A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Jane Grimshaw of Rutgers University will be the first speaker in this year’s colloquium series. The talk will take place at 4pm on Friday, October 17th and it will be in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge. Jane’s title is The use of force in clausal complementation and the abstract is available here.
Louise McNally earned the PhD from UCSC in 1992 with a dissertation that has become one of the foundational documents in the literature on existential constructions (An Interpretation for the English Existential Construction). Since 1995, she has been a faculty member at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and she has had a central role in developing the language sciences community in Catalonia. Louise was recently recognized (for the second time) with a research professorship from ICREA (Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudio Avançats), so we thought that this would be a good time to check in with her.
WHASC: First, many congratulations on your recent ICREA Research Professorship (your second). Could you tell us a little about what this award means for you and what opportunities it opens (for you and for your group)?
Louise: The ICREA award gives me a 50% teaching buyout for 5 years, plus some additional research money. The money comes with very few strings attached, so I’ve used it for various things, mainly as extra support for my students. The best thing about the grant, besides the extra research time, is the flexibility these funds offer.
WHASC: What are you working on at present?
Louise: I’m starting a new project that’s called ‘CONNECT: Connecting conceptual and referential models of meaning’. The title sums it up pretty clearly, and the problem the project addresses is one that has come up repeatedly in different strands of my work. On the one hand, a recurring theme for me since my dissertation has been what you might call the interplay of type- and token-level expressions in language. On the other, I’ve spent most of the last 10 years trying to figure out how to deal with the context dependence of the interpretation of modifiers. A few years ago, since I felt like I couldn’t get much further with classical formal models of modification, I started collaborating with researchers working on distributional semantic models of meaning. Distributional representations do very well at resolving many sorts of context-dependence, and they turn out to offer quite interesting (if imperfect) models of type-level contents as well. On the other hand, distributional models in their current form do not look very promising as models of reference or information structure—things that frameworks like DRT handle well. So the idea is to work on integrating the two sorts of models.
WHASC: You’ve been centrally involved in developing the research and teaching community in linguistics in Barcelona. How does that look at present? What kind of work is being done and what is the community like? What does the future hold?
Louise: Things are great. We’ve got a critical mass of strong doctoral students and have been very lucky to have a steady stream of excellent postdocs and visiting researchers. Our Master’s program, which we started to offer in English a few years ago, is attracting lots of students from all over. I hope we can consolidate the quality we have, continue to strengthen our ties with some other programs both in Spain and in Europe, and just keep on doing new and interesting things. The people in our group are doing all kinds of things. To give just a sample: the clause structure of Catalan Sign Language, the evolution of the auxiliary system in Spanish and Catalan, nominalization of verbs and adjectives in various languages, lexical aspect in Japanese, the syntax of long-distance dependencies, different expressions of denial and the insights they offer into pragmatic theory, and the interaction of prosody and gesture.
WHASC: That all sounds really exciting. However, building that community has involved a lot of heavy administrative work on your part, yet you have remained very active in research. How is that possible? How do you meet both kinds of demands on your time?
Louise: There’s no secret: First, I have a lot of administrative support. Second, I work a lot of hours, try to maximize efficiency, and try to lose sleep over nothing. It’s amazing how much you can improve your efficiency in research by simply learning how to calculate the approximate time it takes to do a given research-related task and scheduling those tasks into your day.
WHASC: What’s it like in Barcelona?
Louise: In some ways it’s like a big, European-flavored Santa Cruz. Every time I go running along the beach here, I remember running along West Cliff Drive. Barcelona is an ideal city for anyone interested in language, especially multilingualism, sociolinguistics, and language policy. An easy way to see for yourself is to come to ESSLLI at UPF next August (a few preliminary details are already available on the web), or to spend some time as a visitor.
WHASC: Looking back at your own time in Santa Cruz, have you any advice for current students looking to build a career like yours?
Louise: I think the most important things I learned at Santa Cruz were humility and how to dig deeper into whatever issue was under discussion. I also remember and find occasion to repeat regularly many pearls of wisdom from my professors. I’ll mention just one: ‘Ideas are cheap; it’s working out the details that has merit.’ (Your collective homework is to figure out who said that; hint: it’s someone who’s still on the faculty.) A few other pieces of advice:
WHASC: Thanks a lot, Louise, and good luck with everything.
In the course of the week, the University of Minnesota Press published Deaf Gain, a volume of essays which argue from various perspectives against the deficit view of deafness and which instead frame deafness as a distinct way of being, one which brings intellectual and cultural benefits. Among the contributors to the volume is grad student Clara Sherley-Appel, who coauthored one of the chapters in the book along with John Bonvillian of the University of Virginia. The title of their paper is Manual Signs and Gestures of the Inuit of Baffin Island: Observations during the Three Voyages Led by Martin Frobisher and Clara has this to say about the paper:
The chapter is part of a project I worked on with John Bonvillian at UVA on the use of manual signs and gestures in first contact situations. The primary case study in this chapter concerns the journeys of a privateer of the Elizabethan era named Martin Frobisher. Frobisher was commissioned by Elizabeth to seek a Northwest Passage to what was then known as Cathay. He didn’t find a Northwest Passage (because it doesn’t exist), but the logs and diaries of the crew from the three voyages he led mention using signs and gestures to facilitate contact and trade, and there is some additional evidence that the Inuit of Baffin Island had elaborated sign systems used for hunting and other purposes, making it an interesting case study.
Junko Ito and Armin Mester spent their spring sabbatical and summer at NINJAL (National Institute of Japanese Linguistics) in Tokyo doing collaborative research with former LRC visitor Haruo Kubozono. They gave invited talks at NINJAL and at Keio University on their ongoing work on Japanese accent in OTWorkplace; and as organizers of FAJL 7 (Formal Approaches to Japanese Linguistics 7), in Tokyo, they met up with many UCSC-related people who were presenting at the conference—Ph.D. alum Ryan Bennett (now Assistant Professor at Yale University), BA alum Sean Johnson, EAP alumni Shigeto Kawahara (UMass Ph.D., now Professor at Keio University), Atsushi Oho (Rutgers Ph.D. grad student), and Takashi Morita (MIT Ph.D. grad student), as well as former LRC visitor Shin Ishihara (Frankfurt U.). Go here for the picture.
We welcome nine new graduate students to the department this year.
Ben Mericli comes to UCSC Linguistics from Washington, D.C., where lived and worked for five years after college. Ben studied linguistics, philosophy, and engineering physics at the University of Pittsburgh. He plans to concentrate on morphology and syntax at UCSC and, although his D.C.-based band has been disbanded, hopes to continue to write and play music as linguistics permits.
Chelsea Miller is entering her first year as an MA student but has been on the campus for 4 years having completed her BA in Linguistics here at UCSC in 2014; she looks forward to continuing to study linguistics here. With regard to linguistic research, her interests include syntax and psycholinguistics, and more specifically within these areas, ellipsis, ellipsis resolution, parsing, and memory. In her “free time”, she is probably still thinking about linguistics, but also enjoys taking dance classes, cooking, walking, hiking, and biking (though it’s a must stop to pet all cats on the way).
Hitomi Hirayama comes from Japan, and completed her BA and MA at the University of Tokyo. She is interested in the semantics of noun phrases, information structure, and also in the Romance languages. She is seriously missing udon noodles in Japan, but is nevertheless enjoying her new life in California with two cute cats.
Jed Guevara got his BA in Linguistics and French from UC Berkeley back in 2010. He then went to CSU Long Beach to get his MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. He did a brief stint as an ESL teacher in Long Beach but decided to go back to school. He plans to focus on the acquisition and processing of syntactic dependencies in Tagalog and other Philippine languages. When he is not doing linguistics, he enjoys cooking with wine (and adding some to the food as well), and/or playing boardgames.
Jeff Adler is from New Jersey. He did his undergrad degree at Rutgers, and then lived in Colombia for a year. Intellectually, he swings p-side, and is interested mostly in everything phonological theory (especially OT), with additional interests in phonetics and syntax. Outside of linguistics, he likes hiking and other endeavors into nature, as well as reading and buying new clothes.
Margaret Kroll found linguistics relatively late, after a (short) career working in politics. She was for the past two years in the linguistics PhD program at UCLA, but is very happy to have moved to Santa Cruz. Her linguistic interests are in pragmatics, semantics, and philosophy of language, in particular issues at the semantics/pragmatics interface. Her non-linguistic interests include running, politics, and, at the moment, teaching herself to sew.
Maxwell Sowell is originally from San Diego, and received his BA in Linguistics and Philosophy at UC Davis. He enjoys working with semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language. In his free time he likes to drum (let’s jam or start a band!) and drag his friends out to be social. Long road trips are rad.
Nate Clair is a Utah native, whose two loves in life are languages and the outdoors. Nate did his undergrad work at the University of Utah where he studied Linguistics and Middle East studies. He loves Indo-Iranian languages in particular and focuses his research on their syntax and semantics. When not employed in linguistic matters, he is an avid runner, hiker and cross-country skier.
Steven Foley comes to Santa Cruz by way of New York City, so he’s thrilled to experience genuine nature but misses good bagels. Morphosyntax, ergativity, and Caucasian languages are major interests of his, as are cooking and at least moderately artsy movies.
Also (re-)joining the department this year is Bern Samko who has spent the last twelve months on a research fellowship at the University of Potsdam in Germany. Bern sent in this report of her year:
I’ve just returned to Santa Cruz from the University of Potsdam, where I spent a year as a visiting PhD student in the Integrated Graduate School associated with the Collaborative Research Center Information Structure: The Linguistic Means of Structuring Utterances, Sentences and Texts. The project group I worked with, The Syntactic Expression of Information Structure and the Architecture of Grammar, was led by Gisbert Fanselow and former LRC Research Associate Luis Vicente. Two internal workshops and a PhD day gave me the opportunity to meet, interact with, and get feedback from students and faculty working on information structure at the University of Potsdam, the Humboldt University of Berlin, and the Free University of Berlin. I had a great time living in Berlin, learned a lot, and am looking forward to making the most of that knowledge this year in Santa Cruz!
We are also fortunate enough to host two visiting graduate students this year.
Annemarie van Dooren is a visiting scholar from Utrecht, the Netherlands, where she completed her MA thesis on the syntax of modal verbs. Here in Santa Cruz, she will be working on the semantics of the same topic.