WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
A few weeks ago, Bern Samko made her way to Stanford for an invited talk. She reports:
I traveled slightly north to present at Stanford’s Syntax and Morphology Circle. The talk was called “Topicality, focus, and intonation in English verb-phrase preposing”, and it sparked a lively discussion (which was mostly about neither syntax nor morphology).
On Thursday, November 6, Donka Farkas gave a colloquium at Cornell entitled Assertions, questions and the land in between. Donka sent WHASC the following report:
My talk reported on joint work I am doing with former LRC visitor, Floris Roelofsen. I then stayed on for the annual linguistics and philosophy workshop organized by Sarah Murray and William Starr. The theme this year was the semantics of plurals. The program of the conference featured two UCSC alums: Robert Henderson (Wayne State) was one of the presenters, and Chris Barker (NYU) was one of the commentators. It was an extremely enjoyable conference, with interesting talks and good, animated discussion. Sara and Will did a great job organizing it all seamlessly.
Meanwhile Jim McCloskey travelled to Ireland to give a talk at the annual Tionól (Symposium) organized by the School of Celtic Studies of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. The abstract for Jim’s talk is here.
The coming week is a busy one for presentations:
CUSP 7 will be taking place on the UCLA campus on Friday November 7th and Saturday November 8th. Presenting at CUSP will be grad students Bern Samko (on Verum Focus in Alternative Semantics) and Erik Zyman, (on Lake P´tzcuaro P’urhepecha and the Semantic Typology of Degree Constructions) visiting grad student Kristin Geer (on The partitive structure of quantification), along with alumna (and CUSP organizer) Lauren Winans speaking on Evidential Restrictions of `must’ and `will’.
Steven Foley will be presenting a talk entitled “Split Ergativity in Georgian is not Structural” at the next meeting of S-Circle on Friday November 7th at 4pm in the Linguistics Common Room.
Bryan Donaldson of the Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics at UCSC will be giving a talk on Information Structure and Word Order in Medieval Occitan on Wednesday October 29th at 5:00pm in Room 210 of Humanities One. The talk argues that information structure concepts help explain patterns of word order variation in Old Occitan which have previously been taken to be random or inexplicable. More detailed information is available here.