ENDLESS SUMMER

Nick Kalivoda will be traveling to Oaxaca to conduct fieldwork on Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec. Nick’s work will focus on the language’s agreement system, and on a continuing investigation of relative clause structure and binding non-connectivity—part of an ongoing project with Erik Zyman.

Bern Samko will travel to Leuven/Louvain in Flanders (Belgium) on June 13th to give an invited presentation to the FEST group at the University of Leuven on her ongoing research on syntax and information structure in English.

Erik Zyman will be traveling to Janitzio, an island on Lake Pátzcuaro in the state of Michoacán in central-western Mexico, to continue his work on P’urhepecha. He will be investigating the clause structure of this language, and specifically the syntax of the verb phrase.

Amy Rose Deal will travel to Israel in July for the workshop Allomorphy: its logic and limitations, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Also expected to be in attendance are alums Ruth Kramer and Peter Svenonius. Amy Rose’s paper for the conference deals with certain interesting patterns of plural marking and double reduplication in Nez Perce.

Grant McGuire will be presenting at the upcoming LabPhon 14 conference at the NINJAL Institute in Tachikawa, Japan on July 24-27th. The oral presentation program is here. Grant’s talk is titled Stereotypes predict memory effects for voices. Junko Ito and Armin Mester will also be at the conference.

Jaye Padgett will be in Ireland for the last two weeks of June to do more ultrasound fieldwork in Conamara, together with collaborator Máire Ní Chiosáin of University College Dublin. Also involved in this ongoing project are Grant McGuire and alumnus Ryan Bennett of Yale.

Maziar Toosarvandani will be devoting the summer to some intense fieldwork on Northern Paiute with the Mono Lake community near Bridgeport in eastern California.

Matt Wagers and Sandy Chung will return twice to the islands of Saipan and Rota in the Northern Mariana Islands to continue their psycholinguistic work on Chamorro. They will collect new data on relative clause comprehension in June, and relative clause production in September. Back in Santa Cruz, the Digital Chamorro Group will be working hard: Scarlett Clothier-Goldschmidt, the 2013-2014 NSF REU fellow, will continue her corpus-based research on person-animacy constraints in Chamorro, while Karl DeVries, the NSF Graduate Research Associate, will resume his work on building digital tools for using the Chamorro dictionary database.

LURC 2014

LURC 2014 took place on Wednesday afternoon, June 5th in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge. Scarlett Clothier-Goldschmidt, Sean Isamu Johnson, Chelsea Miller, and Eileen O’Neill presented research projects on a wide range of topics (mentored by Maziar Toosarvandani) and alumna Lauren Winans of UCLA gave the keynote address (on the acquisition of evidentiality in English). Pictures were taken (by Oliver Northrup) and can be viewed here.

FIEDLER DEFENSE

The final PhD defense of the season took place when Judith Fiedler successfully defended her dissertation on Germanic It-Clefts on Tuesday afternoon June 3rd. The committee consisted of Donka Farkas and Jim McCloskey as co-chairs along with Jorge Hankamer as third member.

HONORS IN THE MAJOR

It was announced that seniors Chase Dontanville and Vicky (Ji Sun) Lee had been awarded honors in the Language Studies major, while Will Buchanan, Scarlett Clothier-Goldschmidt, Chelsea Miller and Michael Titone all received Honors in Linguistics.

HUMANITIES AWARDS CEREMONY

At the Humanities Spring Awards celebration on Thursday May 29th, Abbey Katz presented her HUGRA-award winning poster on Hebrew Nicknames and Phonology, while Michael Titone presented the paper that won him a Dean’s Undergraduate Research Award (On the Semantics of the `Nothing if Not’ constructions). Also at the event Chelsea Miller celebrated her Chancellor’s Award for Undergraduate Research (on the processing of ellipsis in English) with her advisor Matt Wagers and chair Sandy Chung. Also celebrating was the Syntax Five Gang (Tony Zavala, Nich Eggert, Sean Johnson, Vince Del Prado, Hannah Elston, Kristen Sheets, Rachelle Boyson, Chelsea Miller, and Britt Fadelli) who had also just received a Dean’s award for their collaborative project on English causatives. A subset of the group paused to have their picture taken with Jorge Hankamer who, along with Jim McCloskey, advised the project.

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