MCGUIRE AND PADGETT WIN NSF RESEARCH AWARD

Exciting news came in early September when the National Science Foundation announced that it was to fund a collaborative research project involving Grant McGuire and Jaye Padgett (along with alumnus Ryan Bennett, who is now Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Yale). The grant will provide support for the ongoing ultrasound study of palatalization and velarization of consonants in Irish and will also involve Máire Ní Chiosáin of University College Dublin as a collaborator. The project description is available here and a shorter description of the proposed research can be read here.

Announcement of the award generated a great deal of excitement and positive publicity for the researchers, for the department, and for UCSC—first in the campus newsletter, then in the San Jose Mercury News, then on BBC radio (8:02—15:12) and in an article to be published soon in the Irish Times.

LRC WORKSHOP ON INFORMATION STRUCTURE AND SYNTAX

We’ll open the new academic year with a workshop on Information Structure and Syntax on Saturday October 4th. The workshop will feature presentations by current UCSC people (Bern Samko and Jim McCloskey), by alumna Vera Gribanova and by LRC Associate Karen Lahousse from the Department of Linguistics at KU Leuven in Belgium. The workshop will take place in Room 210 of Humanities One, beginning at 10:00am. The program is available here. All are of course welcome.

AGREEMENT WITH MONTEREY INSTITUTE FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDIES EASES PATH FOR LANGUAGE STUDIES AND LINGUISTICS MAJORS

In August, the department concluded a three-year agreement with the Monterey Institute of International Studies, which offers professional and graduate degrees in a range of areas with an international focus.

The agreement, which is described here and here, formalizes a long and fruitful relationship between the department and MIIS; it opens an official path for UCSC Language Studies and Linguistics majors to have specific course credits accepted towards eligibility in the Advanced Entry programs in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages and Teaching Foreign Language, as well as priority consideration for scholarships.

MIIS officials will visit the department later in the Fall Quarter to conduct informational meetings about the agreement and the new pathways that it opens for our majors. In the meantime, detailed information is available from undergraduate staff advisor Susan Welch.

In welcoming the signing of the agreement, Dean Renée Jourdanais of MIIS commented: We’re thrilled that we’ve been able to formalize our relationship with UCSC. Their linguistics majors have always been stellar students in our MATESOL/MATFL program and it just made sense to welcome them into our Advanced Entry program.

SUMMER ADVENTURES

Nate Arnett travelled to AMLaP XX, the 20th annual Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing conference at The Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in Edinburgh, Scotland. Nate delivered a poster Case and finiteness versus clausal position in subject-verb attachment, presenting research that grew out of his dissertation research and collaborative work with Matt Wagers. The poster presented the results of a series of experiments and computational simulations. In addition to the many excellent talks and posters on bleeding-edge Psycholinguistics research, Nate caught up with other members of the UCSC Linguistics community, including alumni Matt Tucker, Adam Morgan, Shayne Slogget, as well as former speakers, friends, and colleagues too numerous to list (you know who you are). Along the way, Nate participated in a workshop on the role of (working) memory in sentence processing, generously hosted by the Maryland Language Science Center at
Kiplin Hall in the north of England. (The connections between Kiplin and (U)MD are interesting, and are well worth a look.)

Nick Kalivoda presented joint work with Erik Zyman at a September meeting of the University of Gothenburg’s Grammar Seminar (Grammatikseminariet). The talk was entitled On the Derivation of Relative Clauses in Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec.

September saw the nineteenth meeting of Sinn und Bedeutung, which was held at the Georg August University in Göttingen, the German town where Frege lived from 1871 to 1873. Among the presenters there were Karen Duek, who reported on joint work with Adrian Brasoveanu (The polysemy of container pseudo-partitives), and Erik Zyman, who presented On the semantics of P’urhepecha degree constructions. The complete program may be viewed here. Participants enjoyed the great variety of semantics and pragmatics talks they had to choose from and the conference’s vibrant international atmosphere.

Jim McCloskey stopped off at MIT on his way back from Ireland to California for a three-day visit, in the course of which he gave a colloquium and met with faculty and graduate students.

Clara Sherley-Appel gave an invited talk at the Linguistics Department of Stony Brook University on September 10th as part of their Brown Bag series. Her talk centered on her ongoing work on the analysis of Turkish relative clauses and the abstract is available here.

SANTA CRUCIANS at NELS 45

The program for NELS 45 at MIT is now available. Among those who will be presenting papers are Amy Rose Deal (Properties of probes: evidence from Nez Perce complementizer agreement) and Anna Greenwood (Unpacking the effects of naturalness and simplicity biases on stress pattern learning). Also presenting will be undergrad alumna Lauren Winans (now a PhD student at UCLA) and doctoral alumnae Ruth Kramer (now Assistant Professor at Georgetown University) and Vera Gribanova (now Assistant Professor at Stanford University).

LAST GASP

This being the final WHASC of 2013—14, we look forward to the summer’s activities and we recognize those who are now moving on to new adventures and opportunities.

MOVING ON

Peter Fabian will enter the Master’s Program in Education at Stanford University starting at the end of June, 2014.

Brianna Kaufman will be traveling around the US, Mexico, and Chile, and then will be entering the Peace Corps.

Rachel Hart will enter the Master’s Program in Speech Pathology at CSU East Bay in Fall 2014.

Michelle Laszlo-Rath is going to the Master’s program in Speech Pathology at the University of Memphis.

Alice Nicholls, who graduated in 2011, will be starting a program in Speech and Language Pathology at CSU East Bay in the fall.

Arianna Puopolo will enter the Master’s Program in Education at the University of California, Berkeley.

Lindsay Ress is moving on to the Master’s program in Speech Pathology at San Jose State University.

Saskia Salm will enter the Master’s Program in Social Work at the University of Southern California.

Jennifer Scott will start the Master’s Program in Applied Linguistics at Boston University in January 2015.

Devin Tankersley will enter the MA program in Linguistics at Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, having won a competitive scholarship from the Taiwanese Ministry of Education for the program.

Mallory Turnbull will begin the Master’s program in Speech Pathology at San Jose State University in the coming Fall.

Nicholas Winter will be entering the PhD program in Linguistics at Rutgers in the coming Fall semester.

Congratulations and good luck to all.

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