LASC 2015

Preparations are now well advanced for one of the most important events in the department’s calendar: the annual celebration of graduate student research known as LASC (Linguistics at Santa Cruz). This year’s instantiation of the conference will take place on Saturday March 14th and the distinguished alumna speaker for this year will be Vera Gribanova, who graduated from UCSC in 2010 and is now Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Stanford. All of the crucial details will be announced in next week’s WHASC.

ITO AND MESTER IN HANDBOOK OF JAPANESE PHONOLOGY

The Handbook of Japanese Phonetics and Phonology (in the DeGruyter Mouton Series: Handbooks of Japanese Language and Linguistics) has just been published. Among the 18 chapters, we find two chapters coauthored by Junko Ito and Armin Mester: Word Formation and Phonological Processes and Sino-Japanese Phonology. The two chapters survey the main results of work done over the last decades and highlight how phonological studies of Japanese have served as major cornerstones in the development of general phonological theory, providing a revealing window into important cross-linguistic and typological issues. The first outlines the main types of word formation in Japanese from a phonological perspective, aiming to show how phonological theory has deepened understanding of Japanese word-formation processes and also how study of those processes has shaped the development of phonological theory. The second paper takes up the Sino-Japanese stratum of the Japanese lexicon and grows out of Junko and Armin’s long engagement with the issue of the structure of the phonological lexicon.

FARKAS IN PARIS

Donka Farkas, meanwhile is in Paris, France, where she was one of two invited speaker at a two day workshop on co-distributivity which took place at CNRS Pouchet and was organized by the research group Typologie et Universaux Linguistiques of CNRS (the principal public body supporting and funding research in France). The program for the two-day workshop can be viewed here. Donka’s presentation was on Dependent Indefinites Revisited and she is staying on a few days in Paris to meet with colleagues and students working on nominal semantics.

ADLER AND GUEVARA FOR LSA INSTITUTE IN CHICAGO

It was announced last week that graduate students Jeff Adler and Jed Guevara had received fellowships from the LSA to attend the 2015 Linguistic Summer Institute to be held at the University of Chicago this July.

We asked Jeff and Jed to describe their plans and hopes for the Institute and this was how they responded:

Jeff: I hope to spend the 2015 LSA Summer Institute filling in certain methodological gaps in my intellectual foundation. Specifically, I hope that courses such as Computational Phonology, Intro to Statistics with R, and Advanced Probabilistic Modeling in R can provide me with an understanding of how to use computational and statistical models to inform and shape phonological theory. In addition, I hope courses like Intonational Phonology and Prosodic Typology and Corpus Phonology will teach me some new skills, namely ToBi transcription, acoustic analysis of prosody, and corpus methods. The overall goal in taking such courses is to be able to incorporate these methodologies in my future research as a graduate student. Forming connections with other graduate students and faculty attending the institute is also a secondary, but highly desirable goal of mine. Hope to see you in Chicago!

Jed: I’m going to the Institute to generate research ideas and to learn new skills. As an aspiring Austronesianist/Philippinist, I’m really excited for Aldridge’s Topics in Austronesian syntax. I think it’ll provide me with a good theoretical foundation for core topics concerning languages in the family (verb initial word order, the robust agreement/voice system, and so on), and a good overview of what topics are currently considered “hot”. That should help me frame research questions of my own that can add to the current dialogue. I plan on building my schedule around this course. If schedule permits, I would really like to take Lidz’ Language Acquisition, Levy and Bicknell’s Computational Psycholinguistics, and Phillip’s The Psycholinguistics of Grammar. Taking Lidz’ class is a good opportunity for me to learn from an acquisitionist, and also to network with other linguists interested in language from a developmental perspective. I think the other two classes will be a good way for me to gain a better understanding of how theory, computational modeling, and linguistic data combine to further theoretical understanding. They will also help me generate more experimental project ideas that test/develop the theories that I will have absorbed in Aldridge’s course.

AISSEN IN HAWAII

Judith Aissen will be travelling to Honolulu in Hawaii between February 26th and March 1st to take part in the 4th International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation (ICLDC). The theme of this year’s conference is Enriching Theory, Practice and Application, a theme which is meant to highlight the need to strengthen the links between language documentation (practice), deep understanding of grammatical structure (theory), and methods for teaching endangered languages (application). Judith will be among a number of distinguished scholars who have been invited to teach Master Classes at the conference. Judith’s Master Class is on Elicitation and Documentation of Topic and Focus Constructions/Processes and is designed to provide a set of skills and tools that will better enable participants to identify and understand topics and foci in texts and in elicitation contexts.

KAUFMAN AT GOOGLE

Brianna Kaufman earned the MA in Linguistics in 2014 with a thesis on the learning of unproductive processes such as emphatic reduplication in Turkish. Brianna very recently accepted an offer to work as an Analytical Linguist at Google. She will be joining fellow UCSC alum Oliver Northrup (PhD 2014) on Google’s LA campus.

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