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WHASC Newsletter April 1, 2004
("What's Happening at Santa Cruz")
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WHASC is the weekly electronic newsletter of the UCSC Linguistics Department. We welcome your news items, comments and feedback.
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COLLOQUIUM FRIDAY
Ingo Plag, Visiting Research Associate of the LRC from the University of Siegen, Germany will give a talk:
Who cares about syntactic category information?
A new look at the morphology-syntax distinction and the role of semantics
in word-formation
Friday, April 2, 2004
4:00 p.m. Silverman Conference Room at Stevenson College
To view the abstract, please visit: http://ling.ucsc.edu/events/index.html
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NEXT WEEK'S COLLOQUIUM
The Department is pleased to welcome:
Peter Ladefoged, Professor of Phonetics, Emeritus from UCLA
who will present
Classifying the sounds of languages
4 p.m. Friday, April 9, 2004
COWELL CLASSROOM 131
(followed by a potluck/reception)
ABSTRACT
The first classifications of speech sounds gave systematic accounts
of the sounds of just a single language. Bell and later the IPA
attempted to describe the sounds of all the world's languages by
providing symbols for intersections of articulatory categories.
Jakobson led investigations into the possibility of describing
languages in terms of a small set of acoustic features. Chomsky and
Halle devised a feature system that was intended to reveal part of
the linguistic possibilities of the human mind. There are several
reasons why none of these systems provide a principled basis for
describing phonological systems. (1) Universal classificatory systems
need to take into account when a sound in one language can be
considered to be potentially distinct from a similar sound in another
language. (2) Patterns of sounds in languages are not properties of
an individual mind but of a social institution. (3) The patterns have
a variety of different origins, including articulatory ease, auditory
distinctiveness and cognitive economy. (4) Some speech sounds do not
fit into any pattern. This paper will propose a theory of phonetics,
a system for classifying the linguistic properties of speech sounds
that takes all these points into account.
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Welcome to Henriette de Swart from the University of Utrecht who is visiting the department today as the guest of Donka Farkas.
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Best Wishes to Vera Lee-Schoenfeld for her talk
POSSESSOR RAISING: A DIAGNOSTIC FOR RESTRUCTURING
which is to be presented at the Berkeley Germanic Linguistics
Roundtable this weekend (April 2nd--3rd).
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Armin Mester is co-editor along with Ellen Woolford of UMass of a new series from Equinox Publishing entitled "Advances in Optimality Theory." Judith Aissen is on the Consultant Board. For more information about this ground-breaking new series, visit the Equinox Publishing website: http://www.equinoxpub.com
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NEWS FROM TROMSO
Curt Rice sent us the following news item:
The University of Tromsø awards a "Young Researcher of the Year" award to one
of its faculty members, and this year the prize went to Peter
Svenonius! (UCSC PhD graduate 1994). We all thought it was an extremely well-deserved
prize, and the University made sort of a big deal out of it
at a ceremony last Friday. You can read all about it (in
Dano-Norwegian) at http://castl.uit.no

So, I just thought I'd pass along that piece of news about
UCSC's influence in the linguistics world!
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Michela Ippolito and Christopher Hom write:
We are pleased to announced that in addition to attending our reading group on Wed., April 7 to discuss his paper titled, 'Semantics, Pragmatics and The Role of Semantic Content' (co-authored with Jason Stanley), Professor Jeffrey King will also be giving his colloquia titled, 'Semantics for Monists' on Thurs., April 8 at 4PM.
Professor King has made innovative contributions in the philosophy of language and philosophical logic. His specific areas of publication include anaphora, structured propositions, complex demonstratives, and the semantics/pragmatics distinction.
Please join us for our first meeting in the SCLL Distinguished Visitors Series!
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UNDERGRAD DEADLINE APPROACHINGThe DEADLINE is April 16th for students to turn in their applications to the department office (241 Stevenson) for the Deans', Chancellor's, and Steck Awards

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The 42nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) will feature a student workshop. It is being held in Barcelona from July 21-26, 2004. For more information, please visit their website:

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EU Parlez-vous Maltese?
In less than two months, 10 new states will join the European Union. The number of member languages will jump from 11 to 20 and, with it, the demand for linguists at headquarters in Brussels. The EU would like to enlist 180 translators--20 for each additional language--but the Union's found only 63 so far, despite the lure of a $48,000-a-year salary. Naturally, the smallest languages pose the biggest problems: the last hunt for Maltese interpreters failed to identify a single candidate. (Malta has about 400,000 people.) The workload's daunting, too. Last year EU translators had 1.4 million pages to comb through; that figure is forecast to rise to 2.3 million by next year. And there are about 11,000 meetings annually that require simultaneous word-for-word interpretation. The EU wants 360 extra interpreters to handle those duties. Why not muddle along in the most-spoken tongues? national pride, says spokesman Erich Mamer. "The whole EU project is about respecting cultures of different countries. You are never going to force a Polish farmer to talk to the EU in English."
--William Underhill, Newsweek Magazine, March 22, 2004
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New in the LRC Library:
Experimental Studies in Linguistics 1, Susann Fischer/Ruben van de Vijver/Ralf Vogel (eds.), Linguistics in Potsdam, Vol. 21, Universitat Potsdam
EONEOHAG, Journal of the Linguistic Society of Korea, No. 37, December, 2003.
TALKS (Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at Kobe Shoin), No. 7, March 2004, Kobe Shoin Institute for Linguistic Sciences.
Linguistic Sciences, Vol. 3 No.8, January, 2004. Xuzhou Normal University, P.R. China.
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Don't forget to "spring ahead" this weekend by setting your clock one hour ahead on April 4.