A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
The final colloquium of the quarter will take place on Friday December 12th at 4pm in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge. The speaker will be Adam Albright of MIT, who will be giving a talk entitled “Testing phonological biases with Artificial Grammar learning experiments.” The abstract for this talk can be found here.
Volume 35 of Dictionaries, the journal of the Dictionary Society of America, contains a short report by Sandy Chung and Elizabeth D. Rechebei on the community-based revision of the Chamorro-English Dictionary. The Dictionary revision began in 2009, was supported from 2009 to 2013 by NSF, and is now in the editing phase. A prepublication version of the report, Community Engagement in the Revised Chamorro-English Dictionary, can be viewed here.
Separately Sandy learned this week that her first book, Case Marking and Grammatical Relations in Polynesian, has come back into print(-on-demand). More information is available here.
Jim McCloskey travelled to UC Berkeley on Monday December 8th to give a talk in the Linguistics Department’s Colloquium Series. Jim’s talk was on Ellipsis in Irish and the Calculus of Redundancy.
We have been asked to spread the word about a conference to be held in Vancouver between April 24th and April 26th 2015. Sponsored by the Department of Philosophy at Simon Fraser University, the title of the conference is Language at the Interface and the invited speakers include Peter Carruthers (Maryland), Wolfram Hinzen (Barcelona and Durham), Friederike Moltmann(CNRS and NYU), and Anna Papafragou (Delaware). Detailed information is available here but in brief the aim of the workshop is to explore a wide range of questions at the intersection of linguistics, psychology, and philosophy that might be raised in connection with the place of language in the architecture of the mind. The organizers (Ashley Atkins (SFU) and James Martin(Princeton/SFU)) invite 1-2 page abstracts on any topic related to the language-mind interface, broadly construed. The abstract submission deadline is January 15, 2015. Anonymized abstracts should be sent to latkins@sfu.ca; the email message should include personal information (name, institution, contact information). More information is available at the conference website.
Visiting researcher Annemarie van Dooren will be giving a talk this Friday, December 5th entitled “Dutch modals and their predicates: Three puzzles for compositionality.” This last S-Circle of the year will be held, as always, at 4pm in the LCR. The abstract for this talk is available here.
Adam Albright, now at MIT, held a position as Faculty Fellow at UCSC between 2002 and 2004. Adam returns to UCSC for the final colloquium of the quarter, to be held on Friday December 12th. Title, abstract, and other details about Adam’s visit will be announced shortly.
A few weeks ago, Bern Samko made her way to Stanford for an invited talk. She reports:
I traveled slightly north to present at Stanford’s Syntax and Morphology Circle. The talk was called “Topicality, focus, and intonation in English verb-phrase preposing”, and it sparked a lively discussion (which was mostly about neither syntax nor morphology).