WHASC

Hats off to all seniors in Language Studies and Linguistics who will graduate this week! And hearty congratulations to the graduate students who completed significant requirements in their degree program during the Spring:

• Ruth Kramer and Dave Teeple completed the Ph.D.
• Justin Nuger defended his dissertation prospectus.
• Paul Willis defended his qualifying paper, Gestural overlap evolution and place assimilation in Korean. Paul’s committee was chaired by Jaye Padgett; the other members were Junko Ito and Grant McGuire.
• Ryan Bennett defended his phonology qualifying paper, Irish plural allomorphy and output optimization. Ryan’s committee was chaired by Junko Ito; the other members were Jim McCloskey, Armin Mester, and Jaye Padgett.
• Robert Henderson defended his phonology qualifying paper, Morphological alternations at the intonational phrase edge (in K’ichee’). Robert’s committee was chaired by Armin Mester; the other members were Judith Aissen and Junko Ito.
• Matt Tucker defended his phonology qualifying paper, The root and prosody approach to Arabic verbs. Matt’s committee was chaired by Junko Ito; the other members were Armin Mester and Jaye Padgett.

Adrian Brasoveanu gave a talk last weekend at Stanford, at a two-day conference on Language, Communication and Rational Agency. The aim of the conference was to provide an opportunity for fruitful interaction among philosophers, logicians, linguists, and game theorists working on similar topics. Adrian was one of two speakers in the Language and Cognition session; the other was Jeroen Groenendijk. Adrian’s talk, Exceptional scope as scopal independence, was based on joint work with Donka Farkas. For the conference program, visit here.

Peter Wagreich (B.A. 2007) writes:

After Graduating from UCSC in Spring ‘07, I spent a little over a month in China teaching English at a summer camp in Shaanxi Province. After returning home, I moved to San Francisco and worked as a reading tutor for elementary school children, and as an after-school teacher for third graders in the SF public schools. I am currently working as a transcriber, with a few other Santa Cruz alumni, at Tellme Inc., a speech recognition company in Mountain View. I was recently accepted to Northwestern University’s Masters program in speech-language pathology with a partial scholarship from the university. After my graduate studies, I plan on practicing in some area of this field.

Donka Farkas writes: At the end of August I will participate in two conferences, a workshop on sentential particles, and the 10th International Conference on Logic and Language. The first is held in Budapest, Hungary, and the second, on the shores of Lake Venice, also in Hungary.

Jesse Saba Kirchner and Justin Nuger will present their research on the “Extensible Crosslinguistic Readability Framework” they have developed at the Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora at the 47th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 47), to be held in Singapore this coming August. Their research was conducted with Prof. Yi Zhang (Baskin School of Engineering, UCSC). Their system automatically classifies the linguistic complexity of documents in unfamiliar languages using statistical algorithms traditionally used in cross-lingual information retrieval tasks.

Immediately following graduation, Stephanie Kramer (B.A. in Language Studies, 2009) is heading off to London to participate in the 3L International Summer School on Language Documentation and Description, which awarded her a competitive scholarship. The program, held this year at SOAS, aims to train field linguists by combining theoretical courses with hands-on technical courses like video/audio recording and data archiving. In addition, the program features seminars on sign language documentation and the sociolinguistic issues that arise in the field. The organizer, the 3L consortium, consists of the Africa Latin America Endangered Languages (AALLED) program of the University of Lyon’s Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), the Leiden University Centre of Linguistics, and the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project in the Department of Linguistics at SOAS.

Nick LaCara reports:

I have some linguistics-related summer plans. In a couple weeks I’m traveling to Lund University in Sweden to take Swedish lessons (via EAP, actually). After that ends at the end of July, I’m flying farther north to Tórshavn, Faroe, to study Faroese at the University of the Faroe Islands. After that, I’m finally giving myself a break and taking a short vacation in England before coming back to the States. It should be a lot of fun!

Jim McCloskey will spend the last two weeks of June in Ireland, first taking part in an external review of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and after that hopefully catching up with the language and with old friends and colleagues. In July, he will join Sandy Chung for a week in Saipan (Northern Mariana Islands), where she will be participating in a workshop to review the Chamorro orthography. In late August he goes to Geneva for The Ninth Doctoral School organized by the Swiss Linguistics Society and the University of Geneva, where he will be one of three invited instructors. The school’s general theme is Les Interfaces dans la Théorie Linguistique (inevitably).