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WHASC Newsletter March 8, 2005
("What's Happening at Santa Cruz")
WHASC is the weekly electronic newsletter of the UCSC Linguistics
Department. We welcome your news items, comments and feedback.
NOTE: WHASC comes out on Tuesdays. Please send your news items to lrc@ling.ucsc.edu by 12 noon on Tuesday.
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GIVE THEM A HAND!
Well done, LASC presenters! The conference was well-attended and lively. A special thank you to Chris Potts for his impressive talk. Also thanks to the many who made it all run so smoothly. The party at Junko and Armin's was especially fun.
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COLLOQUIUM THIS FRIDAY
Daniel Kaufman
Cornell University & UCSC Linguistics Research Center Visiting Scholar
"Nasal Substitution, Contrast Preservation and the Inventory"
Friday, March 11, 2005
5:00 p.m.
Cowell College Conference Room
ABSTRACT
Nasal Substitution (NS) in Austronesian languages (e.g. Malay meng- (aff) + pukul (root)--> memukul 'to hit') has become one of the flagship cases of phonological "conspiracies" in Optimality Theory, where divergent processes conspire to eliminate a certain configuration in the input (Pater 1999, 2001; McCarthy 2002). In a recent article, Blust (2004) surveys a large range of Austronesian languages and shows that current OT accounts of NS cannot describe even a significant portion of the attested patterns. He concludes that such morphophonolgy is more a result of historical residue than an example of universal markedness principles at work.
In this talk, I take a novel approach to NS based on the idea that it is primarily constrained by contrast preservation. It should thus not be seen as fully determinable by phonetic factors nor as simple historical residue. Languages appear to have a threshold for how many contrasts may be lost under a morphological process. Under this view, several seemingly bizarre alternations fall into place and we are offered an explanation for an apparent reversal of the widely accepted markedness hierarchy for voiced stops (b>d>g) which is endemic to NS in Austronesian.
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CONGRATULATIONS!
Congratulations to Cathryn Donohue who has just accepted a
position as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of
Linguistics in the Department of English at the University
of Nevada, Reno to start next fall. UNR has a small but
burgeoning Linguistics Program and is also home to the
Basque Studies Center (which has the largest collection of
Basque works outside the Basque Country). While she will be sorry to leave UCSC, Cathryn is also excited to be taking this position and the opportunities that it brings.
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Dylan Herrick  (Ph.D. 2003), who is teaching at Mie University, will speak on "Examining Perceptual Distance in Phonological Vowel Reduction" at the 6th Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics (TCP 2005) March 18/19, 2005 at Keio University, Japan.
http://www.otsu.icl.keio.ac.jp/tcp/
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LSRL 35 Report
UCSC was represented at the 35th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages held at the University of Texas, Austin this past February 24th through 27th.  Rodrigo Gutierrez (Ph.D. 2002) gave a talk entitled, "Reinterpretation of Quirky Subjects and Related Phenomena in Spanish" as part of the main session (dedicated to Romance Linguistics) while Dylan Herrick (Ph.D. 2003) presented, "Phonological Vowel Reduction is Alive and Well in Non-Barcelona Catalan" as part of the parasession on current approaches to historical linguistics and dialectology. Both talks were well received.
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Assistant Professor of Linguistics Opening
The Department of Linguistics at UCSC announces the opening of a new tenure-track position in semantics.
Position available: July 1, 2006
Closing Date: November 15, 2005
http://www2.ucsc.edu/ahr/employment/bulletin/04-05/163-05.pdf
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STANFORD SEMANTICS FEST
The Stanford Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop: "The Construction of Meaning"
would like to remind everybody of the upcoming
6th Semantics Fest
Friday, March 11, 2005 at CSLI (starting 9:45 a.m)
The program and abstracts can be found here:
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/semfestschedule.html
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SALT 15
UCLA
March 25-27 (Easter Weekend
Speakers: David Beaver (Stanford), Yael Sharvit (Univ. of Connecticut) and Scott Soames (USC).
For more information:  http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/SALT/
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Asserting, Meaning, and Implying
A Conference in Linguistics and Philosophy
In Honor of Jay David Atlas
April 1-2, 2005
Pomona College
Claremont, California
A 60th Birthday Celebration
Speakers: Barbara Abbot, Paul Benacerraf, Anne Bezuidenhout, Noel Burton-Roberts, Laurence Horn, Ruth Kempson, George Lakoff, Jerrold Sadock, Scott Soames, Deirdre Wilson and Frans Zwarts
http://www.lcs.pomona.edu/JayFest
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CALL FOR PAPERS
Language Documentation: Theory, Practice, and Values
At the 2005 LSA Linguistic Institute-MIT/Harvard, July 9-11, 2005
Additional details and abstract-submission instructions can be found at:
http://www.umass.edu/linguist/about/whisc/whisc-current/
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Harvard ISOKL -2005 Call for Papers
The 11th (2005) Harvard (Biennia) International Symposium on Korean Linguistics
to take place in conjunction with the 2005 LSA Linguistic Institute
August 5-7, 2005 at Harvard University
Abstract Deadline is March 15, 2005.
http://www.harvard-isokl.org
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SUMMER JOBS
English Language International is advertising two part- time/temporary positions working with international students:
Summer On-Call Trip Leader/Driver $12.38/hour
Summer Program Host $10.48/hour
Initial review of applications begins on March 16, 2005
http://jobs.ucsc.edu/