WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Nick Kalivoda will be defending his dissertation at 1:30pm on Friday, April 13th, in HUM 1 Room 202. Nick’s dissertation is titled “Syntax-Prosody Mismatches in Optimality Theory.” The committee consists of Junko Ito (chair), Armin Mester, Jim McCloskey, and Alan Prince (Rutgers).
Junko Ito recently gave a colloquium at UCLA on Friday, April 6th, where she presented her work (jointly done with Jeff Adler, Nick Kalivoda and Armin Mester) on the microvariation of pitch accent systems in Kagoshima Japanese dialects. Contributing to the very interesting and stimulating discussion after the talk were the USC phonologists Stephanie Shih (Stanford PhD 2014) and Rachel Walker (UCSC PhD 1998).
Jim McCloskey used the quarter-break to travel to the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, where he gave an invited talk in the Cambridge Linguistics Forum series. Jim’s title was Understanding Ellipsis: Corpus, Annotation, Theory and he used the occasion to discuss some of the work being done by the ellipsis annotation project at Santa Cruz and to present some of the initial results that are emerging.
On March 31 – April 1 Emily Manetta (UCSC PhD 2006; now at University of Vermont), current MA student Mansi Desai, and Rachel Showstack (UCSC BA History, 2006; PhD Hispanic Linguistics UT Austin, now a linguist at Wichita State) attended the eighth annual Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages (FASAL) conference at Wichita State University. Mansi presented a poster entitled “Agreement Probes in Standard Gujarati” and Emily gave a talk on adverbs, polarity and verb movment in Hindi-Urdu in a session chaired by Rachel. A photo of the slug crew is below. Behind them is a recently restored original Miró mural “Personnages Oiseaux”, composed of over a million glass and which is part of the permanent collection of Wichita State’s art museum.
At the end of winter quarter, Jed Pizarro-Guevara, Matt Wagers, and Adrian Brasoveanu traveled north along with an entourage of Santa Cruz psycholinguists (Margaret Kroll, Steven Foley, Nick Van Handel, Jake Vincent, and Netta Ben-Meir) for the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference at UC Davis. Jed presented a poster co-authored with Matt Wagers entitled “Not all filler-gap dependencies are perceived alike: Evidence from Tagalog”. Meanwhile, Adrian presented joint work with Jakub Dotlačil: both a poster called “Modeling Lexical Access in ACT-R” as well as a talk on “A cognitively realistic left-corner parser with visual and motor interfaces“. Several former Slugs also attended, including Shayne Sloggett (BA, ‘10), Caroline Andrews (BA, ‘11), Adam Morgan (MA, ‘13), Ekaterina Kravtchenko (MA, ‘13), and Chelsea Miller (BA, ’14, MA, ’16). On-leave faculty Amanda Rysling graced CUNY with her presence, and organized a joint UMass-UCSC dinner. Delicious Indian food was had, and many bottles of wine, consumed.
Erik Zyman will be defending his dissertation at 3:00pm on Thursday, March 15th, in HUM 1 Room 202. Erik’s dissertation is titled “On the Driving Force for Syntactic Movement.” The committee consists of Jim McCloskey(chair), Sandy Chung, and Jorge Hankamer.
Armin Mester recently presented recent work on the linguistic structure of Japanese baseball chants at two places: on February 26th at Grinnell College in Iowa, where he had been invited by former Visiting Assistant Professor Angelo Mercado (now Associated Professor of Classics), and on March 5th at the Phonological Society of Japan’s Phonology Festa 13 held at Waseda University, Tokyo.