COLLOQUIUM
Richard P. Meier, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin and Principal Investigator of Sign Language Acquisition Projects* at the University of Texas Children's Research Lab, will give a talk entitled:
"The Form of Children's Early Signs: Iconic or Motoric Determinants?"
Friday, January 30, 2004
4:00 p.m.
Social Sciences 2, Room 71
Dr. Meier's talk is co-sponsored by the UCSC Linguistics and Psychology departments. The talk is free and open to the public. For more information or special needs, please contact lrc@ling.ucsc.edu or call 459-2386.  To view the abstract, visit: http://ling.ucsc.edu/events/index.html
*Their research is primarily concerned with the acquisition of American Sign Language (ASL) as a first language. They believe that the study of language acquisition in a different modality (i.e., visual/gestural rather than aural/oral) can contribute a great deal to our understanding of all children's capacity for language learning. They use natural observations of infants with their parents to answer questions about babbling, the emergence of first signs in ASL, and the adjustments that parents make when they sign to their babies.
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WELCOME
We warmly welcome Marcela Depiante who is here for several weeks to work on ellipsis in Spanish with Jorge Hankamer. Marcela earned her Ph.D. in LInguistics at the University of Connecticut in 2000. She is an Assistant Professor in Linguistics at the Universidad Nacional del Comahue, Argentina.
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WHISC
Chris Potts (PhD-UCSC, 2003), Assistant Professor at UMass, publishes "WHISC". a lively weekly electronic newsletter. WHISC stands for "What's Happening in South College", the location of the Linguistics Department at UMass. http://people.umass.edu/potts/whisc/
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COMPUTATIONAL SEMANTICS
Kyle Rawlins, first year linguistics graduate student, maintains a very useful web page devoted to Computational Semantics information: http://people.ucsc.edu/~krawlins/clsbib
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LANGUAGE LOG
Chris Potts and Geoff Pullum are among the contributors to an interesting newer website called Language Log: http://www.languagelog.org/
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IN THE NEWS
Quotes by Geoff Pullum featured prominently in Jonathan Glater's
piece on the back page of the Weekend Review section of last
Sunday's New York Times. The article, entitled "Cold, Colder,
Coldest: Then What?", focused on the supposed problem that
during the extreme cold spell in New York City, writers might
run out of words for describing how cold it is. Geoff stressed
that "Talking about something does not depend on how many words
there are for it." (Geoff's example of a totally missing word:
there is no word to name the internal sensation of experiencing
an orgasm.) Geoff stressed that we don't have nouns for every
thing, or adjectives for every property, or adverbs for every way
of doing something. "Don't worry about running out of words,"
he said. "You have to worry about original thoughts to put across.
If you have an original thought, the English language will not
let you down."
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APPROACHING DEADLINES
Student nominations for 2003-04 Excellence in Teaching Awards may be submitted to the Center for Teaching Excellence at McHenry Library up until 5:00 p.m. Monday, March 8, 2004. http://www.ic.ucsc.edu/CTE
Instructional Improvement Grant Proposals are due to the Center for Teaching Excellence no later than 5:00 p.m., Friday, January 30, 2004. http://www.ic.ucsc.edu/CTE/grants.html
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JOB OPENING
Pending budgetary approval, the Department of Linguistics at the
University of California, Berkeley, expects to have a visiting
position at the rank of Lecturer or Assistant Professor for the
academic year 2004-2005. Specialization is open, but teaching will
probably include morphology and undergraduate linguistics survey
courses, as well as graduate teaching. Rank and salary to be
commensurate with qualifications and experience. Applicants should
have a Ph.D. in Linguistics by July 1, 2004. Interested persons
should send a letter of application, curriculum vitae, and names of
three references to:
Visiting Appointment Search Committee
University of California
Department of Linguistics
1203 Dwinelle Hall> Berkeley, CA 94720-2650

We will begin screening applicants on January 30, 2004, for the
position, which will remain open until filled. The University of
California is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer.
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NEW in the LRC LIBRARY
Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics has sent us the Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Meeting of the Niagara Linguistic Society (January 2003) in CD format.
English Linguistics, Journal of the English Linguistic Society of Japan, Vol. 20, No. 2 (November 2003)
Eoneohag, Journal of the Linguistic Society of Korea, No. 36 (August 2003)
Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS Yearbook 2003 which contains papers presented at the student conference held each year, the so-called "Uiltjesdagen".
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