WHASC

SCLL COLLOQUIUM THIS WEDNESDAY: PETER CARRUTHERS

Peter Carruthers (University of Maryland), a prominent philosopher of mind who has done research on theories of consciousness, the role of natural language in human cognition, and modularity of mind, visits UCSC this week as a SCLL Distinguished Visitor. He will give a Philosophy colloquium at 4 p.m. on Thursday, May 15, in Stevenson College’s Silverman Conference Room. His title is “How we know our own minds: A dual-method theory”. For the abstract, go here.

AARON KAPLAN’S DEFENSE THIS MONDAY

Aaron Kaplan will defend his Ph.D. dissertation, What noniterativity tells us about processes in phonology, at 4:00 p.m. on Monday, May 12, in the Cowell Senior Common Room. All are welcome!

S-CIRCLE THIS MONDAY: KYLE RAWLINS

The final S-Circle of the Spring quarter will meet at 2:30 p.m. on Monday, May 12, in the LCR (249 Stevenson). Note the new time. Kyle Rawlins will speak on “Unconditionals and the notional category conditionals“. Hope to see you there!

MICHAEL WAGNER’S LRC SEMINAR TO BEGIN NEXT WEEK

Michael Wagner, Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Cornell, will give an LRC seminar on prosodic structure and its relation to syntax and semantics. The seminar, which starts next week, will meet four times in all: the first meeting is 4:00-5:45 p.m. on Monday, May 19, in the Stevenson Cave. Here is the abstract for the course:

The class looks at prosodic structure and its relation to syntax and semantics. Generalizations about this relation turn out to be recursive: the phonological structure of a sentence in natural language can be analyzed compositionally based on the phonological properties of its parts, just as the semantic meaning of an expression is compositionally derived from the meaning of its parts. This fits well with the recent conception of syntax as a compositional engine that combines smaller pieces into larger structures that get cyclically assigned a phonological and semantic interpretation. This class explores the nature of the interface, looks at how phonetic and phonological means serve to encode syntactic and semantic information, and discusses what can be learned about the interrelation of different grammatical components.

TREND 2008

This year, it was UCSC’s turn to host TREND, the annual ‘trilateral linguistics weekend’ which brings together faculty and students from the Linguistics Departments of UC Berkeley, Stanford, and UCSC for a day or more of talks and discussion (as well as gossip and conversation). Jaye Padgett was the local organizer, aided by Department Manager Tanya Honig and many of UCSC’s Linguistics graduate students. Around 50 people from the three Departments gathered to hear a sequence of nine talks, preceded by breakfast and followed by a party. The UCSC presentations were by Scott AnderBois (”Strong positions and laryngeal features in Yukatek Maya”), Ryan Bennett (”English resumptive pronouns and the highest subject restriction”), and Abby Kaplan (”Perceptual and articulatory influences on phonological alternations”).

TRANSITIONS

Undergrad alum Heather Maillet has been accepted to the Communication Sciences & Disorders Post-Baccalaureate program at Western Washington University.

PADGETT AT MIT

Jaye Padgett was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the beginning of May. On Friday, May 2, he gave a joint Linguistics colloquium at MIT with alum Nathan Sanders (Ph.D. 2003), who is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Williams College. Jaye’s and Nathan’s title was “The role of dispersion, focalization, and articulation in vowel system simulations”. The abstract can be viewed here.

CHUNG AWARDED SPECIAL RESEARCH GRANT

Sandy Chung has been awarded a Special Research Grant from the Academic Senate Committee on Research. The grant will support the initial stages of her work on a revision of the Chamorro-English Dictionary.

BASQUE STUDIES SYMPOSIUM AT UCSB

The first Basque Studies Symposium will be held on Wednesday, May 14, at UC Santa Barbara. The Symposium focuses mainly on linguistics and literature considered from broad perspectives. The papers will address a number of topics: Basque syntax and words, Basque language policy and rights, the status of women authors, contemporary Basque literature and projecting the identity of a small nation onto a global scene. For more information and the program, visit here.

JK18 AT CUNY IN NOVEMBER

The CUNY Graduate Center is hosting the 18th Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference (JK18) this year. The event will take place in New York City on November 13-15, 2008; among the invited speakers Junko Ito and Armin Mester, as well as Maria Polinsky (Harvard) and Peter Sells (SOAS). For further information, go here. The deadline for submission of abstracts is July 1, 2008.