KALIVODA AND ZYMAN RESEARCH ROAD-TRIP

Nick Kalivoda and Erik Zyman recently gave a talk entitled On the Derivation of Relative Clauses in Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec at the 20th annual meeting of the Workshop on Structure and Constituency in Languages of the Americas, at Stanford’s Syntax and Morphology Circle, and at the 41st annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. They report that they received very helpful comments and suggestions at all these venues, and that both conferences featured a wide array of extremely interesting talks.

MARK AMENGUAL SEEKS RESEARCH ASSISTANCE

Mark Amengual of the Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics at UCSC has contacted us looking for research assistance in a fascinating project involving production and perception abilities among various categories of speakers of Spanish. Mark describes the project as follows:

I am looking for a graduate or undergraduate student with experience conducting acoustic analyses in Praat. The project examines the production and perception abilities of Spanish Heritage Speakers and L2 learners of Spanish. The RA would help with the data analysis of the production data. Scripting abilities in Praat are preferred, but not required. The RA will receive a sum amount of $1,200 and the work is scheduled to start sometime around May or June 2015. I am estimating a total of 80 hours of work, and the goal would be to have the acoustic analyses phase of the project completed by October 1, 2015. Anyone interested in this position, please contact Mark Amengual (amengual@ucsc.edu).

 

UCSC AT WCCFL 2015

WCCFL 33 will take place at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia on March 27th-29th 2015. The preliminary program has now been published and there are several highlights of relevance to people in Santa Cruz. One of three keynote speakers at the conference is Matt Wagers. Matt’s keynote will open the conference at 9am on Friday March 27th. Also on the program are Amy Rose Deal arguing that TP is a Phase in a Relative Clause (Friday afternoon March 27th at 3pm) and Nick Kalivoda speaking on Constraint Interaction in Zapotec Loan Phonology (Friday morning March 27th at 11:20). Numerous UCSC alums and former visitors are also presenting papers: Matt Barros and Luis Vicente presenting together on A remnant condition on ellipsis, Louise McNally and Scott Grimm presenting on The+VPing as anaphoric event-type reference, Erin Ament and Anya Lunden presenting on The syllabic role of word-final consonants.

RACHEL WALKER COLLOQUIUM

Rachel Walker, who is now Professor of Linguistics at the University of Southern California, earned the PhD at UCSC in 1998, with a much-cited dissertation on Nasalization, Neutral Segments, and Opacity Effects (published by Garland in 2000 in their Distinguished Dissertations in Linguistics series). Since her graduation she has pursued a very active program of research in phonology, phonetics, morphology and their interactions. Her book Vowel Patterns in Language was described as `essential reading for all phonologists’ by Joe Pater when it was published in 2011. Rachel returns to the department this week to give the third colloquium of the quarter and the year—at 2pm on Friday February 6th in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge. Rachel’s title is Partially Overlapping Harmonies: Implications for Agreement by Correspondence; the abstract and other relevant details are available here.

AAAS MEETS IN SAN JOSE

AAAS (The American Associated for the Advancement of Science) is one of the largest and most respected organizations in the world seeking to advance scientific understanding and the communication of scientific results for the benefit of all. One of the 24 sections of the association is Section Z, which is devoted to Linguistics and the Language Sciences. The current chair of Section Z is Sandy Chung, who was elected a Fellow of the AAAS in December 2012.

The association will hold its annual meeting between February 12th and February 16th in San Jose. There will be a number of events of interest to linguists, including an invited topical lecture by Geoff Nunberg, along with the following symposia:

  • Imaging the Past: Using New Information Technologies To Nurture Historical Analysis (Fri 2/13, 10:00-11:30 a.m.)
  • Watching the Brain Think: Naturalistic Approaches To Studying Human Brain Function (Sat 2/14, 8:00-9:30 a.m.)
  • Social, Emotional, and Cognitive Bases of Communication: New Analytic Approaches (Sat 2/14, 1:30-4:30 p.m.)
  • Visualizing Verbal Culture: Seeing Language Diversity (Sun 2/15, 1:00-2:30 p.m.)
  • The Linguistics of Status, Influence, and Innovation: A Computational Perspective (Sun 2/15, 3:00-4:30 p.m.)

AAAS is probably one of the most valuable vehicles available for informing the broader public about recent advances in understanding of how language works. The on-line program can be accessed here.

 

RESEARCH POSITIONS IN SYNTAX AND PROSODY AT LEIDEN

Anikó Lipták and Lisa Cheng of Universiteit Leiden in the Netherlands have written to us asking for help in getting the word out about two research positions that are available in Leiden, one for a PhD student, one for a postdoc, both in the area of syntax and prosody. Both positions are funded under a grant from the NWO (Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research) for a 4-year research project on Ellipsis licensing beyond syntax, which will start later this year in Leiden, and on which Anikó and Lisa are the principal investigators. Information about the postdoctoral position is available here. For details of the PhD position, go here.

S-CIRCLE AMPS IT UP

S-Circle got off to something of a slow start this quarter due to the LSA meeting in Portland and back-to-back colloquia, but the group is now swinging into high hear. Below is a list of what is scheduled so far this quarter. This quarter’s meetings will take place on Fridays at 2 p.m. in the Linguistics Common Room.

  • February 13th: Nick Kalivoda on clause structure and agreement in Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec
  • February 20th: Melissa Fusco from the Berkeley philosophy department on the semantics of disjunction and sluicing
  • February 27th: Three presentations on island experiments from the students of Experimental Methods (Fall 2014)
  • March 6th: Amy Rose Deal on phase theory and relative clauses
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