alongside Jesse Zymet from UCLA, “Irreducible parallelism in process interactions”, which extends the claims of Adler’s QP, both cross-linguistically and theoretically. Visiting faculty Brian Smith will be presenting the poster “Emergent idiosyncrasy in English comparatives” with UConn’s Claire Moore-Cantwell.
Speakers at the conference include alum Ryan Bennett, who is delivering the co-authored talk on Kaqchikel entitled “Against phonetic realism as the source of root co-occurrence restrictions”, and other poster presenters include former visitors Adam Albright and Lev Blumenfeld, and alum Andy Wedel.
Last Tuesday, graduate student Erik Zyman gave a talk at Berkeley’s Fieldwork Forum (FForum) on “P’urhepecha Negative Shift and Cyclic Linearization.” He reports that he received a warm welcome and a great many helpful questions, suggestions, and observations.
Graduate student Ben Meriçli spent last weekend in Bloomington, Indiana rubbing shoulders with linguists from every corner of Central Asia at the second biennial Conference on Central Asian Languages and Linguistics (ConCALL). (Our very own Jorge Hankamer was an invited speaker at the first.) While other presenters hailed from such Silk Road capitals as Urumqi, Dushanbe, and Ulaanbaatar, Ben gave a paper from the fringes of the region, entitled “Perfective by Default: Aspect-Shifting Affixes in Turkish.”
Highlights of the conference included an invited talk by renowned Turkologist Marcel Erdal, as well as by linguists including Barış Kabak and Arsalan Kahnemuyipour, not to mention an evening of musical performances in Azerbaijani, Persian, Turkish, and Uyghur. Ben’s wasn’t the only talk on Turkish. Another presented new research on the phonetics of “intrusive vowels,” taking fellow Santa Crucian Jenny Bellik’s second qualifying paper as it’s starting point.
This Friday (October 14), visiting postdoc Lavi Wolf (Ben Gurion University of the Negev) will present in S-Circle. His talk is titled “On Rhetorical and Metalinguistic Questions in English and Hebrew.” An abstract for the talk can be found here. The talk will take place at 2:40pm in the LCR (Stevenson 249).
On October 5th, alum Jason Merchant delivered a University of Chicago Harper Lecture for UChicago friends and alumni in New York City. Jason spoke about his interdisciplinary project “Historical Semantics and Legal Interpretation” with UChicago law professor Alison LaCroix. Their aim is to enrich contemporary textual analysis in law with insights from theoretical linguistic analysis and large-scale historical corpus analysis, to precisely investigate the syntactic and semantic distributions of important legal terms throughout history in order to understand the use of such terms both at a law’s enactment and as language changed.
Our congratulations to Karl DeVries, who successfully defended his dissertation, Independence Friendly Dynamic Semantics: Integrating Exceptional Scope, Anaphora and their Interactions, on Thursday, September 29th. Despite the witching-hour timeslot, Karl kept the audience riveted with his exploration of the semantics of wide-scope, distributivity, and maximization. In the 77 hours since his talk finished, Karl has found the time to pack up and move down to Los Angeles, where he starts a job as an Analytical Linguist in Ads Human Evaluation and Experiment Design at Google today, alongside alums Brianna Kaufman and Oliver Northrup! Good luck, Karl. Check out the porridge at Gjustia! Only $7.50, plus tax!