A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Are you interested in a summer volunteer job in London? Donna Jo Napoli reports that the Winant and Clayton Volunteers is a wonderful organization. You can read about the organization here and about their internships here. The deadline for applications is February 10.
H5 Technologies is hiring linguists! H5, located in San Francisco, is interviewing linguists for the Discourse Analyst position; the current openings are for mid-February. There are already quite a few UCSC linguists at H5 and they are always looking for more! For more details about the position, go here; for more information about the company, go here. If you are interested, but a February start date wouldn’t work for you, be sure to apply anyway; there may be more opportunities later in the year.
Language Studies major Natalie Cox, who is spending the year in Toulouse, France with UC’s Education Abroad Program, is having a most unusual Fall quarter. She reports:
I’m not sure if you in Santa Cruz are aware of the situation in Toulouse or not, but the university where all the EAP-ers are located—Université de Toulose 2, Mirail—has been on strike since November 6. It is one of many French universities striking to counter a heavily opposed privatization bill.
This means that I have not been able to attend classes for almost one month. I’m crossing my fingers that courses will start this following Monday, as tennis and coffee “breaks” are getting a bit tedious and it would be nice to have some good, old-fashioned class again. But we have no idea how long the strike will last, it could potentially be until the end of the year, there is really no way of knowing.
It really is a crazy situation over here. There are tables and chairs blocking all of the entrances to the buildings, and it’s very very odd.
For some of Natalie’s photos of Toulouse on strike, go here.
Donka Farkas and Henriëtte de Swart will present a paper at the 16th Amsterdam Colloquium on December 19. The title of their talk is “Inclusive and Exclusive Plurals Reconciled”. For the preliminary program of the Colloquium, go here.
Luis Vicente will join the Department as a Research Associate of the Linguistics Research Center (LRC) for two years beginning in January 2008. A syntactician with a major focus on the structure of Spanish, Basque, and Hungarian, Luis earned his doctorate at Leiden University (The Netherlands) in 2007, working with Lisa Cheng, Anikó Lipták, and Idan Landau. His dissertation, The Syntax of Heads and Phrases, is a study of the predicate cleft construction, focusing especially on data from Spanish and Hungarian. Luis argues for a theory of movement that makes no fundamental distinction between phrases and heads; both move uniformly to specifier and adjoined positions.
Luis also has a well-developed interest in ellipsis phenomena–sluicing, negative fragments, and the like. This will be the focus of his UCSC research program, which is funded by a grant from the governnent of the Basque Country.
We look forward to welcoming Luis to the linguistics community in Santa Cruz.
UCSD anthropologist John Haviland will lead a summer Global Seminar in Sorrento, Italy, on the complex relationships between language, cultural categories, conceptualization, and communicative modalities. The seminar is open to students (undergraduates and graduate students) from any of the ten UC campuses, including UCSC. One course, Language and (Multi)culture, will explore the relationships between linguistic categories, cultural concepts, and thought. A second course, Gesture, Communication, and the Body, will consider the expressive resources in social interaction, including speech, the use of space, and gesture. The region around Sorrento has a rich tradition of gesture which has received popular, artistic, and scholarly attention since antiquity. In addition to readings and ethnographic observation, participants in the seminar will visit archeological sites at Pompeii and Herculaneum where surviving art depicts still recognizable expressive bodily attitudes. Classes will be in English, though knowledge of Italian (or other Romance languages) will be useful. For further information, contact Prof. Haviland at jhaviland@ucsd.edu, or visit the seminar’s webpage here.
As announced in last week’s WHASC, Jorge Hankamer, Vera Gribanova, Ruth Kramer, and David Teeple will hold a session to deliver their LSA talks at 3:30 p.m. on Friday, December 7, in the Linguistics Common Room (249 Stevenson). The titles of their talks are: