WHASC Newsletter April 26, 2005
("What's Happening at Santa Cruz")
WHASC is the weekly electronic newsletter of the UCSC Linguistics Department and the Linguistics Research Center. We welcome your news items, comments and feedback. Please submit news items by noon on Tuesdays.
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Junko Ito gave a colloquium at USC, Dept of Linguistics on April 11, 2005 on
"Contrast-enhancing depalatalization and glide loss in Japanese".
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SYNTAX WORKSHOP TODAY:
Tuesday, April 26th, at 5:30pm, in Room 126 in the Stanford Linguistics
Department, Margaret Jacks Hall (Building 460), Jim McCloskey
(UC Santa Cruz) will present:
Lightest to the Right: An Anomalous Displacement in Irish
This talk examines a process in Irish which, counter to typological
expectation, displaces weak object pronouns (the smallest and weakest
words in the language) to the right edge. It examines two earlier
purely syntactic accounts of the displacement and argues that they are
wrong, or at best incomplete. It also examines the possible influence
on the process of constraints on the organization of discourse
information and concludes (from examination of a very particular kind
of corpus material) that there are none. The process seems in fact to
be prosodically driven. Therefore the larger descriptive background
for the talk becomes the investigation of (mis)matches between
syntactic and prosodic structure in Irish and the larger theoretical
background becomes that of figuring out the role of prosodic
organization as a determinant of constituent order.
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THE PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT
UC SANTA CRUZ
PRESENTS
Michael Devitt
CUNY Graduate Center
"Intuitions"
4:00 pm
Thursday, April 28, 2005
Silverman Conference Room
Stevenson College
Abstract:
Intuition mongering is common in the theory of reference and in philosophy generally. Why is this appropriate? And why is it appropriate for linguists to take intuitions as the main evidence for a grammar. The Chomskian answer to the latter question is that the intuitions are derived by a rational process from a representation of linguistic principles in the mind. Stich has suggested (although not endorsed) an analogous answer to the question about referential intuitions. The paper takes a different view. It argues for a naturalistic and non-Cartesian view of intuitions in general. They are empirical central-processor responses to phenomena differing from other such responses only in being immediate and fairly unreflective. Applying this view to linguistic and referential intuitions yields an explanation of their evidential role without any appeal to the representation of rules. And the view yields a naturalistic view of the characteristic method of "armchair philosophy."
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The Linguistics Department presents
Michael Devitt
The Graduate Center, CUNY
"Ignorance of Language"
Friday, April 29, 2005
5:00 p.m.
Cowell College Conference Room
To view the abstract: http://ling.ucsc.edu/events/colloquia/index.html
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Stanford Workshop
Friday, April 29: 3:30pm
Stanford Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Are Intensions Necessary?"
Almerindo Ojeda
UC Davis
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
Abstract available on calendar web page
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SPRING CALENDAR OF UCSC LINGUISTICS EVENTS

Friday April 29 Colloquium: Michael Devitt
Friday May 6 Colloquium: Paula Menendez-Benito (semantics) [+potluck]
Tuesday May 10 Syntax Forum: Jim McCloskey
Friday May 13 Colloquium: Gregory Ward (pragmatics)
Thursday May 19 Vera Lee-Schoenfeld dissertation defense
Friday May 20 Academic Senate Meeting, followed by Psychology Colloquium (see below)
Tuesday May 24 Syntax Forum: Pete Alrenga; Florence Woo
Friday May 27 Colloquium: Theresa Biberauer (syntax)
Tuesday May 31 End of Year Reception at Cowell Provost's House
Wednesday June 1 Undergrad Conference
Friday June 3 Colloquium: Veerle Van Geenhoven [+potluck]
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Summer Schools
In addition to the high-quality, high-priced summer schools going on this year ( ESSLLI , (http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/esslli05/) and  LSA ( http://web.mit.edu/lsa2005/index.html ), there are two excellent, essentially free summer schools for linguists:
The New York Institute for Cognitive and Cultural Studies will take place in St. Petersburg, Russia, July 4-29. Barbara Partee and Vladimir Borschev will teach an advanced semantics class, and Chris Potts will teach a two-week introduction to semantics followed by a class in pragmatics. Barbara, Chris, and Volodja have taught at the NYI before (Barbara and Volodja in 2002; Chris in 2003). The application deadline is May 9. http://www.ic.sunysb.edu/Clubs/nels/jbailyn/NYIa.html
The indomitable EGG school is back. The 2005 Eastern European Summer School in Generative Linguistics will take place in Wroclaw, Poland, from July 25 to August 5, so one could in principle go right from Petersburg to Poland and enjoy two months of linguistics on the cheap. Visit the website for more information.  http://coolschool.auf.net/
[Thanks, Chris Potts]
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BUCLD
The Boston University Conference on Language Development is pleased to announce the topic of the lunch symposium for BUCLD 30 (November 4-6 at Boston University):
"Statistical Learning in Language Development: What is it, What is its Potential, and What are its Limitations?"
The symposium speakers will be Jeff Elman (University of California at San Diego), LouAnn Gerken (University of Arizona) and Mark Johnson (Brown University).
The conference will also include a keynote address by Janet Werker ("Speech Perception and Language Acquisition: Comparing Monolingual and Bilingual Infants") and a plenary talk by Harald Clahsen ("Grammatical Processing in First and Second Language Learners").
Further information is available on the BUCLD website ( http://www.bu.edu/linguistics/APPLIED/BUCLD ). The call for papers (deadline May 15) can be found at http://www.bu.edu/linguistics/APPLIED/BUCLD/callforpapers.htm .
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Upcoming semantics conferences
SALT 16 will take place in Tokyo sometime during the week of March 20 - 24, 2006. My understanding is that the organizers will subsidize travel for anybody whose abstract is accepted (that was the plan anyway), so having an abstract accepted for that SALT might very well come with a free trip to Japan. No call for papers yet.
The Fifteenth Amsterdam Colloquium will be held December 19 to 21 at the University of Amsterdam. Abstracts must be in by September 1. http://www.illc.uva.nl/AC05/
Sinn und Bedeutung 10 will take place in Berlin, October 13-15, 2005. The deadline for submission of abstracts is June 18. http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/events/sub/
CSSP Sixth Syntax and Semantics Conference in Paris . September 29 - October 1, 2005. Deadline for submission of abstracts: April 30. http://www.cssp.cnrs.fr/cssp2005/index_en.html
[Thanks to Angelika Kratzer of UMass for putting together this list.]
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Psychology Spring Colloquia
Social Sciences 2 #121 
3:30-5 pm
Wednesday, April 27th
Cognitive & Developmental Programs presents:
BRIAN ROSS
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
"Categories in Cognition: Learning to Use and Using to Learn"
Wednesday, May 4th
Cognitive Program presents:
ANDREW MATHEWS
Medical Research Council of Cambridge, England
"The Malleability of Emotional Encoding"
For special arrangements to accommodate a disability, please call Virginia Lee at 459-4194.
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The Psychology Dept. is sponsoring a department-wide colloquium on Friday, May 20th from 5:00-6:30 pm that will be open to the entire campus in SS2 #71.
(NOTE: It will take place after the Academic Senate meeting and will be followed by a reception.)
Our speaker is Dr. Pat Gurin from the University of Michigan, a professor emerita in both Psychology and Women's Studies. She is currently a faculty associate for the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the Institute for Social Research as well as for the Center for African and Afro-American Studies. As a renowned social psychologist, Dr. Gurin's work has focused on social identity and its role in political attitudes and behavior, and the role of social structure in intergroup relations. She was an expert witness in the affirmative action cases that were decided by the Supreme Court in June 2003.
Currently, she is leading a ten-university evaluation of the effects of intergroup dialogues. She will talk about that work: "After Gratz and Grutter: Intergroup Dialogues -- A Social Psychological Model for Leveraging Diversity."
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