A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
S-Circle resumes this week, when alum Pete Alrenga of Boston University returns to the department to give a talk on At Least, At Most, and Speaker Ignorance. Friday May 16th at 3:30 in the Linguistics Common Room. The abstract is available here.
Alumna Angela Aiello (BA 2003, MA 2010) is now a graduate of the Communicative Disorders and Sciences program at San Jose State University. Angela will return to the department on Friday May 16th to give a career talk for those interested in pursuing careers in speech therapy and communicative disorders. The talk will take place in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge at 4pm.
Erik Zyman will be giving an informal talk on Tuesday, May 13, at 3:30 in the Linguistics Common Room. The title is On the Semantics of P’urhepecha Degree Constructions and this is a practice talk for Erik’s upcoming presentation at SULA 8 in Vancouver. Amy Rose Deal and Maziar Toosarvandani will also be presenting at the conference.
CSLI (Center for the Study of Language and Information), at Stanford University, will host the Third CSLI Workshop on Logic, Rationality and Intelligent Interaction on Saturday May 31st and Sunday June 1st, 2014. The workshop draws contributions from logic, philosophy, mathematics, computer science, linguistics and economics, with an emphasis on exploring contacts among those disciplines. Among the speakers will be Adrian Brasoveanu. Detailed information along with a preliminary program is available here.
The final colloquium of the quarter and of the year will take place on Friday May 9th at 4pm in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge. The speaker will be Jean E. Fox Tree of the Cognitive Psychology group in the Psychology Department at UCSC. Professor Fox Tree coordinates the work of the Spontaneous Communication Laboratory at UCSC and the title of her talk is Spontaneous Communication. The abstract is available here.
Oliver Northrup will be among those PhD students defending their doctoral dissertations in coming weeks. The working title of Oliver’s dissertation (soon to be finalized) is Grounds for Commitment and the committee consists of Donka Farkas (Chair), Pranav Anand, and Adrian Brasoveanu. The defense will take place in Humanities One, Room 202 on Wednesday May 28th.
The NSF-supported project, The Real-Time Grammar of Chamorro WH-Dependencies, is seeking applications for an undergraduate research fellow in 2014-2015. The fellow will be advised by Co-PIs Matt Wagers and Sandy Chung to complete an original research project on a topic related to the grant’s areas of scientific inquiry. These include, but need not be limited to, language processing, the syntax of long-distance dependencies, morphological parsing, Chamorro and Austronesian linguistics. The project abstract is available here and a more detailed project description is here. The fellow will receive a $3500 stipend.
Any rising sophomore, junior or senior at UC Santa Cruz is eligible. To apply, prepare a project proposal of 1-2 pages that outlines a research question, its relevance to the project, and the methods to be used. Attach the proposal as a PDF to an email addressed to both mwagers@ucsc.edu and schung@ucsc.edu. In the body of your message, please describe your background, including relevant coursework, and give a faculty reference. Project proposals are due by May 20.