WHASC

Adrian Brasoveanu will speak in the S-Circle from 11.00 a.m. to 12.00 noon on Monday, November 23, in the Linguistics Common Room (249 Stevenson). His talk, a preview of the talk he will give at the Seventeenth Amsterdam Colloquium, is titled, “Modified numerals as post-suppositions”. For the abstract, visit here. All are welcome!

Donka Farkas reports:

On Saturday, November 21, the Department hosted the second California Universities Semantics and Pragmatics workshop (CUSP 2). We had a packed day with high quality talks and lively discussion. There were speakers from USC, Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA and, from the home team, Scott AnderBois and Robert Henderson. The Fireside Lounge was pretty full, and it was good to see alums Line Mikkelsen (Berkeley) and Chris Potts (Stanford) in the audience, as well as quite a few of our graduate students and faculty. And, most importantly, Debbie Belville made sure we had great food throughout the day and even led a group on a short walk during lunch break.

CUSP ended with a sociable dinner hosted by Donka and Peter.

On November 12-13, Pranav Anand participated in a two-day workshop on Perspectival Thought at the University of Chicago, organized by alum Chris Kennedy (Ph.D. 1997, now Professor and Chair of Linguistics, University of Chicago) and philosopher Josef Stern. Pranav’s talk, “Relatively boring imagination,” was commented on by former UCSC visitor Anastasia Giannakidou (Professor of Linguistics, University of Chicago). Pranav reports:

The workshop brought together several philosophers and linguists working on the question of how perspective enters thought and language, under the backdrop of whether the concept of truth both communities rely on needs to be reformulated to deal with the subjectivity of experience. As linguist Peter Lasersohn remarked, the workshop was more philosophy than linguistics, and as such really grappled with certain ontological issues (What gives rise to relative truth? What is disagreement? What are the dimensions of thought?). The philosophical model of a few talks with plenty of room for discussion allowed us to really probe some foundational issues, and I found it enormously enjoyable and intellectually stimulating.

Vera Gribanova was one of a number of UCSC linguists who attended the 40th Meeting of the Northeast Linguistics Society, which was held November 13-15 at MIT. She reports:

UCSC linguists enjoyed a cheerful, if a little rainy, NELS 40 at MIT last weekend. Robert Henderson, Ryan Bennett, and visiting student Emily Elfner delivered clear, engaging, well-attended talks that generated interesting discussion and questions. Abby Kaplan gave a really good talk in the workshop on Phonological Similarity and fielded some challenging questions extremely well. Spotted in the audience were UCSC alums Eric Potsdam (Ph.D. 1996, now Associate Professor of Linguistics, University of Florida), Kyle Rawlins (Ph.D. 2008, now Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins) and Joey Sabbagh (B.A. 2000, now Assistant Professor of Linguistics, University of Texas at Arlington). At the podium were former LCR research associate Theresa Biberauer (Senior Research Associate in Linguistics, University of Cambridge), and former visiting faculty Michela Ippolito (Assistant Professor of Linguistics, University of Toronto) and Paula Menéndez-Benito (Postdoctoral Researcher in English Language and Literature, University of Goettingen). The Saturday night party was held at the MIT Museum, where guests talked linguistics while surrounded by exhibitions of robots and holograms.

The seventeenth meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association will be held May 7-9, 2010, at Stony Brook University. The invited speakers are Edith Aldridge (University of Washington), Abigail Cohn (Cornell), Peter Cole (University of Delaware), and Gabriella Hermon (University of Delaware). There will be a special session on the psycholinguistics of Austronesian languages. Abstracts for talks (20 minutes plus 10 minutes of discussion) and posters are solicited on any aspect of the formal linguistics of any Austronesian language. The deadline for abstracts, which must be submitted online, is 11.59 p.m. EST on February 1, 2010. For more information, go here.