WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ

With the installation late last week of a series of access points on the second floor of Stevenson College, the department’s office, meeting, and lab-space is now thoroughly saturated in wireless accessibility.

Katrina Vahedi hosted this quarter’s second Peer Advising workshop on Wednesday, November 7th. The topic this time was Application to Graduate Programs, a breakdown of the application process, requirements and common questions/issues. The discussion was excellent, thanks in particular to Armin Mester’s appearance as a faculty representative. Our peer advisors are eager to talk more about this topic with other students if you are interested in applying to a graduate program, or have general questions about the process, please stop by Stevenson 265 during drop-in hours to chat. Advising hours are posted here.

Vera Gribanova received the exciting news this week that her paper `Structural adjacency and the typology of interrogative interpretations’ has been accepted for publication in Linguistic Inquiry. Vera’s paper began life as a squib written in the first year syntax sequence.

Tellme (since May 2007 a subsidiary of Microsoft) is a company which has developed a platform which creates a bridge between the phone and the Internet, allowing people to find, use and share information via the phone. A number of alumni of our programs have worked there, at a variety of levels. Tellme has written to us, seeking to hire someone as soon as possible into a Contract Transcriber position. Here is the job description:

Contract Orthographic Transcriber

Responsibilities

As a transcriber, you’ll be responsible for transcribing spoken utterances into text for analysis by speech engineers and other teams
at Tellme. You’ll be:

• Analyzing utterances to determine whether the speaker is a native or non-native English speaker, etc.
• Determining correct pronunciation of words and names
• Finding correct spelling of obscure words and names
• Generating data that helps improve the performance of some of the most advanced phone applications in the world

Requirements:

• Excellent knowledge of the English language
• Strong typing, spelling, and basic computing skills
• Familiarity with phonetics, experience with arpabet, CPA, or other textual representation of phonetic symbols a plus
• A degree in Linguistics a plus

If interested, please send your resume to Todd Caplener: todcap@microsoft.com

This week’s colloquium is jointly sponsored by the Departments of Linguistics and Philosophy. It takes place on Friday November 16th at 4:30PM in the Cowell Conference Room. The speaker is Sam Cumming. Sam is a philosopher of language who trained at Rutgers in a context where there was a great deal of interaction between linguists and philosophers. His topic on this occasion is Hypercontexts.

UCSC undergraduates who are considering the option of applying to the Linguistics Department’s M.A. program should attend the informational meeting to be held at 3:30 p.m. on Friday, November 9. in the Linguistics Common Room (Stevenson 249). Chair Jim McCloskey, Graduate Director Armin Mester, and Department Manager Tanya Honig will present information about the Department’s MA program. Among the topics to be covered:

• application and admission procedures
• the structure of the program
• possible futures

Please bring your questions and queries to this meeting if you are interested in the advanced training in linguistics that the M.A. program can provide.

The seventh volume of Phonology at Santa Cruz (PASC) is now completed and available on-line here. The contributors are Aaron Kaplan, Abby Kaplan, Jesse Saba Kirchner, Ruth Kramer, Anya Lunden, Maíre Ní Chiosáin, Jaye Padgett, David Teeple, and Ember Van Allen.