WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ

The next Linguistics colloquium will take place at 4:30 p.m. on Friday November 2, in the Silverman Conference Room. The speaker, Jon Sprouse, recently received the Ph.D. from the University of Maryland and now teaches at the University of California, Irvine. Jon’s title is Acceptability, Grammaticality, and the Role of Experimental Syntax. The abstract is available here.

This year’s Stevenson College Alumni Association Distinguished Visiting Professor is Jonathan Moreno, who is Emily Davie and Joseph S. Kornfeld Professor of Biomedical Ethics at the University of Virginia. He will give three talks:

Monday, October 29, 12.30-1.30 p.m. in 101 Natural Sciences Annex, on The Ethics of Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research;

Monday, October 29, 5.00-6.30 p.m. in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge, on The Ethics of Human Experimentation for National Security Purposes;

Tuesday, October 30, 2.00-3.45 p.m. in the Stevenson Event Center, on Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense.

Paul Willis traveled to Tucson last week to present a paper at the inaugural meeting of the Arizona Linguistics Circle (ALC 1), held at the University of Arizona, Tucson, between October 19 and 21. The conference provides a forum for research in theoretical linguistics, experimental linguistics, and Native American linguistics. Paul’s paper was on The Role of Topic-hood in Multiple Wh-Question Semantics and one seasoned observer judged it to be one of the best papers presented at the conference.

Proposals for this year’s Humanities Undergraduate Research Awards (HUGRA) are due to Nicole Rios in the Humanities Dean’s office on Monday, November 5, 2007 at 5:00 p.m. This is also the deadline for the faculty letters of support that must accompany the proposals. More information is available here.

Last week’s WHASC misstated the deadline for SALT 18, to be held March 21-23, 2008, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The correct deadline is December 15, 2007. Thanks to alum Chris Potts (UCSC Ph.D., 2003), whose announcement of SALT to WHASC caused our error to be uncovered. SALT 18’s invited speakers are Lyn Frazier, Lisa Matthewson, Hotze Rullmann, and Philippe Schlenker. For the call for papers, go here.

The next Syntax Circle will be from 12:00 to 1:15 p.m. on October 23 in the Silverman Conference Room. Dave Teeple will be presenting his research on “The Placement of Arabic Pronominal Clitics.”

Jim McCloskey travelled from rainy California to balmy upstate New York to give a colloquium on Thursday, October 18, at Cornell University’s Department of Linguistics. Jim’s talk was on Movement, Agreement, and Beyond, and since it had had a trial run in the Syntax Circle on October 9, it went off without serious incident.