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WHASC Newsletter May 6, 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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SWOT 2004
The department will host the South Western Optimality Theory Workshop Program on May 14 and 15. The program may be viewed at: http://ling.ucsc.edu/events/SWOT.html Jaye Padgett is organizing this event with the able assistance of Aaron Kaplan, David Teeple and Ember Van Allen. Speakers will come from Univ. of Texas, Austin, Stanford, USC, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Univ. of Arizona, Tucson and UC San Diego. Friday's talks will take place at the Cowell Conference Room. On Saturday, the workshop will move to Bay Tree Conference Room D on the third floor of the Bay Tree Bookstore Building. The conference will conclude with a dinner at the Merrill College Provost house Saturday evening.
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NEWS FROM BERLIN
AFLA (the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association) held its annual
conference in Berlin on the weekend of April 23rd and 24th. Its
principal organizer was Paul Law, who was an undergraduate in
linguistics at UCSC, and who later went on to get his PhD at MIT in
1991. Paul currently works at ZAS (Zentrum fuer Allgemeine
Sprachwissenschaft) in Berlin. Among the speakers at the conference
was Sandy Chung, who spoke about some of the joint work that she and
Bill Ladusaw have been doing together on modes of composition. Sandy
also participated in a workshop on adjuncts in Austronesian languages
that was held at ZAS on Monday April 26th, following AFLA.
Also giving a talk at AFLA was Eric Potsdam, who got the PhD from UCSC
in 1996, and who is now in the Department of Linguistics at the
University of Florida. His paper was about Wh-Movement in questions in
Malagasy. Eric also gave a joint paper (with Masha Polinsky of UC San
Diego) on patterns of control in Malagasy, at a workshop on Control
held at ZAS on Friday April 30th and Saturday May 1st.
Jim McCloskey was in Berlin during roughly the same period, working
with a group at ZAS involved in a research project on embedded
illocutionary force.
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WELCOME
We wish a warm welcome to Ben Hermans, from Tilburg University, The Netherlands, who is visiting the department during the month of May. Ben is a phonologist working mainly in Slavic. He will be consulting with Jaye Padgett on vowel reduction in Russian. His office is in the Phonetics Lab, room 256. Please introduce yourself to him!
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WCCFL
Adam Albright was a speaker at WCCFL 23 which was held at UC Davis on April 23-25. Adam spoke on "Sub-optimal paradigms in Yiddish." UCSC grads Jason Riggle (MA) and Rachel Walker (PhD) also gave talks.
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CALL FOR POSTERS!
This year's Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference will also include a Poster Session. All students doing a senior thesis or project, or any other research project, in Linguistics or Languages Studies, are encouraged to present their main results in form of a poster. The conference will take place in the Silverman Room at Stevenson College on Wednesday, June 2 from 2:30-5:15 p.m., followed by a reception. This year's invited speaker is Jason Riggle, UCLA (BA in Linguistics and Psychology, UCSC, 1998 and MA in Linguistics, UCSC, 1999).