A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Language Studies major Cody Townsend won the Mammoth Quest extreme skiing event last week. He then went on to place fourteenth in the Nissan Mammoth Challenge on January 25. The Nissan Mammoth Challenge is the first event in the 1st Freeride World Tour 2008.
The call for the 2008 competition for the Deans’, Chancellor’s, and Steck Undergraduate Awards has just been issued. These awards recognize exceptional achievements by UCSC undergraduates in research projects or other creative activities, and are intended to encourage outstanding scholarship and promote research as an important part of undergraduate education at UCSC. The awards are described here.
Undergaduates who wish to apply for these awards on the basis of a paper or project in linguistics or language studies should submit their completed paper or project directly to the Linguistics Department, along with an application form, by Friday, April 11. The awards will be presented at the annual Awards Ceremony, which will be held June 6, at the end of Student Achievement Week.
Chronos 8 will be held October 3-5, 2008, at the University of Texas, Austin. Chronos is a series of biannual conferences dedicated to current research on the morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of markers of tense, aspect, mood, and modality. The series aims to bring together researchers working from different perspectives and in different theoretical frameworks. The deadline for submission of abstracts is March 1, 2008. More detailed information and instructions for submitting abstracts are available here. This year’s conference is dedicated to the memory of Carlota Smith.
Raj Singh (MIT), one of four candidates for a position as Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department, will visit UCSC this week. He will give a colloquium “On the Proviso Problem for Presupposition” from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday, January 23, in 202 Humanities One.
Chris Brumwell (UCSC B.A., 2007) who is currently an M.A. student in the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) at the University of Amsterdam, writes:
Putting aside a few misunderstandings with the Dutch immigration service, Amsterdam has been treating me great so far. The university found me a cool apartment close to the center of town, and the Dutch government awarded me a Huygens scholarship (more information on the HSP Huygens Programme can be found here.) The program at the ILLC has been interesting so far, and I’ve met lots of great people during my studies. Right now, I’m continuing a project I started in Donka Farkas’s Semantics A course a few years back, studying models of discourse with another first year student, and taking a wide variety of classes. Hope everything is going great in Santa Cruz!
Oscar Velasco (UCSC B.A., 1999) writes from Seattle:
Since we’ve last spoken, I’ve had quite the series of adventures. I’ve gone from creating syntax and logical form analyses used to evaluate a multi-layered parser at the Evil Empire to running an enterprise known to many as Artemis Café & Bar. How did I get from Stevenson to Redmond and then to the brutal industry of late night restaurateuring, you might ask? By movement, of course? And as we all know, movement happens for a reason. True or False? (Argue amongst yourselves.)
On a cloudy Seattle afternoon, I was introduced to a Russian philosopher named Boris. This gentle soul and I talked about change in the world and modes of perception. We came to the conclusion that the only way to live up to our full potential as a species was to create a physical institution that would allow for uninhibited interactions between humans.
After careful analysis of population density, cost analyzing, menu planning, wine tasting, gin tasting, rum tasting, etc., a goddess was born.
She is warm and welcoming to all linguists, generative and otherwise. Perhaps you will consider having Artemis host the Santa Cruz party when next you find yourselves in Seattle?
UnderLings, the Cornell University undergraduate linguistics association, will hold its second annual Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium on March 8-9, 2008. The goal of the conference is to promote undergraduate research at all levels by facilitating communication and discussion between researchers. Submissions from interested undergraduate students are encouraged in a variety of subfields of linguistics, including but not limited to phonetics, phonology, syntax, historical linguistics and sociolinguistics. There is a high probability that the conference proceedings will be published afterward, most likely in an online, widely-accessible format.
Applicants are invited to submit one-page abstracts proposing talks of not more than twenty minutes. All participants must be pursuing a B.A., B.S., or equivalent degree. The abstract deadline is February 8. For more information, including instructions on how to submit your abstract online, go here, or contact: alt28@cornell.edu .