WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ

Robert Henderson (UCSC PhD 2012) has been awarded tenure at the University of Arizona. Congratulations, Robert!

The latest issue of The Linguistic Review—Volume 36, Number One— has just appeared in print. It is a special issue, edited by Haruo Kubozono, which is devoted to Prosody and Prosodic Interfaces in Japanese and Korean and its lead article is `Pitch Accent and Tonal Alignment in Kagoshima Japanese’ by Junko Ito and Armin Mester. The paper (which is available here), examines patterns of microvariation in the pitch accent systems of dialects of Japanese spoken in Kagoshima Prefecture. It argues that the apparently very complex patterns of variation can be understood in terms of the relative ranking in the various microdialects of the basic constraints governing the distribution of two accentual melodies (HL and H).

Congratulations to Tom Roberts for successfully defending his Qualifying Exam, “I can’t believe it’s not lexical: Deriving distributed factivity” on Friday, May 3rd. Tom’s QE provides a compositional analysis of “can’t believe,” an odd construction that is both factive and embeds questions — something that “believe” on its own does not. He’ll be presenting this work at SALT at UCLA later this month.

UCSC undergraduate linguistics major Brianda Alicia Caldera was recently awarded the 2018-2019 Dean’s Undergraduate Research Award for her project, “Anglicisms: Use and Perceptions in the Tijuana-San Diego Border.” Congratulations, Brianda!

On May 17-19, the Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics at UCSC presents the Miriam Ellis International Playhouse, which will take place each night at 8:00 PM in the Stevenson Event Center. The event, which is a program of multilingual theater pieces, will be performed by Language students and directed by their instructors. More information on the event can be found here.

This Friday, May 10, from 9:00-4:00 PM, the UCSC Spring Data Science Day will take place in Engineering 2, Room 180. The event focuses on responsible data science and data science for social good. There promise to be many talks by UCSC faculty and students, as well as a poster session and a keynote talk by Mehran Sahami (Stanford University).

s/lab: Monday, 12:00-1:00 PM, LCR: Steven Foley will lead discussion of Kush et al. (2019), “Processing of Norwegian complex verbs: Evidence for early decomposition.”

S-Circle: Thursday, 10:00-11:00 AM, LCR: Tom Roberts will give a practice talk of his SALT presentation, “I can’t believe it’s not lexical: deriving distributed factivity.”

LIP: Thursday, 12:00-1:00 PM, LCR: Stephanie Lain (UCSC Languages & Applied Linguistics) will present work in progress, titled “A comparison of the function of Spanish vowels and consonants in lexical and socioindexical processing tasks using auditory discrimination.”

MRG: Thursday, 1:00-2:00 PM, LCR: the group will discuss Siddiqi (2019), “Distributed Morphology.”

SPLAP: Thursday, 2:00-3:00 PM, STEV 217: the group will discuss Bittner (2005), “Future Discourse in a Tenseless Language.”

Phlunch and WLMA are not meeting this week.