WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
The first colloquium of the Winter Quarter will take place on Friday January 17th at 4pm in Humanities One, Room 210. The speaker will be Lisa Pearl of the Department of Cognitive Science at UC Irvine and the title of the talk will be More learnable than thou? Testing knowledge representations with realistic acquisition data. The abstract is available here.
The first meeting of the year of the Unofficial Graduate student Get-together on Semantics and pragmatics (UGGS) took place Saturday, November 16. Karen Duek, who has taken the helm after last year’s visiting student Matthijs Westera created the group, writes:
Tania Rojas-Esponda, from Stanford, talked about her work on the German discourse particle überhaupt under the lens of a theory of questions under discussion. The abstract for the talk is here.
Phonologist Lev Blumenfeld spent a year at UCSC in 2006-2007 as Visiting Assistant Professor. Lev will return to the department on Friday November 22nd and will give a special presentation on some of his current work in Phlunch that afternoon between 2pm and 3pm in the Linguistics Common Room (Stevenson 249). Lev’s title is Quantitative meter as faithfulness and the abstract for the talk is available here.
At the end of the week (on Saturday November 9th) many linguists were in attendance for a lecture given by alumnus Marc Okrand. The lecture was sponsored by the American Indian Resource Center on campus, and Marc’s title was From Mutsun to Klingon: How Helping Bring Back One Language Gave Rise to Another. This week’s WHASC Challenge is to name all of the linguists identifiable from the backs of their heads in the photograph which accompanies the Santa Cruz Sentinel‘s report of the lecture. After the event Marc got together with some UCSC linguists who have done fieldwork on indigenous languages of North America, including Amy Rose Deal and grad student Nick Kalivoda. Since Nick has strong interests both in field linguistics and in constructed languages, he was pleased to be able to have his picture taken with Marc.
SCLP—Santa Cruz Linguistics and Philosophy group—is an interdisciplinary working group composed of faculty and graduate students from the Linguistics Department and the Philosophy Department at UCSC. SCLP has its funding from the Institute for Humanities Research. The first visitor of the year to be hosted by SCLP will be Seth Yalcin from the Department of Philosophy at UC Berkeley. Seth will be arriving on Wednesday, November 13 and that afternoon at 5:15pm he will lead a discussion (in Stevenson 249) based on a paper of his entitled Epistemic Modals. This paper appeared in the journal Mind in 2007. On Thursday, November 14, he will give a colloquium in the Philosophy Department to which everyone is invited. That will start at 4:00pm in Humanities 1, 210. The title of his talk is Epistemic Modality De Re.
The next colloquium will take place on Friday November 8th at 4pm in Humanities 210. The speaker will be Anna Szabolcsi of the Department of Linguistics at NYU. The title of the paper is What do quantifier particles do? and the abstract is available here.
CUSP 6 was held on Friday Oct 11 and Saturday Oct 12 on the campus of UC Berkeley. Donka Farkas went along and describes the event this way:
Lots of good papers, a lively audience, great discussion. UCSC was represented on the program by Karen Duek, talking about the polysemy of container pseudo-partitives. Great paper, very well delivered. In the audience there was LRC visitor Filippa Lindahl and a record number of faculty: Adrian Brasoveanu, Amy Rose Deal, myself and Maziar Toosarvandani. Alumni Chris Potts (Stanford) and Line Mikkelsen (Berkeley) were also there.
