A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Undergraduate Linguistics major Brianda Caldera was recently awarded a 2018-2019 Chancellor’s award for her project, “Anglicisms: Use and Perceptions in the Tijuana-San Diego Border,” the same project which earned her a 2018-2019 Dean’s Undergraduate Research Award. Congratulations, Brianda!
Undergraduate Linguistics major Corey Pessin has been selected as a recipient of the David A. Kadish Humanities Scholarship, which recognizes an undergraduate student who displays a strong interest in the humanities. Congratulations, Corey!
s/lab: Wednesday, 5:00-6:00 PM, Location TBD: Stephanie Rich will be giving a practice talk entitled “The limits of forward thinking: Structural prediction with correlative and quantificational both” for the workshop Psycholinguistics in Iceland – Prediction & Parsing.
S-Circle: Thursday, 10:00-11:00 AM, LCR: Jack Duff will be presenting work in progress on subject agreement, focus, and Wh-movement in the Nakh-Dagestanian language Udi, spoken in Azerbaijan and Georgia.
LIP: Thursday, 12:00-1:00 PM, LCR: Max Kaplan will lead discussion of Chang (2019), “Language change and linguistic inquiry in a world of multicompetence: Sustained phonetic drift and its implications for behavioral linguistic research.”
MRG: Thursday, 1:00-2:00 PM, LCR: the group will discuss LaCara (2019), “C-command and Local Dislocation in the Danish DP: A reply to Hankamer and Mikkelsen.”
SPLAP: Thursday, 2:00-3:00 PM, LCR: the group will discuss Bittner (2005), “Future Discourse in a Tenseless Language.”
Phlunch: Friday, 10:30-11:30 AM, LCR: Anne-Michelle Tessier (University of British Columbia) will give a talk titled ‘(What is) the Phonology of Children’s Lexical Avoidance.’
WLMA is not meeting this week.
From May 17 – 19, many past, present, and future slugs congregated at UCLA for Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 29. A list of presentations is given below:
Margaret Kroll and Amanda Rysling: “The Search for Truth: Appositives Weigh In.”
Jess H.-K. Law: “Independence in Distributivity.”
Tom Roberts: “I can’t believe it’s not lexical: Deriving distributed factivity.”
Morwenna Hoeks and Floris Roelofsen: “Disjoining questions.”
Michela Ippolito and Donka Farkas: “Epistemic stance without epistemic modals: The case of the presumptive future.”
Deniz Rudin: “Embedded Rising Declaratives.”
Deniz Rudin and Andrea Beltrama: “Default agreement with subjective assertions.”
Scott AnderBois: At-issueness in direct quotation: the case of Mayan quotatives.”
Pictured from right are Donka Farkas, Scott AnderBois, Stephanie Rich, Chris Barker, Morwenna Hoeks, Margaret Kroll, Deniz Rudin, Tom Roberts, and Amanda Rysling
Jim McCloskey traveled (semi-successfully) to Boston this weekend to be the commencement speaker at the graduation ceremonies of Boston University’s Linguistics Department. It was an auspicious time to be there since Linguistics at BU has just achieved full departmental status and has added a new PhD program to its degree offerings (the initial cohort of students just completed their first year in the program). It was a particular point of pleasure for Jim that alumna Emmy Digirolamo was among the MA graduates. Emmy completed the BA in Linguistics at UCSC in Spring 2018 and graduated from the one-year MA program on Saturday. Jim was also able to catch up with alumna Sabrina Tran, who graduated from UCSC in Spring 2017 and completed the MA in Linguistics at BU a year ago.
In June, a new group of UCSC students is set to receive their Bachelor’s degrees, and among these are several who will be awarded departmental honors. Language Studies majors Annie Stert and Vienna Chan will receive this distinction, as will Linguistics majors Ivona Borissova, Jared Crawford-Levis, Melanie Gounas, Sarah Oertel, Azusena Orozco, and Corey Pessin. Congratulations, graduates!
This past Saturday, May 17, visiting professor Gorka Elordieta (University of the Basque Country) gave a presentation at the Monterey Bay Applied Linguistics Symposium (MBALS), which was held at UCSC. His talk was titled, “The falling intonational contours of polar interrogatives in Basque Spanish and their correlation with language attitudes towards Basque.”