A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
As announced in an earlier WHASC Jaye Padgett will give the Stevenson College Distinguished Faculty Lecture on Wednesday next (February 25th) at 4:00pm in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge. Jaye’s title is What Irish Gaelic Tells us About All Linguistic Sound Systems.
In Fall 2014 Jim McCloskey and Matt Wagers taught coordinated graduate seminars on island phenomena from theoretical and psycholinguistic perspectives. This week’s S-Circle will be devoted to some of the research that emerged from the quarter’s work, featuring talks from three of the groups who investigated various aspects of the island phenomenon and its interaction with resumption. The meeting will take place, as usual, at 2pm on Friday February 27th in the Linguistics Common Room.
The CRISSP group at KU Leuven in Belgium have asked us to publicize their annual conference (8th Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics), whose theme this year is The Grammar of Idioms. The conference, which is co-sponsored by the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS, will take place in Brussels on June 4-5th 2015 and will explore the phenomenon of idioms in all its aspects (syntax, semantics, processing, acquisition, diachrony), with the goal of better understanding how such expressions are able to occur within natural language, and what mechanisms they are governed by. The invited speakers are Christiane Fellbaum of Princeton, Manfred Sailer of the University of Frankfurt, and UCSC alumna Louise McNally of Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. The abstract submission deadline is March 15th 2015. The call for papers is here.
Amy Rose Deal writes about a busy summer ahead for her filled with semantics-related activities.
In the first part of the month I will be teaching a course at the LSA summer institute at the University of Chicago. The course topic is Semantic Variation in Nominal Expressions, and the full blurb is available here.
In the second part of the month I will be in Berlin participating in the SIAS Summer Institute, The Investigation of Linguistic Meaning: In the Armchair, in the Field, and in the Lab. Co-sponsored by the National Humanities Center and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the institute will consist of workshops this summer and next aimed at kick-starting joint interdisciplinary work by young European and American researchers.
More information about the SIAS Summer Institute is available here.
Chris Potts graduated with the PhD from UCSC in 2003 and has since held faculty positions at UMass Amherst and at Stanford, where he is now Associate Professor of Linguistics and Director of CSLI. Chris returns to Santa Cruz on Wednesday February 18th to give a colloquium in the Psychology Department. The talk will take place in Social Sciences 2, Room 121 between 12:30 and 2:00, and it will report on joint work by Chris, Dan Lassiter, Roger Levy, and Michael C. Frank. The title is Embedded implicatures as pragmatic inferences under compositional lexical uncertainty and the abstract is available here.
Max Corbin graduated with the BA in Linguistics in Spring 2014 and has been building a career in data analysis ever since. Max will give a career talk for undergraduate majors in Linguistics and Language Studies on Monday, February 23rd from 5-6pm in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge. Max describes the plan for the talk as follows:
I’m currently working as a data collections assistant, report writer, and analyst at the Santa Cruz Women’s Health Center, here in downtown Santa Cruz. I’ll be talking broadly about the growing need for analysts for all kinds of data in many industries, and we’ll drill down to discuss the speech technology industry as an exciting case study that is likely to be of particular interest to our undergraduate linguists. I’ll also cover some of the skills students will need to work as a data analyst; some are taught as part of the degree program, but others they may have to pick up as they go.
Light refreshments will be served, and a reception will be held afterward in the Fireside Lounge. All are welcome; no RSVP required.
S-Circle resumes its work on Friday next, February 20th at 2pm in the Linguistics Common Room. Melissa Fusco from the Philosophy Department at UC Berkeley will visit to present a talk on Deontic Disjunction. The abstract is available here.