Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax

Also published late in the year was Volume 93 in the respected Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax series. Among the papers in the volume is one by former LRC visitor Filippa Lindahl. The paper, Relative Clauses are not Always Strong Islands, grows out of Filippa’s presentation to S-Circle last June. Johan Brandtler, who was an LRC visitor in 2011-2012, is the current editor of WPSS and he is overseeing an ambitious project to make the entire archive of past issues of the series available online. At present, Volumes 81-93 of this rich resource are available for download from the archive.

Alumna Kristen Sheets Helps Localize Gmail To Irish

Also in the second half of December, at an event held at The Foundry (the conference and innovation center at Google’s EU headquarters in Dublin), Google launched an Irish language version of its email service gmail. Among the people who made this possible was alumna Kristen Sheets. Since her graduation in Spring 2014, Kristen has been working with Google doing localization and the Irish project was one of the principal ones that she has so far been involved in. Kristen has this to say about the project:

I’m always very excited when I get to work, even peripherally, on projects translating into minority/endangered languages. There are obviously other more ‘promotional’ issues at play here, but I think allowing people to use the internet/internet applications in their native language is a really worthwhile endeavor.

Call for Nominations for Dizikes Award

Since 2002 the Humanities Division at UCSC has presented the Dizikes Award to recognize faculty for their commitment and effectiveness in transformative teaching and effective mentoring of students, both undergraduate and graduate. In addition to receiving the award, recipients have the honor of selecting an undergraduate student who receives a scholarship in their name. The selection process is student-driven; current students and recent alumni are therefore invited to nominate faculty for consideration for the award. Nominations should address the faculty member’s ability to rouse curiosity in students, to encourage high standards, and to stimulate students to original and rigorous work. A nomination consists of a single-page form, which is available here, along with a one-page narrative describing the impact and effectiveness of the nominee’s teaching. Nominations should be submitted to chair Sandy Chung and/or to Department Manager Ashley Hardisty by February 13th 2015. More detailed information is available here. Students who are considering making a nomination are encouraged to consult with Sandy and Ashley for guidance and advice.

PADGETT IN NORWAY

Jaye Padgett was in Tromsø, Norway where he was an invited speaker at the Palatalization Conference there, which was hosted by the Center for Advanced Study in Theoretical Linguistics (CASTL) and the University of Tromsø (a.k.a. the Arctic University of Norway). You can see here the slides of his talk, The perception of secondary palatalization: Irish and Russian compared, co-authored with Máire Ní Chiosáin of University College Dublin, in Ireland. While there, Jaye saw UCSC Ph.D. alum Peter Svenonius (1994), as well as Ove Lorentz, a frequent LRC visitor in the past. One of the conference co-organizers, Martin Krämer, will be an LRC visitor as of January. Apart from deconstructing palatalization, Jaye experienced the taste of reindeer and grouse, and a feeling of impending Vitamin D deficiency. (The sun never rose that week. These pictures give a sense of the light at high noon.)

MCGUIRE IN NEW ZEALAND

Meanwhile, Grant McGuire travelled to the other end of the earth to attend the 15th Australasian International Speech Science and Technology conference in Christchurch, New Zealand /Aotearoa. Grant presented a paper entitled, Orthographic effects on phonetic cue weighting. Grant reports:

This was a nice gathering of Antipodeans as well as North Americans and Europeans. We had a lovely conference dinner at a wildlife preserve that had Kiwi as well as many other endangered NZ species. We also got to experience a Maori pōwhiri, practice poi dancing and haka, and eat pit barbecue, called hāngi. The evening was concluded with the phonetician’s tradition of a spectrogram reading contest.To quote my hosts, it was “sweet as”!

The conference proceedings (including Grant’s paper) are already available here.

RESEARCH AND READING GROUPS

The research and reading groups that are such a central part of the life of the department will continue and expand their activities going in to the new quarter and the new year. S-Circle and Phlunch will continue their Friday meetings, and the venerable MRG (Morphology Reading Group) will spring into life again in Winter 2015. Two new groups came into being in Fall 2014 and we thought that the final WHASC of 2014 would be a good time to check in with them and see what their plans for the coming year were.

The Agree(ment) group is coordinated by Amy Rose Deal and Maziar Toosarvandani and has financial support from the Institute for Humanities Research at UCSC. Amy Rose and Maziar sent in this report:

This fall, the Agree(ment) group has been meeting primarily to discuss recent theories that have been proposed to account for the patterns of verbal agreement found in the world’s languages. Mid-quarter, we took a break from reading to hear from Nick Kalivoda about his ongoing working on the intricate system of agreement in Teotitlan del Valle Zapotec. We will be kicking off 2015 with a pair of talks by visitors to UCSC. In the first week of classes, Coppe van Urk (MIT) will be joining us for a meeting on Wednesday evening. And in the second week, Claire Halpert (University of Minnesota) will speak to us during our regular meeting time on Thursday evening. Stay tuned for details!

SPLAP (Semantics, Pragmatics, and Language Philosophy) is coordinated by Karen Duek, Margaret Kroll and Deniz Rudin and focuses on the connections among semantics, pragmatics and philosophy of language. Deniz sent in this report about their activities and plans:

SPLAP’s inaugural quarter proved to be very productive and enjoyable. The management would like to thank from the bottom of our hearts all of our loyal Splappers, for helping us to realize our fever dream of a weekly assembly of colleagues eager to discuss Semantics, Pragmatics, and LAnguage Philosophy. We sank our teeth into two main topics: First, we performed a thorough investigation of the theory of vague predicates. We saw logicians formalize a wiggle-roomier notion of truth; we saw semanticists discard the law of the excluded middle; we saw philosophers declare that there’s no such thing as vagueness after all; and we saw psycholinguists demonstrate that many people are distressingly comfortable describing people of average height as `tall and not tall’. In a private discussion, whose participants were sworn to secrecy until their dying day, we solved to our satisfaction all of the problems that a satisfactory analysis of vagueness must solve, and decided to move on with our lives, confident in the knowledge that there remained no more to be said on the subject. Second, we dipped our toes into a preliminary investigation of the notion of meaning. Putnam argued that meanings aren’t psychological objects; Chomsky argued that they are; Burge argued that the two camps are talking past each other and are actually in agreement about most of the fundamental issues. Strong and contradictory opinions were voiced by various parties in these discussions, but at least we all could agree that the true path is obvious and that our opponents are hopelessly misguided. Who knows what our next quarter will bring? All are welcome to show up and participate to whatever degree they feel comfortable; email drudin@ucsc.edu with any inquiries, including requests to be added to our mailing list.

1 … 179 180 181 182 183 … 378