A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
This Sunday, May 19, UCSC’s Nido de Lenguas was in attendance at the Vive Oaxaca Guelaguetza, an annual Oaxacan cultural festival put on by local cultural non-profit Senderos. The event featured Oaxacan cultural music, dance, and food, and many of the attendees enjoyed learning about the languages of Oaxaca at the Nido booth. Thank you to all who volunteered for another successful Guelaguetza celebration!
MRG: Thursday, 1:15-2:15 PM, LCR: Jason Ostrove will give a presentation called “Domains for allomorphy selection in Scottish Gaelic.”
Phlunch: Friday, 10:30-11:30 AM, LCR: The group will have an abstract editing workshop for those intending to submit a project to AMP.
SPLAP, S-Circle, s/lab, LIP, and WLMA are not meeting this week.
On Friday, May 10, Jenny Bellik successfully defended her dissertation, “Vowel Intrustion in Turkish Complex Onsets.” There was an excellent and spirited exchange between Jenny, the audience, and her committee members, consisting of Jaye Padgett (co-chair), Grant McGuire (co-chair), and Ryan Bennett. The defense was followed by a celebration hosted by Junko Ito and Armin Mester, which occurred concurrently with a potluck following Sandy Chung‘s colloquium. The celebration was well-attended by Santa Cruz linguists, and a good time was had by all. Congratulations, Jenny!
Jenny Bellik and Nick Kalivoda recently had a paper on SPOT come out in Linguistics Vanguard: “Automated tableau generation using SPOT (Syntax Prosody in Optimality Theory).” You can find the article and an abstract here. Congratulations, Jenny and Nick!
On Saturday, May 4, the Department of Linguistics at UCSC hosted the second Syntax-Prosody in Optimality Thery (SPOT) workshop. The event was very productive and interesting, with talks from UCSC-ers and linguists from near and far. Everything went very smoothly, except for an exciting fight between a hawk and some crows right outside, which caused an exciting interruption. Among the presenters were the following slugs:
Jenny Bellik, Gorka Elordieta (University of the Basque Country), Junko Ito, Nick Kalivoda, & Armin Mester: “SPOT: theory and analyses.”
Nick Van Handel: “Recursive phonological phrasing in Italian.”
Three Stevenson linguists were discussants, as well: Gorka Elordieta, Ryan Bennett, and Nick Kalivoda.
Jenny Bellik and Nick Kalivoda, the organizers, are extremely grateful to all of the presenters and discussants for coming, especially Sara Myrberg (Lund University), who set the record for distance traveled (8,866 km). For more information, including pictures from the event, click here.
Over the last weekend, the 24th Workshop on the Structure and Constituency of the Languages of the Americas (WSCLA) took place at the University of Maryland in College Park, MD. Participants at the conference enjoyed jovial and lively discussions of indigenous American languages alongside warm sunshine punctuated by bursts of rain. Two UCSC graduate students, Andrew Hedding and Ben Eischens, gave talks. Andrew’s talk was titled “The phonetic realization of focus in San Martín Peras Mixtec, and Ben’s was “Tonal negation and negative elements in San Martín Peras Mixtec.”
Phlunch: Monday, 10:30-11:30 AM, LCR: Max Kaplan will lead discussion on his own in-progress work, “Quantity-driven syncope and quantity-insensitive stress in Southern Pomo.”
s/lab: Monday, 12:00-1:00 PM, LCR: Shayne Sloggett (Northwestern University) will give a presentation on the Maze task.
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.”
WLMA: Friday, 1:30-3:00 PM, STEV 217: Ben Eischens will lead discussion of Macaulay (1990), “Negation and mood in Mixtec.”