HANKAMER COLLOQUIUM ON FRIDAY
This Friday, Jorge Hankamer will give a colloquium talk titled, “CP complements to D.” The talk will take place on Friday, October 11, from 1:20-3:00 PM in Humanities 2, Room 259.
LINGUISTS REFLECT ON SANTIAGO LAXOPA TRIP
The Humanities Institute recently shared reflections from Maziar Toosarvandani and PhD students Kelsey Sasaki and Steven Foley on time spent in the village of Santiago Laxopa in Oaxaca this summer, the second trip there by linguists from our department. Maziar, Kelsey, Steven, fellow PhD student Jed Pizarro-Guevara, and recent undergraduate alumnae Brianda Caldera and Azusena Orozco conducted an eye-tracking study in the variety of Zapotec spoken in the village, learning more about the language and its speakers. While there, the researchers also taught English courses at the town’s school, using a curriculum designed by Azusena. The linguists were hosted by Maestra Fe Silva Robles, Co-Founder and Director of the Santa Cruz County nonprofit Senderos, our department’s partners in Nido de Lenguas, a collaborative initiative to share the beauty and value of Oaxacan languages. Learn more about Nido de Lenguas and its programs, which include monthly courses in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec taught by Silva Robles, on its website.
RICH IN ICELAND
This past June, PhD student Stephanie Rich presented a talk (“The limits of forward thinking: Structural prediction with correlative and quantificational both) and a poster (“Evidence for lingering structural prediction with either-or structures”) at the workshop Psycholinguistics in Iceland – Parsing and Prediction, both with Jesse Harris (UCLA). Discussions about prediction in language processing, dramatic Icelandic landscape, and a never-setting sun were all thoroughly enjoyed.
DUFF AT BERKELEY
PhD student Jack Duff traveled to Berkeley this past Friday, October 4th, for the UC Berkeley Linguistics Department’s Syntax and Semantics Circle, where he gave a talk titled “To flip a judge: Predicates of personal taste in a commitment-based discourse model.” He was happy to receive a warm welcome and very useful questions and comments from our UC Berkeley colleagues.
HOW OUR READINGS ARE GROUPING THIS WEEK
s/lab: Tuesday, 3:00-4:00 PM, LCR: Stephanie Rich will present ongoing research with Matt Wagers.
SPLAP: Thursday, 12:00-1:00 PM, Location TBD: Jess Law will lead discussion of Brennan et al. (1987), “A centering approach to pronouns,” and Grosz et al. (1995), “Centering: A framework for modeling the local coherence of discourse.”
Phlunch: Friday, 12:00-1:00 PM, LCR: Maya Wax Cavallaro will lead discussion of Wagner et al. (2006), “Formant transitions in fricative identification: The role of native fricative inventory.”
KRAVTCHENKO ZU FRAUGSTER
UCSC Linguistics alum Ekaterina Kravtchenko (MA, 2013) has accepted a position as a Data Scientist working in research and development at the fraud detection company Fraugster (Berlin). Congratulations, Ekaterina!
KROLL RECEIVES CHANCELLOR’S DISSERTATION-YEAR FELLOWSHIP
This spring, Linguistics PhD candidate Margaret Kroll received the Chancellor’s Dissertation-Year Fellowship for the 2019-20 academic year. The university writes, of the fellowships:
These state-funded, merit-based fellowships are awarded on a competitive basis to doctoral graduates who have overcome significant social or educational obstacles to achieve a college education, and whose backgrounds equip them to contribute to intellectual diversity among the graduate student population.
Congratulations, Margaret!