WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ

Semantics and Pragmatics is a new peer-reviewed, open-access journal devoted to research on  the semantics and pragmatics of natural languages.The journal is affiliated with and published by the Linguistic Society of America under the aegis of its eLanguage initiative. The Editors-in-chief are Kai von Fintel (MIT) and David Beaver (University
of Texas, Austin).

As of November 26, 2007, the journal’s website is live and open for submissions. Readers and prospective authors are encouraged to register; the site provides an RSS newsfeed that you can subscribe to by way of a newsreader. The pilot issue contains two editorial articles. The first research articles are expected to appear early in 2008.

One of the goals of Semantics and Pragmatics is to reduce to a minimum the time from a manuscript’s submission to its publication. With the advantages of the open-access format and the editorial board’s strong commitment to this goal, it aims for a significantly faster time-to-publication than is typical in linguistics.

The members of the Editorial Board include Donka Farkas, Jim McCloskey, and
alums Chris Barker, Christine Gunlogson, Chris Kennedy, Louise McNally, and Chris Potts.

From UCSC’s Undergraduate Honors and Awards Coordinator, Marlene Robinson, comes the following list of external scholarships for undergraduates. If you are interested in applying, contact Marlene at marobins@ucsc.edu.

The National Security Education Program‘s David L. Boren Undergraduate Scholarships provide support for study abroad in selected countries. (Study in Western Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand is excluded.) Recipients will be selected on the basis of merit, with consideration of: academic record, commitment to international education, language interest and aptitude, and the quality and appropriateness of the proposed program and its relevance to the National Security Education Program. This scholarship carries with it a service requirement.

Campus application deadline: January 11, 2008

Award amount: The maximum award is $8,000 for a summer, $10,000 for a semester, or $20,000 for a full academic year.

The Donald A. Strauss Scholarship Foundation allows juniors to pursue a public service project during their senior year by providing $10,000 for educational expenses. The project may be a new undertaking or an extension of the recipient’s current activities. UCSC nominates students for the Strauss Award. To qualify, Students must: (i) have one full year remaining until graduation; (ii) have a GPA in the upper 1/3 of his/her class, and (iii) must plan to devote a significant part of their lives to public service.

Campus application deadline: January 25, 2008

Award amount: $10,000 for educational expenses

Jack Kent Cooke Scholarships are graduate scholarships that aim to help students with exceptional promise and demonstrated financial need reach their full potential through education. To be eligible, each candidate must: (i) be a current student at an accredited US college or university with senior status by December 31, 2007, or be a recent graduate (since spring 2003); (ii) have a cumulative college grade point average of 3.5 or better; (iii) plan to begin a full-time graduate degree program in Fall 2008 (at any accredited graduate school in the US or abroad).

Campus Application deadline: February 15, 2008

Award amount: Educational expenses, including tuition, living expenses, and other required fees for the length of the approved graduate degree program, up to six years. Maximum award amount is $50,000.

Let WHASC know your winter holiday plans and we will report on them next week, in the final WHASC of 2007!

Arto Anttila, Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Stanford, will deliver the last Linguistics colloquium of 2007 at 4:30 on Friday, November 30, in the Silverman Conference Room (Stevenson College). His title is “The Role of Prosody in Constituent Structure.” Here is the abstract:

Does phonology influence the ordering of meaningful elements (morphemes, words, phrases)? The answer is often taken to be no, but an investigation into the quantitative distribution of constituents tells a different story. This talk reports the results of a preliminary quantitative study of the English Dative Alternation. Our main conclusion is that prosody plays an active role in constituent linearization in English. The prosodic effects are mostly gradient and variable, yet entirely systematic. We present an optimality-theoretic phonological model that predicts, for each input, what the possible orderings are as well as the quantitative preferences among them.

A potluck will follow at the home of Junko Ito and Armin Mester.

The S-Circle convenes this week at 12.15 p.m. on Thursday, November 29, in the Linguistics Common Room (249 Stevenson).

Justin Nuger will be speaking on “The Case of Objects: Palauan vP Exposed!” Hope to see you there.

On Monday, December 3, the Department will host a campus visit by representatives of Apple.

The group, headed by Jay DeLong, will give a presentation on Apple’s Internship Program, discuss possible internship opportunities at Apple for graduate students and undergraduates in Linguistics and Language Studies, and talk with anyone interested in these opportunities.

More information about Apple’s internship program is available here.

The presentation will be held at 4.30 p.m. in Room 202, Humanities One, on December 3.

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 of next week, December 7, in the Linguistics Common Room (249 Stevenson). The titles of their talks are:

• Jorge Hankamer: “Ad-phrasal affixes and suspended affixation”
• Vera Gribanova: “The (post-)syntax of Russian verbal prefixes”
• Ruth Kramer: “Phase impenetrability at PF and Amharic definite marking”
• David Teeple: “Avoiding strong-position neutralization”