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Olga Kagan will join the Department as Visiting Assistant Professor for the Winter and Spring quarters, 2008. A semanticist, Olga trained with Edit Doron and Malka Rappaport Hovav at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her dissertation, on genitive-accusative case marking alternations in Russian and in other Balto-Slavic languages, explores some of the semantic correlates of the use of the genitive: non-specificity, narrow scope, and the absence of existential entailment.

Olga will teach a seminar based on her dissertation research in Winter 2008. In the Spring, she will teach Pragmatics (Ling 117) as well a new course on the structure of Russian. We look forward to welcoming her to UCSC’s linguistics community.

Psychology Professor Dominic W. Massaro would like to record a female voice articulating the sound segments of English for a project on learning to read. A stipend will be given. If you are interested in participating, please contact him at: Massaro@ucsc.edu .

The Department of English at Arizona State University has advertised a position for an Assistant Professor in Linguistics whose specializations include Native American linguistics and formal semantics. Proficiency in one or more Native American languages is desired. The application deadline is November 9. For further information, go here.

Last week’s WHASC inadvertently gave a non-current affiliation for bioethicist Jonathan Moreno. He is now at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is the David & Lyn Silfen University Professor and Professor of Medical Ethics and of History and Sociology of Science.

The next Linguistics colloquium will take place at 4:30 p.m. on Friday November 2, in the Silverman Conference Room. The speaker, Jon Sprouse, recently received the Ph.D. from the University of Maryland and now teaches at the University of California, Irvine. Jon’s title is Acceptability, Grammaticality, and the Role of Experimental Syntax. The abstract is available here.

This year’s Stevenson College Alumni Association Distinguished Visiting Professor is Jonathan Moreno, who is Emily Davie and Joseph S. Kornfeld Professor of Biomedical Ethics at the University of Virginia. He will give three talks:

Monday, October 29, 12.30-1.30 p.m. in 101 Natural Sciences Annex, on The Ethics of Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research;

Monday, October 29, 5.00-6.30 p.m. in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge, on The Ethics of Human Experimentation for National Security Purposes;

Tuesday, October 30, 2.00-3.45 p.m. in the Stevenson Event Center, on Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense.

Paul Willis traveled to Tucson last week to present a paper at the inaugural meeting of the Arizona Linguistics Circle (ALC 1), held at the University of Arizona, Tucson, between October 19 and 21. The conference provides a forum for research in theoretical linguistics, experimental linguistics, and Native American linguistics. Paul’s paper was on The Role of Topic-hood in Multiple Wh-Question Semantics and one seasoned observer judged it to be one of the best papers presented at the conference.