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This quarter, grad student Katrina Vahedi, who is the Linguistics Department’s Peer Advising Coordinator, will host two workshops for Linguistics undergraduate peer advisors and undergraduate student graders. The first workshop, to be held on October 17, is a Tutor Training session for new course graders; it will provide a forum to clarify and discuss the responsibilities of the position. The second workshop, to be held on November 7, is a training session for peer advisors in Application to Graduate School. This workshop will enable peer advisors to pass on valuable information to other undergraduates who intend to apply to a graduate program, either this Fall or in the future.

Sandy Chung is just back from an 8-day trip to the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI). In Luta (also known as Rota), she attended the Mina’dos na Konferensian Chamorro (2nd Chamorro Conference), where she presented a paper on Chamorro’s status as an endangered language. The conference was attended by Chamorro educators, students, government staff, and others interested in Chamorro language and culture; almost all of the presentations were in Chamorro. Thanks to Sandy’s co-author Manny Borja, who translated her talk beforehand, she too was able to give her paper in Chamorro. After the conference, Sandy and Manny ran a workshop for bilingual teachers in Saipan. Sandy’s and Manny’s trips were sponsored by the NMI Council for the Humanities. For some photos, go here.

UCSC linguists will deliver at least five papers at the 82nd annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, to be held January 3-6, 2008, at the Palmer House Hilton Hotel in Chicago. Vera Gribanova will present a paper on “The (Post-)Syntax of Russian Verbal Prefixes”. Jorge Hankamer will be presenting a paper titled “Ad-phrasal Affixes and Suspended Affixation”. (This is the same paper he will present in the Syntax Circle on November 20, with the title “Suspended Affixation”.) Ruth Kramer will present a paper on “Phase Impenetrability at PF and Amharic Definite Marking.” David Teeple will give a paper on “Avoiding Strong-Position Neutralization”. Sandy Chung will give a plenary session lecture titled “How Much Can Understudied Languages Really Tell Us About How Language Works?” An extraordinarily large number of LSA abstracts were submitted this year, and the selection process was far more rigorous than in previous years. If you’re presenting a paper but we don’t yet have your information, let us know!

The call for proposals for the 2007-8 Humanities Undergraduate Research Awards (HUGRA) has just been issued. There are ten awards ($500 each). Juniors and seniors are eligible to apply; they will need to provide a plan for a research project and a letter of recommendation from a faculty advisor. The deadline is Monday, November 5. Click here for the announcement and the application.

The Department of Linguistics at the University of Utah is advertising a tenure-track position for an Assistant Professor (or under exceptional circumstances, someone more senior), to begin July 1, 2008, pending budgetary approval. The successful applicant will have a primary specialization in theoretical syntax or phonology. A secondary specialization, especially in the documentation of Native American languages, is preferred. For the official announcement, go here. Questions about the position? Contact Marianna Di Paolo.

Jaye Padgett travelled to Russia at the end of the summer to conduct some research at St. Petersburg State University. He lived to tell the tale, and this is his report:

In September I spent about 10 days in St. Petersburg, Russia. I was there to run a perceptual experiment on Russian listeners. (The experiment explores the perceptual similarities among sounds that commonly form the input and output of palatalizing mutations, like the kind you get in English “got you” → “gotcha”.) The people of the Phonetics Department of St. Petersburg State University were kind enough, at the beginning of their academic year, to make a room available to me and to supply me with a continual stream of bemused undergraduates—24 in all. St. Petersburg is called the “Venice of the north”, at least by Russians, and in fact it is spectacular. The university is right on the Neva river embankment, across the river and down a bit from the Winter Palace. The city center is an architectural candy store—baroque, neoclassical, art nouveau—and is laced by canals.

Instead of a hotel I booked lodgings through a service that lands you in somebody’s apartment. There I was fed lots of soup by the obligatory babushka who said babushka things like ‘Russian ice cream is the best’ and ‘I read that milk in tea destroys the health effects of tea; those British have really gotten it wrong.’ On my last night there the department’s chair Pavel Skrelin took me to a Georgian restaurant and tried to kill me with vodka.

In a new advising initiative, the Department has set up a system to provide undergraduate students in the Linguistics and Language Studies majors with access to a group of peer advisors to help them through the often complex paths through the two majors.

The group is coordinated by MA student Katrina Vahedi, the Peer Advising Coordinator, and its members hold regular office hours and drop-in advising hours in Room 265 on the second floor of Stevenson College. The current group of advisors includes Michael Fahey, Angie Muñoz, Robyn Perry, and Cameron Taylor.

Please drop by and chat with them.