WHASC

On Friday, February 5, Vera Gribanova successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation, Composition and locality: The morphosyntax and phonology of the Russian verbal complex. As is traditional, the defense was public. The event began with Vera giving an elegant presentation of some of the main results of her dissertation. Then came questions from the committee, followed by open discussion. The committee members were Jorge Hankamer, Jim McCloskey (co-chairs), Sandy Chung, and Maria Polinsky (Professor of Linguistics, Harvard). Professor Polinsky made her contribution by way of video Skype from her home in Cambridge. The evening ended (for some) with a lively celebration at Jim and Sandy’s house.

This Friday at 11am in the LCR, the UCSC linguists headed to WCCFL 28 at USC in a few weeks will practice their presentations. The whole thing should take about an hour, and the authors would very much appreciate your feedback!

Alum Joaquin Munoz (B.A., Language Studies), who is now a Software Localization Engineer at Palm, will give a career workshop for Language Studies majors and Linguistics majors on Thursday, March 4, from 12.00-1.30 p.m., in 210 Humanities One. Joaquin will be talking about careers for polyglots and linguists in the field of globalization, which includes internationalization (prepping software, hardware, and data sets to handle multiple locales’ requirements such as time/date format, currency, numeration, etc.) and localization (translation phase). Mark your calendars!

The 2010 Linguistics at Santa Cruz (LASC) conference will take place on Saturday, March 13, in 202 Humanities One. This annual event showcases the research of second-year and third-year Linguistics graduate students. This year’s distinguished alumnus speaker will be Pete Alrenga (Ph.D. 2007, now Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Boston University). The program will be announced shortly. Mark your calendars!

Grad students Judith Fiedler and Paul Willis have recently had posters accepted at the 12th conference on Laboratory Phonology (LabPhon 12), which will be held at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque on July 8-10, 2010. The title of Judith’s submission is “Phonetic correlates of German weak pronoun cliticization”; the title of Paul’s is “Gestural overlap in labial and dorsal stops in Korean: a failure of parallel transmission”.

Grad student Robert Henderson submitted this report from Guatemala, where he’s been doing fieldwork:

Guatemala has been great! I spent last week doing fieldwork at the Kaqchikel branch of the Academy of Mayan Languages. I collected data on pluractional suffixes and worked on a joint project with a good friend who works there named Juan Ajsivinac. But I didn’t just get to do fieldwork on Kaqchikel; by a stroke of luck I was able to find a speaker of Uspanteko! Ryan Bennett and I are working on a project on Uspanteko tone, and we really need some data beyond the grammar and dictionary. Finding a speaker was a total needle-in-a-haystack operation because there are only about 2000 speakers (though there have only ever been about 2000 speakers. It is only spoken in and around the village of Uspantan, Tz’unun Kaab’). I did some recordings with her last Saturday, which turned out well. This Saturday we are going to be doing some more. Besides trying to get linguistics done, I have spent this whole week working with Wuqu’ Kawoq in some medical clinics doing translation and meeting with our community collaborators. We have two malnutrition programs going and a water project. Things are moving ahead nicely and we’re getting great data on health, nutrition, and growth. I also had a chance to meet with the midwives cooperative we fund. We’re just planning our next big project, which is to build a maternity center where women can stay for a few days, have their babies with the help of a midwife, but also have an ultrasound machine and other equipment and experience close.

All in all it has been a great trip, though I am a bit behind on my day to day schoolwork. At the end of the day I think it is worth every minute, but I’m ready to be back in Santa Cruz!

The latest issue of Linguistic Inquiry (Volume 41, Number 1) begins and ends with publications by UCSC alumnae. Emily Manetta (Ph.D. 2006, now Assistant Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Anthropology, University of Vermont) is the author of the article “Wh- expletives in Hindi-Urdu: The vP phase”. Emily will be returning to UCSC for a brief visit March 10-14 and looks forward to renewing old friendships. Rachel Walker (Ph.D. 1998, now Associate Professor of Linguistics, USC) is the author of the squib “Nonmyopic harmony and the nature of derivations”.

Alum Jessamy Norton-Ford (M.A. 2007) recently sent in this report:

I’m currently in my third year of the Ph.D. program in Cognitive Sciences at UC Irvine, working with fellow Linguist and Psychologist, Professor Mary Louise Kean. Our lab specializes in bilingualism and verbal working memory, and we have a project in the works investigating the effects of micro-level linguistic structure on performance in serial recall paradigms. I’ve also been working for the past year on learning several EEG methods of indexing aspects of language processing. In a project collaborated on by our Language Lab and the Human Neuroscience Lab at UC Irvine, we have used various forms of spectral analysis to determine if there is sensitivity of naturally occurring oscillatory activity to linguistic features of stimuli (conceptual meaning, grammatical structure, phonological structure). I presented a progress report on this project last month in my poster at the LSA meeting in Baltimore.

Other than that, I am filing the final paperwork to receive my Masters degree in Psychology this Spring, and am scheduled to teach one of the `Introduction to Psychology’ series courses this summer at UC Irvine. I was able to attend a workshop in Cognitive Neuroscience at UC Santa Barbara this past summer run by Mike Gazzaniga, and this summer hope to attend a workshop in ERP methods.

I’ve happily kept up with the WHASC newsletters, and was also very happy to run into so many familiar faces at LSA this year. All my best to everyone up in beautiful Santa Cruz!