Category: Uncategorized

A new book by Vera Lee-Schoenfeld will be published by John Benjamins Publishing Company in the coming month. Vera completed the PhD at UCSC in 2005 and is now with the Department of Linguistics at Swarthmore College. Vera’s book, Beyond Coherence: The Syntax of Opacity in German, published in the Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today Series, is a substantial revision of her Santa Cruz dissertation. It deals with a range of issues in the syntax of German and argues that movement and certain kinds of anaphoric processes are governed by a unified locality principle centered on the concept of the phase.

C. Jan Wouter Zwart of the University of Groningen says of the book that it ‘makes an essential contribution to the lively debate on locality in syntax, yielding an empirical argument that is sure to be influential’, while Jason Merchant of the University of Chicago calls the book a ‘a landmark study’, and says: ‘Lee-Schoenfeld provides a masterful guide through the intricate data on a fundamental syntactic question: what makes a phrase into a boundary for syntactic processes?’

The book will be available for purchase in a couple of weeks.

Students from the department will be roaming far and near to present the results of their research over the next month or two.

Vera Gribanova will travel to Germany to give a talk at Formal Descriptions of Slavic Languages 7, which takes place at the University of Leipzig in late November. The title of Vera’s talk is ‘Phonological evidence for a distinction between Russian prepositions and prefixes’.

Meanwhile, Dave Teeple and Aaron Kaplan will both be presenting at the Mid-America Linguistics Conference at the University of Kansas in October. Aaron’s topic is Stress in the trigger of Chamorro umlaut, while Dave will speak on Emergentism and OT: a compromise. This conference marks the 50th anniversary of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Kansas (Dave’s alma mater).

Finally, recent alumnus Pete Alrenga will do a poster presentation on Tokens, Types, and Identity at NELS 38 in Ottawa, October 26–28, 2007.

Ariel Benson is an alumna of the department who graduated with a degree in Language Studies in 1986. She now works as the Language Assessment Program Specialist for the Pajaro Valley Unified School District. Ariel contacted the department to see if we could help in putting her in contact with people who might be interested in working with her office to provide language tutoring in core academic areas for some of the newly arrived students. The school district is currently looking for a tutor to work with one of their students in Mandarin. Ariel further writes:

Throughout the year we sometimes need tutors in other languages, and for this reason I was hoping to establish contact with your department for future inquiries as well. I would greatly appreciate hearing back from anyone able to assist me in immediately locating potential language tutors in Mandarin, or from anyone willing to receive requests for assistance in the future. PVUSD has a steady population of newcomers who represent a great variety of linguistic needs. Most recently I have had a request from a school site in Aptos for a language tutor in Kinyarwanda for a little first grader whose family has recently come to the area. On an ongoing basis we need assistance for students who speak only Mixteco.

If you would like to help with this important work, you can contact Ariel here.

Initial information about the colloquium series for Fall Quarter have been announced and the particulars are available here.

Here is a summary of what’s in store:

Armin Mester, UCSC
Friday, October 12, 2007, 4:30PM

Andy Kehler, UCSD
Friday, October 19, 2007, 4:30PM

Jon Sprouse, UC Irvine
Friday, November 2nd, 2007, 4:30PM

Sam Cumming, UCLA
Friday, November 16, 2007, 4:30PM
Colloquium Jointly Sponsored by the Departments of Linguistics and Philosophy

Arto Anttila, Stanford University
Friday, November 30, 2006, 4:30PM

The Linguistics Department has now moved back to its once and future home on the second floor of Stevenson College. A diagram of the floor plan is available here. The Department Library has been unpacked and is open again for business. The Linguistics Common Room is awaiting new furniture and, for the moment, remains a storage space, but that will change shortly. Not shown on the floor plan is Stevenson 221, which is where the Phonetics Lab and the nascent Semantics Lab will be jointly housed for the rest of 2007-08. Stevenson 263 is the office designated for undergraduate peer advising.

Congratulations to alum Sally Mirken Teeple (B.A., 2006) and grad student Dave Teeple, who were married on the evening of July 7, in the back yard of Sally’s parents in San Juan Capistrano. Here are photos of Sally, Dave, and their wedding party.

Congratulations to Pranav Anand and Nikki Vamosi, who were married on September 15! Here is Pranav’s report:

The civil ceremony took place in the Cowell Redwoods on the afternoon of the 15th, and was attended by immediate family. In the spirit of things linguistically related, I discovered after making the cake that marzipan (the base for the little fruit) is a word with mysterious etymological origins. The OED traces it to Italian marzapane, but here the record becomes blurry. One theory breaks this up into Martius panis (`bread of Mars’), an homage to the castles on medieval cakes. Another traces it to the matapanus, or mataban, a coin stamped with the image of an enthroned Christ. A third source suggests that this word gained a sense referring to the volume contained in a small box (reflected in the fact that several regional Romance languages still use a variant to denote a small box, and thereafter the prototypical contents of such boxes — candy. It was further suggested that mataban is a borrowing from the Arabic mawthaban, meaning “the king that sits still.” However, a completely different history has been advanced, connecting the Burmese city of Martaban, famous for its glazed jars. What’s the right story — Martian bread, a coin that becomes a box, or a jar? As one of the sources just cited closes, “nobody has a better idea.” Regardless, these tales serve to remind us how plastic word sense is.