WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Last Friday, Ryan Bennett presented recent work on prosodic recursion in Kaqchikel to an audience of undergraduate Linguistics students at Washington University in St. Louis. He had this to say:
“It was a great pleasure to visit Wash U and get to know the faculty and students there a bit better. The undergraduates are quite impressive, and I really enjoyed talking to them about my work as well as their own research.”
SPLAP: Wednesday, 1:20 – 2:20 pm, LCR There will be a discussion of Chapter 3 of Wataru Uegaki’s dissertation
s/lab: Wednesday, 3:00 – 4:00 pm, LCR Amanda Rysling and visiting BA alum Shayne Sloggett will be presenting
LaLoCo: Thursday, 2:00 – 3:00 pm, LCR Continued discussion of Chapter 5 of the textbook “Intro to Connectionist Modeling of Cognitive Processes”, which is about back-propagation and multi-layer networks
Phlunch: Friday, 12:00 – 1:00 pm, LCR Andrew Angeles will be leading a discussion of “Postfocal Downstep in German” (Kügler and Féry 2017)
Fourth-year grad student Steven Foley recently visited Reykjavík for NELS 48, hosted by the University of Iceland. There he presented recent work on Georgian relative clause processing, done in collaboration with Matt Wagers. Steven reports an altogether lively and stimulating conference, which featured a number of Santa Cruz alumni, including Eric Baković, Matt Barros, Boris Harizanov, Eric Potsdam, Kyle Rawlins, Rachel Walker, and Aaron Steven White. But more impressive than the conference was Iceland itself. Just outside Reykjavík is an otherworldly landscape of lava fields, glaciers, and geysers (pictured). Steven regrets missing a few other natural phenomena the country is known for (the northern lights, Björk), so he hopes it won’t take another 48 years for Iceland to host NELS again.
Junko Ito and Armin Mester are mounting a one-day IHR (Institute of Humanities Research)-sponsored workshop on Saturday, Nov. 18, 2017, called SPOT (“Syntax-Prosody in Optimality Theory”) at Santa Cruz. They provide additional details:
“This is part of our research project aiming to create a computational platform that generates prosodic candidate sets from syntactic structures. Besides a presentation of the pilot SPOT program by Nick Kalivoda and Jenny Bellik, the workshop will consist of research talks focused on the syntax-prosody interface. The invited speakers are Lisa Selkirk (UMass/Amherst) and Shin Ishihara (Lund University, Sweden), and more locally, Nicholas Rolle (UC Berkeley), and Ryan Bennett and Jim McCloskey (UC Santa Cruz).
Here is the program with links to abstracts of the talks:
http://ihr.ucsc.edu/event/
We hope you will be able to join us!”
SPLAP: Monday, 1:20 – 2:20 pm, LCR This week a special meeting of SPLAP took place where visitor Jérémy Pasquereau discussed his research on embedded polarity particles in French
s/lab: Wednesday, 3:00 – 4:00 pm, LCR Margaret Kroll will be presenting on the role of prosody and discourse status in the allocation of working memory resources
LaLoCo: Thursday, 2:00 – 3:00 pm, LCR Continued discussion of chapter 4 of the textbook “Introduction to Connectionist Modelling of Cognitive Processes”, in addition to taking a look at distributional semantics
This weekend Ryan Bennett attended CILLA VIII in Austin, TX. He had this to say:
“CILLA VIII brought together specialists on a wide range of indigenous Latin American languages, including languages spoken at the bottom of South America, the top of Mexico, and everywhere in between. I presented on the phonetics and phonology of stop consonants in Kaqchikel, and was very pleased to see friends and colleagues in the room from Mexico, Guatemala, and all over the United States. The diversity and quality of the work presented at the conference was truly impressive: I myself saw top-notch presentations on phonetics, phonology, syntax, morphology, diachrony, and anthropology, almost all of which drew on original fieldwork with indigenous languages of South America and Mesoamerica.
UCSC was well-represented at CILLA: apart from my own presentation, there were talks by UCSC alums Robert Henderson and Scott AnderBois, and UCSC Professor Emerita Judith Aissen was also in attendance. This was my first time participating in CILLA – I cannot believe I waited this long to attend, and will definitely be attending in the future if at all possible.”
SPLAP: Wednesday, 1:20 – 2:20 pm, LCR There will be a discussion of Aloni (2005), on the topic of “A Formal Treatment of the Pragmatics of Questions and Attitudes”
s/lab: Wednesday, 3:00 – 4:00 pm, LCR Nick Van Handel will be presenting his current research on adaptation to prepositional object gaps
LaLoCo: Thursday, 2:00 – 3:00 pm, LCR Discussion of chapter 4 of the textbook “Introduction to Connectionist Modelling of Cognitive Processes”, which introduces autoassociative neural networks
WLMA: Friday, 10:00 – 11:30 am, Stevenson 217 Judith Aissen will be leading a discussion of Kotek and Erlewine (2016), which is about “Unifying definite and indefinite free relatives: evidence from Mayan”
Phlunch: Friday, 12:00 – 1:00 pm, LCR Ryan Bennett will be leading a discussion of Shaw and Kawahara (2018), an experimental study of devoiced vowels in Japanese
S-Circle: Friday, 4:00 – 5:30 pm, LCR Jim McCloskey will be speaking on the subject of “Microparameters in a tiny space — stranding at the edge”