WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ

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.

Ever visited Phonoloblog, a website dedicated to “all things phonology”? To get a feel for it, check out alum Eric Bakovic‘s (UCSC B.A., 1993) webchat interview of Junko Ito, on the subject of the squibs section to be inaugurated in the journal Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. For the interview, go here.

After two years in a postdoc at McGill, alum Joey Sabbagh (UCSC B.A., 2000, MIT Ph.D., 2005) is now teaching at UC Berkeley. He reports:

Things are good here. Teaching is taking up all of my time, but I’m enjoying it for the most part. The department is wonderful. I get to see Line (and Oscar and Patrick) a lot, and I’m getting to know some of the other faculty pretty well too. I’m thoroughly enjoying Berkeley, even though I’m not getting out much (due to my teaching schedule), but its such a pleasure to be living (back) here! Classes are going well overall. Intro is a bit of a challenge: Some days students are awake and seemingly engaged, other days they are silent. Now that we’ve moved on from Phonology to Morphology (and we’re about to start Syntax), the (active) students are starting to ask more interesting questions, which is making it more fun for me. The grad course is challenging too. Because half of the students have some background in syntax, but the other half do not, the difficulty there is trying to bring some sense of equilibrium to the class. I’m hoping that I’ll soon feel at ease enough with teaching to start making time for other stuff (research and personal). My LSA abstract was accepted, so I have some work to do for that as well.

The deadline for submission of abstracts to the 31st GLOW Colloquium, to be held March 26-28, 2008, at the University of Newcastle, UK, is November 1. The invited speakers are Luigi Rizzi and Arto Anttila. Apart from the main session, there will be workshops on: categorical phonology and gradient facts; evidentiality; DP types and feature syntax; language contact; and principles of linearization.

Meanwhile, the deadline for submission of abstracts to SALT 18, to be held March 21-23, 2008, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is December 1. The invited speakers are Lyn Frazier, Lisa Matthewson, Hotze Rullmann, and Philippe Schlenker.

The Department’s second colloquium of the Fall quarter will take place at 4:30 p.m. on Friday, October 19, in the Silverman Conference Room. The speaker is Andy Kehler (Department of Linguistics, UC San Diego), and his title is Coherence and the (Psycho-) Linguistics of Pronoun Interpretation. The abstract is available here.

The first workshop for Linguistics undergraduate peer advisors and undergraduate student graders will be held in the Silverman Conference Room, from 8:15 to 9:15 a.m. on Wednesday, October 17. This workshop, a Tutor Training session for new course graders, will be run by Peer Advising Coordinator Katrina Vahedi.

After a year in a temporary position at the University of Vermont, Emily Manetta (UCSC Ph.D., 2006) accepted a tenure-track position there. Emily, who is in the Department of Anthropology, is heavily involved in the further development of Linguistics at the University of Vermont. She reports:

Things are good, though challenging. The good stuff: I’m happily encsconced in my new office in the Anthropology department. I’m teaching two freshman seminars; one is called Language and Mind, the other is basically baby semantics and is filled with bright, inquisitive students. I am currently advising two undergraduates who are considering applying to graduate school in linguistics. The linguistics minor has been approved by the curriculum committee; the Program in Linguistics and the accompanying major are in process and have the dean’s support.

As far as research is concerned, I am working on a paper which explores the sluicing facts in Hindi-Urdu further. The structure of the paper is what is interesting to me, considering in turn proposals which address what seems to be sluicing in other wh-in-situ contexts (Japanese, etc.), and rejecting them on empirical grounds. The other thing I’m interested in at the moment is causative constructions in Kashmiri (something I stumbled upon in Delhi this past summer). The range of case assignment and agreement possibilities (especially once ergativity is thrown into the mix) is what I find unusual.

The challenging part is now being a full-fledged faculty member of a changing department without the stability (and associated experience) that I’m used to. I think I’m going to be able to figure out how to balance teaching and research, something I didn’t really have to do while writing my dissertation (mashallah), but that I now really need to learn. So, in other words, I have a lot of work to do and I’m negotiating how I can be good at that in an Anthropology department. It’s a place I very much like living in and I’m surrounded by smart and interesting people. I’m working on a few joint efforts with new colleagues which, though they are at the periphery of my experience and what I do, allow me to connect with them and allow them to see what my work is about. I guess it isn’t worth doing if it’s too easy.