A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
On Wednesday May 28th from 4.00 until 5.30pm, Maziar Toosarvandani will will give the 28th Stevenson Distinguished Faculty Lecture, in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge. His title is Talking About Time in a Language Without Tense. A poster for the event is available here.
On the afternoon of Wednesday June 4th in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge, the department celebrates one of the high points of the year, with LURC 2014 (Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference 2014), which will take place in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge. This year’s conference features talks by Scarlett Clothier-Goldschmidt, Sean Isamu Johnson, Chelsea Miller, and Eileen O’Neill. The distinguished Alumnus address which ends the conference will be given by Lauren Winans. Lauren graduated with the BA in Linguistics in 2010 and is now in the fourth year of her doctorate at UCLA. The program for LURC 2014 is available here.
Linguistics staff member, Susan Welch, participated all year in the UCSC Diversity and Inclusion Program and received her certificate of completion from Chancellor Blumenthal on Monday, May 19th, at University House. The Diversity and Inclusion Certificate Program is designed to offer participants an in-depth education in diversity issues so that they can gain a greater understanding of how to build a stronger and more inclusive UC Santa Cruz community. Susan completed the entire eight course program in one academic year, while continuing to coordinate and oversee advising for the two undergraduate majors sponsored by the department. There are pictures of the awards ceremony here.
Last week, Jaye Padgett presented at two conferences. First, he was a panel discussant at the Agreement by Correspondence Conference at UC Berkeley. Also presenting at that conference were alums Rachel Walker (Ph.D., 1998, now at USC) and Eric Baković (B.A., now at UC San Diego), along with Wendell Kimper, who was recently a visiting faculty member in the department. Jaye then got on a plane to Dublin, where he presented a talk called On the origins of the prosodic word in Russian at the
Speech Prosody 2014 conference at Trinity College Dublin.
Just as Jaye was flying into SFO from the east from Ireland, Sandy Chung and Matt Wagers were flying westwards out of SFO towards the sunnier climes of Hawai’i, to present a paper at AFLA 21, hosted this year by the University of Hawai’i. Matt presented the paper—Constituent order, grammatical licensing and parser control processes in Chamorro— which develops one strand of the collaborative research project that Matt and Sandy are engaged in with their collaborator on Saipan Manuel F. Borja.
Now that Mark Norris and Anie Thompson have survived the ordeal and successfully defended their dissertations, Oliver Northrup and Judith Fiedler are up next. Oliver defends his thesis Grounds for Commitment on Wednesday morning May 28th at 10.00am in Humanities One, Room 202. Judith’s turn comes on Tuesday June 3rd at 4.00pm in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge, when she will present and defend her dissertation Germanic It-Clefts: Structural Variation and Semantic Uniformity.
Mark Aronoff of the Linguistics Department at Stony Brook University will present in Morphology Reading Group on Friday, May 30th at 1.00pm in the Cave. Mark’s talk will be on Synonymy and Competition in Language.
