Category: Talks

MARC OKRAND TO SPEAK AT UCSC

Marc Okrand is another undergraduate alumnus of the UCSC program. From UCSC, Marc went on to the PhD program at UC Berkeley, where in 1977 he completed a dissertation on the grammar of Mutsun, which is a dialect of the Ohlone language (sometimes known as Southern Costanoan). He is probably now best known for his work on the Klingon language, a language that he developed originally for the Star Trek franchise. His commitment to Amerindian linguistics has never waned however, and it is in that capacity that he will give a lecture at UCSC on Saturday November 9th at 2pm. The lecture is sponsored by the American Indian Resource Center, the Amah Mutsun Band of Ohlone Indians, and the Office of the Dean of Humanities. Marc’s title is From Mutsun to Klingon: How Helping Bring Back One Language Gave Rise to Another.

CAROLYNN JIMENEZ PRESENTING AT INT6

Carolynn Jimenez is pursuing a joint major in Computer Science and Linguistics at UCSC, planning to graduate in 2014. She is also a UC LEADS Scholar and is this year’s Chapter President of the UCSC Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers.

This week Carolynn will be traveling to the INT6 Workshop (Intelligent Narrative Technologies) at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta to present a paper: Dammit to Jotunheim: Increasing Author Leverage with Expressive Natural Language Generation . Carolynn is one of six co-authors of the paper (the others being her advisor Marilyn Walker, along with Jennifer Sawyer, Grace Lin, Elena Rishes and Noah Wardrip-Fruin).

Carolynn says about the paper she will present: I’ve been doing research with Marilyn Walker and the Natural Language Dialogue Systems Lab for a little over a year through a state funded fellowship (UC LEADS). This project comes from work we did for an NSF funded project called Character Creator. The paper itself grows out of a user study where we had expert and non-expert authors evaluate algorithmically generated dialogue with quantitative and qualitative methods.

MCCLOSKEY AT NORTHWESTERN

Jim McCloskey travelled to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois on Friday, to give a colloquium at the Linguistics Department there (more or less a repeat performance of the first UCSC colloquium of the year). Being in Evanston, Jim was able to connect with Tommy Denby who graduated with the MA from Santa Cruz in June 2013 and is now in the PhD program at Northwestern. While settling in at Northwestern, Tommy has continued to blog at the New Yorker. A contingent also came out for the talk from the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago, led by alumnus Jason Merchant, who sends his greetings via WHASC to all at Santa Cruz.

ITO AND MESTER AT MIT CONFERENCE

Junko Ito and Armin Mester attended M@90 (a conference on metrical structure: text-setting and stress) (Sept. 20-21), a celebration of Morris Halle’s 90th birthday organized by Mike Kenstowicz and Donca Steriade, where they presented some of their recent work on the role of supersized units in prosody (like superheavy syllables or HL trochees). Armin reports:

Besides the many fascinating talks and the sheer enjoyment of a splendidly organized conference, there was a whole group of UCSC-related folks to catch up with (Adam Albright, Ryan Bennett, Lev Blumenfeld, and Takashi Morita). The high point of the conference was Morris Halle’s closing presentation (on the morphophonology of the Latin verb). The speaker was not only very graciously introduced by Noam Chomsky (with touching reminiscences going back to their days as graduate students at Harvard many years ago), but went on to give a very lucid and well-argued talk, and defended his position very well in the ensuing question period. An amazing performance “@90”!
Some pictures here.

COLLOQUIUM

Jim McCloskey will open the year’s colloquium series on Friday October 4th at 4pm in Humanities One, Room 210. Jim’s title is Preverbs, Phases, and Objecthood: an Irish Perspective on Some Old Problems and, as always, all are welcome. The abstract is available here.

THIS WEEK’S S-CIRCLE TALK

This week’s S-Circle talk will be by James Collins (Stanford University), speaking on “The Morphosyntax of Ergativity in Samoan”. The talk will be this Friday, June 7th at 4 pm in the Linguistics Common Room (Stevenson 249). You can read the abstract here.

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