WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ

The 2nd Annual Summer Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America will take place at The Ohio State University, from Thursday, July 10 to Sunday, July 13, 2008. The meeting is directed specifically at undergraduate and graduate students in Linguistics, and has the following goals:

• To provide a supportive setting for students to present their research and obtain feedback on their work;
• To encourage the development of a community of scholars and a spirit of collaboration; and
• To provide students with the opportunity to learn about various aspects of the profession through targeted professional development panels.

The program will include career-related workshops on how to apply for a job, how to apply for graduate school, how to apply for funding, and how to publish research. There will also be paper/poster presentations, social events for networking, and plenary talks by Ilse Lehiste (OSU), Mary Paster (Pomona College), Elizabeth Strand (Tellme, A Microsoft Subsidiary), Frederick Parkinson (Nuance Communications), John Rickford (Stanford), and Tom Wasow (Stanford).

The deadline for submitting abstracts for 20-minute papers and posters is 5:00 p.m. EST on Monday, March 18. Instructions for submitting abstracts can be found here. The online abstract submission module will open on March 1.

Following the Summer Meeting, The Ohio State University will host a weeklong series of workshops offered by faculty and researchers from the OSU Linguistics community. For more information, go here.

The 39th Poznan Linguistic Meeting (PLM2008) will take place September 11-14, 2008, in Gniezno, Poland. The Meeting is organized by the School of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan. Its leitmotif is “Language, brain and mind: Recent linguistic, neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic perspectives”. Proposals of papers related to this main theme, as well as to other fields of modern linguistics, are invited.

Papers will be 20 minutes long, followed by 10 minutes for discussion. There will also be poster sessions. The language of the conference is English. The deadline for submission of abstracts is May 1.

Proposals are also invited for thematic workshop sessions. Slots will be reserved for six such sessions, with 6 to 9 speakers each. The submission deadline for workshop session proposals is February 15.

For more information, including guidelines for submission of abstracts and workshop proposals, go here.

Four candidates for a position as Assistant Professor in UCSC’s Linguistics Department are visiting the campus during January. Last week, Florian Schwarz (University of Massachusetts) visited the campus and gave a colloquium on “Bridging with Two Types of Definites in German–Relational Anaphora and Situational Uniqueness”. This week, Adrian Brasoveanu (Stanford University) is visiting. Adrian will give a colloquium from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday, January 16, in 202 Humanities One. His title is “Uniqueness Effects in Correlatives”.

The following week, Raj Singh (MIT) will visit UCSC; he will give a colloquium “On the Proviso Problem for Presuppositions” from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday, January 23, in 202 Humanities One. Finally, in the last week of January,  Lynsey Wolter (UCSC Ph.D. 2006; University of Rochester) will return to UCSC: she will give a colloquium on “Deixis and Identification” from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday, January 30, in 202 Humanities One.

An informal Morphology Reading Group will meet once a week this quarter, organized by Jorge Hankamer and Katrina Vahedi. The first meeting was on Friday, January 11. Subsequent meetings will be held Fridays at 12:15 p.m. in the Stevenson Cave. Topics/readings will begin with an introduction to Distributed Morphology and move on to issues in blocking, agreement, and inflection.

Jim McCloskey, who attended the LSA meeting last weekend, reports:

The 82nd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America took place in Chicago on January 3-6. Among the highlights of the meeting was Sandy Chung‘s plenary lecture “How much can understudied languages really tell us about how language works?”, a talk which sparked a lot of lively discussion immediately following the presentation itself and in the days that followed (at the meeting and on the web). At the Business Meeting, and again at the Presidential Address, it was announced that Judith Aissen and emeritus professor Geoff Pullum had been elected Fellows of the LSA, a signal honor for them both.

There were numerous presentations by members of the UCSC linguistics community. In the session on Morphology, Jorge Hankamer spoke about Turkish and morphological theory (“Ad-phrasal affixes and suspended affixation”) and Vera Gribanova presented some of her recent work on the internal structure of Russian verbs (“The (post-)syntax of Russian verbal prefixes”). In the session on Morphosyntax, Ruth Kramer presented some of her recent work on definiteness-marking in Amharic (“Phase impenetrability at PF and Amharic definite marking”), while Dave Teeple, in a session on Tone, Stress, and Syllable Structure, presented “Avoiding strong-position neutralization”.

UCSC alumni and alumnae were also a strong presence at the meeting. Papers were delivered by undergrad alums Eric Bakovic (UC San Diego), Sara Finley (Johns Hopkins University), Joseph Sabbagh (UC Berkeley), and Mark Sicoli (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics), as well as grad alums John Alderete (Simon Fraser University), Vera Lee-Schoenfeld (Swarthmore College), Jason Riggle (University of Chicago), Anne Sturgeon (H5 Technologies), and Adam Ussishkin (University of Arizona).

Almost all of the faculty missed all of this excitement, since they were busy in a windowless room on the 3rd floor, talking with people who had applied for the two new positions that the department will fill in the current year.

Vera Gribanova has been awarded an IHR dissertation fellowship for Winter 2009.

Jesse Saba Kirchner passed his Qualifying Exam with a successful defense of a paper on Dakota morphophonology. His committee was chaired by Armin Mester; the other members were Junko Ito, Alan Kawamoto (Psychology), and Jaye Padgett.

The Department of Linguistics at the University of British Columbia invites applications for a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowship to begin July 1, 2008.

This position is part of a UBC-wide program designed to facilitate innovative and collaborative teaching between early-career scholars and outstanding professors. It is for one year, renewable for an additional year subject to approval from the Head. Applicants will normally be within 3 years of being awarded the Ph.D. The successful candidate will teach, under the supervision of an experienced professor, three single-semester undergraduate courses or sections during each year of the fellowship. Salary is $50,000 (Canadian) per year, plus benefits. The position is subject to final budgetary approval. Complete applications (including letters of reference) received by February 15 will be given priority. For further details, go here.