A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Due to the temporally skewed distribution of our reading groups, the majority will be taking an off-week instead of interrupting the Thanksgiving festivities for academic discussions. However, s/lab met on Monday from 3:30-4:40 PM in the LCR. Jenny Bellik and Tom Roberts presented recent joint work in a talk titled “Verbatim memory for surface features: The case of stress shift.”
LIP, SPLAP, MRG, Phlunch, S-Circle, and WLMA will not be meeting this week.
Tzutu Kan, a hip-hop artist from Guatemala who raps in Spanish and several Mayan languages, will be performing on UCSC’s campus this week. The event will take place at Kresge Town hall from 4:00 PM to about 6:00 PM this Thursday, November 15th. A flyer with more details can be found here.
On October 27, UCSC hosted a workshop on “Topics at the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface,” organized by Adrian Brasoveanu and former LRC visitor Floris Roelofsen. The workshop featured talks by collaborators and former students of Donka Farkas, and much like Donka’s own work, dove into a broad range of topics, including Mayan quotatives, free choice inferences, and the interaction between priority modals and conditionals. The workshop was capped off by a plenary talk by Donka on the special conventional discourse effects of non-intrusive oare-questions in Romanian. True to UCSC form, the workshop tackled tricky questions at the semantics-pragmatics interface and subsequently spirited but friendly debate about which member of the projected set to adopt as the common ground.
LaLoCo: Tuesday, 11:00-12:00 PM, Room 217: the group will discuss chapters four and five of Lee and Wagenmakers (2014), “Bayesian cognitive modeling: a practical course.”
SPLAP: Wednesday, 3:00-4:00 PM, LCR: the group will discuss Davidson (2015), “Quotation, demonstration, and iconicity.”
MRG: Friday, 9:00-10:00 AM, LCR: the group will discuss Zanon (2014), “On the status of TP in Turkish.”
Phlunch: Friday, 12:00-1:00 PM, LCR: Junko Ito and Armin Mester will give a practice WECOL talk on syntax-prosody faithfulness.
S-Circle: Friday, 1:20-2:50 PM, LCR: Steven Foley will give a presentation on recent work entitled “Economy, Minimal Compliance, and cross-derivational competition in Georgian agreement.”
WLMA: Friday, 3:00 – 4:00 PM, LCR: the zlab psycholinguistic group will present on a recent experiment.
Current PhD student Hitomi Hirayama’s first Qualifying Paper appeared in the most recent issue of Glossa. The article, entitled “Revisiting a null pronominal account for parasitic gaps in Japanese,” can be found along with an abstract here. Congratulations, Hitomi!
The LSA’s latest newsletter congratulates members of the panel “New Directions in LGBTQ+ Linguistics: Commemorating the LSA Special Interest Group on LGBTQ+ Issues in Linguistics,” which will be held at the LSA’s 2019 Annual Meeting in New York. The panel has received an Interdisciplinary Public Engagement Award from the Society for Linguistic Anthropology. On the panel is alum Kirby Conrod (BA in Linguistics and Literature, 2011), who is now a fourth-year graduate student in Linguistics at the University of Washington. They will deliver a paper entitled “Trans(itive) Gendering.”
On Saturday, November 3rd, Nido de Lenguas hosted a booth at local non-profit Senderos’ Día de los Muertos celebration. Visitors enjoyed playing interactive language games in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec and San Martín Peras Mixtec while learning about the languages of Oaxaca. The event was a great success and drew participants from around Santa Cruz County.
Pictured from left to right are UCSC linguists Jack Duff, Andrew Angeles, Jérémie Beauchamp, Azusena Orozco, and Jed Pizarro-Guevara.
You can stay updated on Nido de Lenguas’ events, classes, and more by following them on Instagram (@wlma_ucsc), Twitter (@WLMA_UCSC), and Facebook (@wlmaucsc).