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WHASC Newsletter August 18, 2004
("What's Happening at Santa Cruz")
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WHASC is the electronic newsletter of the UCSC Linguistics Department. We welcome your news items, comments and feedback.
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VISITING ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OPENING
The Department announces the opening of a two-quarter (winter and spring) visiting position in semantics for 2004-05. Applicants should have a Ph.D. degree in Linguistics and a research and teaching specialization in formal semantics. The announcement is posted at: http://ling.ucsc.edu/main/SemanticsOpening.html The Closing Date is September 20, 2004.
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MOUNTAIN MAIDU
William Shipley, Professor of Linguistics Emeritus, is featured in an article in Mother Jones magazine (July + August, 2004) entitled "Keepers of a Lost Language" about efforts to preserve the language Mountain Maidu. A copy of the article along with color photographs is posted on the bulletin board in the LCR.
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NEWS FROM ARGENTINA
Jorge Hankamer and Jim McCloskey both gave papers at a 2-day workshop
on syntax and morphosyntax (Coloquio de Morfosintaxis) held at the
University of Buenos Aires in Argentina on the 1st and 2nd of
July. Jorge's paper was on `Strange Ellipsis in Comparatives'; Jim's
title was `Three Puzzles about Head Movement.' Also at the workshop
was Santa Cruz alumnus Jason Merchant, whose paper `The Structure of
Ellipsis' reported joint work with Howard Lasnik on island-repair
under ellipsis.
The following week Jorge gave a course titled "Introduction to Distributed
Morphology" in a Winter School at the Universidad Nacional del Comahue,
Escuela Superior de Idiomas. That's in Patagonia.
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NEWS FROM BRITISH COLUMBIA
Florence Woo is in BC this summer doing fieldwork on Nuu-chah-nulth syntax, funded by the Jacobs Research Funds (Whatcom Museum, WA), the Philips Funds for Native American Research (American Philosophical Society), and the IHR Graduate Student Research and Travel Grant. It has been extremely hot most of the summer and the province has been plagued by forest fires, but the fieldwork is going fine.
This past Tuesday Florence was an invited speaker at the 1st Wakashan Linguistics Conference held at UBC. The conference was surprisingly well-attended by both linguists and the native community--they had a turnout of about 60 people! The conference was an important event as it was the first such gathering of linguists and native people of the Wakashan languages, and of the new generation of linguists/fieldworkers and the old. Attendees came from as far as Japan, the UK, and Germany. Florence's paper, on "What to do to `do.to..'", was well-received and led to lively discussion.
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CLASSES ON ENGLISH GRAMMAR
Geoff Pullum gave an invited lecture on model-theoretic syntax under
the title "What grammars say" on June 22 at the North American Summer
School in Logic, Language and Information, held at UCLA.
Then he returned to work on completing the typescript of the textbook
that he and Rodney Huddleston have been writing together, A Student's
Introduction to English Grammar, and delivered it electronically
to Cambridge University Press. Being perennially pessimistic about the
possibility of portable electronic documents, while in England in July
he took a day out of his vacation to visit Cambridge and take a look
at what they had printed out. Suffice it to say that they had somehow
formed the impression that converting it from WordPerfect to Word would
work well enough, and the result was the textual analog of a thing with
the body of a man and the head of a fly. Two further attempts to print
it out finally got them a version that was a bit closer to being usable,
though not perfect. Geoff told the full story on Language Log, August 3
(see http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001303.html:
"WYSIAANWTG: What You See Is Almost Always Not What They Get").
A Student's Introduction to English Grammar is now in the copy
editing stage, and will be used in typescript form as the basis for
Geoff's two rather different courses on English grammar in the fall
quarter: "Modern English Grammar" (Linguistics 80B, lower division,
no prerequisites) and "The Structure of English" (Linguistics 120,
upper division, intended for Linguistics and Language Studies majors).
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COLLABORATION
A coauthored paper by Nameera Akhtar, Maureen Callanan, Geoff Pullum,
and Barbara Scholz has appeared in Cognition 93 (2004), 141-145.
Entitled "Learning antecedents for anaphoric one", it appears to be the
first instance of a publication resulting from faculty collaboration
between the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Psychology
at UCSC (Akhtar and Callanan are members of the Psychology faculty).
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ADIEU
Ingo Plag writes:
Santa Cruz, July 16, 2004
Dear all,
In a few days my family and I will be going back to Germany after a five-month stay in Santa Cruz.
Since most of you are currently not here, I would like to use this newsletter to say good-bye and thank you all for your great hospitality. It has been a wonderful time here in Santa Cruz, both academically and otherwise. My visit was superbly organized by the Linguistics Research Center and the Linguistics Department (special thanks to Connie and Junko!). From the beginning, I very much appreciated the friendly, open, cooperative and respectful atmosphere among the people at the department, which made me feel integrated within no time. Although everybody was visibly very busy, there was always someone available and willing to discuss things with me, sharing their linguistic expertise ad helping me out with technical problems (computer, printer, library, copier, etc.). My research projects have greatly profited from this interaction, and I am very grateful for all the help I received.
It is a privilege to work in such a department, and I very much hope that this has not been my last visit.
All the best,
Ingo
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RESCUE ME!
Ryan Bush (UCSC PhD graduate, 2000) was featured in an article in the Santa Cruz Sentinel on August 8, 2004 entitled "Rescue Me, Cellular phone companies help their customers get out of bad dates." Ryan is a senior user interface designer for BeVocal in Mountain View which designs complex voice-driven software for the telecom market. The article is posted on the bulletin board in the LCR.
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POSITION IN NEWFOUNDLAND
Memorial University of Newfoundland seeks an Assistant Professor of Linguistics in language variation and change. Consideration of applications will begin October 18, 2004. A complete job announcement is posted on the clipboard near the Linguistics Office.
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CALL FOR PAPERS
Call for Papers/Abstracts/Submissions
3rd Annual Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities
January 13 - 16, 2005
Sheraton Waikiki Hotel, Honolulu Hawaii, USA
Submission Deadline: August 31, 2004
Sponsored by:
East West Council for Education
Center of Asian Pacific Studies of Peking University
Web address: http://www.hichumanities.org
Email address: humanities@hichumanities.org
The 3rd Annual Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities will
be held from January 13 (Thursday) to January 16 (Sunday), 2005 at the
Sheraton Waikiki Hotel in Honolulu, Hawaii. The conference will provide
many opportunities for academicians and professionals from the arts and
humanities related fields to interact with members inside and outside their
own particular disciplines. Cross-disciplinary submissions with other
fields are welcome.
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PART-TIME JOB
Seeking a UCSC student who can teach English to a 10th grade student at Merit Academy.
Merit Academy
English 10
M/W: 9:00-10:30 am
Starts Sept 8, 2004
Ends June 1, 2005
2392 North Rodeo Gulch Road
Soquel, CA 95073
10th grade class of one student
Teach English grammar, writing mechanics, journalism, essay writing.
Pays $12/hour
Need a car
Contact: Susan D'Arcy or Marcee Seifert
(831) 462-5655
sd@meritworld.com
oa@meritworld.com
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NEW IN THE LRC LIBRARY
Thank you to Sandy Chung for donating the following books:
Middles and Argument Structure across Languages, Marijana Marelj, Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics (LOT), 2004.
The Morphosyntax of Argument Realization: Greek Argument Structure and the Lexicon-Syntax Interface, dissertation by Dimitra Papangeli, Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics (LOT), 2004.
290r* Harvard Studies in Syntax and Semantics, Vol II, Edited by Jorge Hankamer and Judith Aissen, Cambridge, Massachusetts, April, 1976.
Working Papers in Linguistics 7, 1995, Department of Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London.
Working Papers in Linguistics 8, 1996, Department of Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London.
Also just arrived:
English Linguistics, Journal of the English Linguistic Society of Japan, Vol. 21, No. 1, June 2004.
EONEOHAG, Journal of the Linguistic Society of Korea, No. 38, April, 2004.
Language Research, Vol. 40 No. 2, June 2004, Language Education Institute , Seoul National University.
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FROM THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS:

In the Beginning, A Short History of the Hebrew Language
Joel Hoffman * $27.95 cloth
This sweeping history, packed with lively information about language and linguistics and history, traces Hebrew's development from one of the first languages to make use of vowels to its dramatic rebirth as a modern language. NYU Press: http://www.nyupress.org

Weird English
Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch'ien
"Nien-Ming Ch'ien makes a sophisticated theoretical argument by proposing that with the rise of world literatures in English, readers are encountering barely intelligible and sometimes unrecognizable English resulting from a combination of one or more languages with English. She terms this combination 'weird English'...Examining the works of such multicultural writers as Vladimir Nabokov, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Arundhati Roy, [she] posits that weird English obliterates the boundary between the sacred and the profane in language and demands a new literary theory...[Ch'ien's] somewhat unorthodox and vivacious style perfectly complements her argument."
---Aparna Zambare, Library Journal
Harvard University Press
http://www.hup.harvard.edu
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