WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ

The Department of Linguistics at the University of Utah is advertising a tenure-track position for an Assistant Professor (or under exceptional circumstances, someone more senior), to begin July 1, 2008, pending budgetary approval. The successful applicant will have a primary specialization in theoretical syntax or phonology. A secondary specialization, especially in the documentation of Native American languages, is preferred. For the official announcement, go here. Questions about the position? Contact Marianna Di Paolo.

Jaye Padgett travelled to Russia at the end of the summer to conduct some research at St. Petersburg State University. He lived to tell the tale, and this is his report:

In September I spent about 10 days in St. Petersburg, Russia. I was there to run a perceptual experiment on Russian listeners. (The experiment explores the perceptual similarities among sounds that commonly form the input and output of palatalizing mutations, like the kind you get in English “got you” → “gotcha”.) The people of the Phonetics Department of St. Petersburg State University were kind enough, at the beginning of their academic year, to make a room available to me and to supply me with a continual stream of bemused undergraduates—24 in all. St. Petersburg is called the “Venice of the north”, at least by Russians, and in fact it is spectacular. The university is right on the Neva river embankment, across the river and down a bit from the Winter Palace. The city center is an architectural candy store—baroque, neoclassical, art nouveau—and is laced by canals.

Instead of a hotel I booked lodgings through a service that lands you in somebody’s apartment. There I was fed lots of soup by the obligatory babushka who said babushka things like ‘Russian ice cream is the best’ and ‘I read that milk in tea destroys the health effects of tea; those British have really gotten it wrong.’ On my last night there the department’s chair Pavel Skrelin took me to a Georgian restaurant and tried to kill me with vodka.

In a new advising initiative, the Department has set up a system to provide undergraduate students in the Linguistics and Language Studies majors with access to a group of peer advisors to help them through the often complex paths through the two majors.

The group is coordinated by MA student Katrina Vahedi, the Peer Advising Coordinator, and its members hold regular office hours and drop-in advising hours in Room 265 on the second floor of Stevenson College. The current group of advisors includes Michael Fahey, Angie Muñoz, Robyn Perry, and Cameron Taylor.

Please drop by and chat with them.

A new book by Vera Lee-Schoenfeld will be published by John Benjamins Publishing Company in the coming month. Vera completed the PhD at UCSC in 2005 and is now with the Department of Linguistics at Swarthmore College. Vera’s book, Beyond Coherence: The Syntax of Opacity in German, published in the Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today Series, is a substantial revision of her Santa Cruz dissertation. It deals with a range of issues in the syntax of German and argues that movement and certain kinds of anaphoric processes are governed by a unified locality principle centered on the concept of the phase.

C. Jan Wouter Zwart of the University of Groningen says of the book that it ‘makes an essential contribution to the lively debate on locality in syntax, yielding an empirical argument that is sure to be influential’, while Jason Merchant of the University of Chicago calls the book a ‘a landmark study’, and says: ‘Lee-Schoenfeld provides a masterful guide through the intricate data on a fundamental syntactic question: what makes a phrase into a boundary for syntactic processes?’

The book will be available for purchase in a couple of weeks.

Students from the department will be roaming far and near to present the results of their research over the next month or two.

Vera Gribanova will travel to Germany to give a talk at Formal Descriptions of Slavic Languages 7, which takes place at the University of Leipzig in late November. The title of Vera’s talk is ‘Phonological evidence for a distinction between Russian prepositions and prefixes’.

Meanwhile, Dave Teeple and Aaron Kaplan will both be presenting at the Mid-America Linguistics Conference at the University of Kansas in October. Aaron’s topic is Stress in the trigger of Chamorro umlaut, while Dave will speak on Emergentism and OT: a compromise. This conference marks the 50th anniversary of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Kansas (Dave’s alma mater).

Finally, recent alumnus Pete Alrenga will do a poster presentation on Tokens, Types, and Identity at NELS 38 in Ottawa, October 26–28, 2007.

Ariel Benson is an alumna of the department who graduated with a degree in Language Studies in 1986. She now works as the Language Assessment Program Specialist for the Pajaro Valley Unified School District. Ariel contacted the department to see if we could help in putting her in contact with people who might be interested in working with her office to provide language tutoring in core academic areas for some of the newly arrived students. The school district is currently looking for a tutor to work with one of their students in Mandarin. Ariel further writes:

Throughout the year we sometimes need tutors in other languages, and for this reason I was hoping to establish contact with your department for future inquiries as well. I would greatly appreciate hearing back from anyone able to assist me in immediately locating potential language tutors in Mandarin, or from anyone willing to receive requests for assistance in the future. PVUSD has a steady population of newcomers who represent a great variety of linguistic needs. Most recently I have had a request from a school site in Aptos for a language tutor in Kinyarwanda for a little first grader whose family has recently come to the area. On an ongoing basis we need assistance for students who speak only Mixteco.

If you would like to help with this important work, you can contact Ariel here.

Initial information about the colloquium series for Fall Quarter have been announced and the particulars are available here.

Here is a summary of what’s in store:

Armin Mester, UCSC
Friday, October 12, 2007, 4:30PM

Andy Kehler, UCSD
Friday, October 19, 2007, 4:30PM

Jon Sprouse, UC Irvine
Friday, November 2nd, 2007, 4:30PM

Sam Cumming, UCLA
Friday, November 16, 2007, 4:30PM
Colloquium Jointly Sponsored by the Departments of Linguistics and Philosophy

Arto Anttila, Stanford University
Friday, November 30, 2006, 4:30PM