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WHASC Newsletter September 18, 2002
("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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WELCOME!
We are delighted to welcome the following new graduate students to the department:
ROBERT CONDE has an undergraduate degree in mathematics from MIT. He studied Arabic in the Harvard-MIT exchange program. He has also lived and studied in the Basque country. His goal is to study the syntactic systems of lesser-used languages and he remains committed to work on Basque.
LINDSAY JONES has a BA in Linguistics and English from the University of Iowa. Her interests are in issues at the syntax-semantics interface, and she has also worked as a research assistant in experimental psychology. Her work in English focused mostly on Shakespeare.
AARON KAPLAN has a BA in Linguistics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Aaron worked as a research assistant in the Department of Psychology at UNC with computer programs designed to facilitate statistical analysis of the grammatical characteristics of very large computer-based corpora. His principal interest is in phonology, in OT and in the status of the syllable.
CHELSEA STRONG is a graduate of the Language Studies major at UCSC, with a concentration in Spanish. She has been working in the business world for several years, learning yet more languages, but has felt the urge to return to linguistics and to UCSC.
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We extend a sincere welcome to Kwon Mook Lim and his family. Dr. Lim is Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Anyang University, Anyang, Korea. He received the M.S. degree in computer Science at Western Illinois University, Macomb and the Ph.D. degree in computer Science at Yon-Sei University, Seoul, Korea. He has also studied in the doctoral program in Computer Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. Dr. Lim's research interests include Natural Language Processing, especially ambiguity resolution; machine learning, especially learning for syntactic and semantic analysis; and lexicon acquisition. His faculty sponsor is Jorge Hankamer. He will be be a Visiting Research Scholar in our department for one year.
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ACCOLADES
We are please to congratulate the Summer 2002 Linguistics Graduates:
Caroline Hanley (Ling. Minor)
Daniela Wiener
In Language Studies, congratulations to Jennifer Glavis (L.S. minor) and Kalan Milhous who received degrees this summer.
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Congratulations to Chris Potts on the publication of two papers:
"The Lexical Semantics of Parenthetical-As and Appositive-Which" in Syntax, Volume 5 No. 1, April 2002, 55-88 (Blackwell Publishing)
"The Syntax and Semantics of As-Parentheticals" in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 20: 623-689, 2002 (Kluwer Academic Publishers)
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Congratulations to Rodrigo Gutierrez who is starting a new job in Mexico City this week. He is going to be a research fellow at the Center for Research and Graduate Studies in Social Anthropology, at the Mexico City unit. The place usually goes by its Spanish acronym: CIESAS-DF.
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Congratulations to Chris Potts who has two talks coming up. He is presenting a paper called `Expressive content as conventional implicature' at NELS 33, which is at MIT, November 8-10. The NELS website is
http://linguistics-philosophy.mit.edu:16080/nels/
Judith Aissen is an invited speaker in the special session on nonconfigurationality. The session is in honor of Ken Hale.
Chris is also giving a talk at UConn's Ling Lunch, on October 29. That talk is called `A new factual basis for conventional implicatures'.
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Congratulations to Line Mikkelsen who has a talk coming up. The conference is called Existence, held in Nancy, France, September 26-28. The URL is
http://www.loria.fr/conferences/existence/en/index.html
Line's talk is called `Specificational clauses and semantic types'.
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SUMMER NEWS
James Isaacs, Line Mikkelsen and Patrick Davidson attended the 14th annual European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI) in Trento, Italy.
The summer school offered 50 or so courses in the interdisciplinary areas of Language & Computation, Language & Logic, and Logic & Computation (
James and Line also presented recent work at the student session, James with "Predicting the Placement of Accent in Questions" and Line with "Types of definite descriptions in subject position". Both talks went very well, were well-attended and inspired helpful (and often pointed) discussion. On a high note, Line was named as a finalist for the Kluwer best paper award.
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Volume 19 numbers 1-2 (2002) of The Linguistic Review, which came out over the summer, is a special issue on the innateness controversy, featuring an article by Geoff Pullum and Barbara Scholz called "Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments" followed by six replies to it (by Stephen Crain and Paul Pietroski; Janet Fodor and Carrie Crowther; Howard Lasnik and Juan Uriagereka; Julie Legate and Charles Yang; Geoffrey Sampson; and Margaret Thomas), followed by a long reply by Barbara Scholz and Geoff Pullum called "Searching for arguments to support linguistic nativism." Check it out; it's quite a battle.
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Donka Farkas was invited for 2 weeks, in July, at the University of Konstanz, Germany, to work on a project involving Specificity in collaboration with Klaus von Heusinger.
Henriette de Swart visited Santa Cruz in August, to work with her on a project on incorporation.
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Geoff Pullum and Junko Ito both presented papers at a conference in the first week of September, "Linguistics and Phonetics 2002", at Meikai University in Urayasu, Japan. Junko's paper (joint research with Armin Mester) was entitled "Positional faithfulness." Geoff's paper (based on joint research with Rodney Huddleston as reported in "The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language" was called "Categorizing anomalous lexical items in English."
While in Japan, Geoff also gave a keynote address at the 41st Annual Meeting of the Japan Association of College English Teachers, at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, entitled: "Grammar for the 21st century: Time for an exorcism." In it he argued that essentially no progress was made during the 20th century in replacing the myths of English traditional grammar that stemmed from the 19th and earlier, and that as we start the 21st century it is time that the Victorian grammatical ghosts that still haunt English teaching were exorcized. He reports a certain reluctance to accept this message on the part of some older members of the English teaching profession. "But wouldn't it be simpler to stay with the old way of describing things, for pedagogical purposes?" they would say. And he would answer, "No. You cannot improve pedagogy by teaching students things that are not true." Some reacted positively; but Geoff suspects that changing the whole tradition of teaching English grammar is going to take a while.
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CALL FOR PAPERS - WCCFL XXII
Visit the WCCFL XXII website at: http://ling.ucsd.edu/wccfl-22.
The 22nd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL XXII) will be held on March 21-23, 2003, at the University of California, San Diego.
This year there will be both a General Session and a Special Session. The deadline for receipt of abstracts for both sessions is November 15, 2002.
GENERAL SESSION:
Abstracts from all areas of formal linguistics and from any theoretical perspective are invited for 20-minute talks in the general session.
SPECIAL SESSION: EXPERIMENTAL APPROACHES TO THEORETICAL LINGUISTICS
Abstracts from fields such as psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, computational linguistics, and phonetics that address issues in theoretical linguistics using experimental methods are also invited for 20-minute talks in this special session.
For abstract requirements and submission details, please view the full WCCFL XXII Call for Papers at: http://ling.ucsd.edu/wccfl-22/cfp.html.