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We are delighted to welcome the following new graduate students to the department:
LAURA BUHL is a UCSC graduate, with a B.A. in Linguistics.
ZENA HARVILL is a UCSC graduate, with a B.A. in Language Studies.
ELENA INNES is a UCSC graduate, with a B.A. in Linguistics.
RUTH KRAMER comes to us from Brown University, with a B.A. in Linguistics and Egyptology.
STUART LA ROSA is a graduate of University of Florida, with a B.A. in Linguistics, Spanish and French.
RANDALL ORR graduated from UC Davis with a B.S. in Math and a Linguistics minor.
KYLE RAWLINS is a graduate of UMass Amherst, with a B.S. in Computer Science and Linguistics.
ADAM SAVEL is a UCSC graduate, with a B.A. in Linguistics.
MARC SCIGLIMPAGLIA is a UCSC graduate, with a B.A. in Linguistics.
ALIA SPERLING is a UCSC graduate, with a B.A. in Linguistics.
DAVID TEEPLE comes to us from University of Kansas, with a B.A. and M.A. in Linguistics.
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A very warm welcome to visiting Assistant Professor Michela Ippolito. Michela received her Ph.D. from MIT. She is a semanticist and will be teaching for us throughout the 2003-04 academic year, beginning with a semantics seminar fall quarter.
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We extend a sincere welcome to our visiting scholars:
Cathryn Donohue is visiting from Stanford. She will be teaching Morphology for us fall quarter.
Gunnar Hrafnbjargarson, from Iceland, is studying the factors leading to the loss of morphological case in Scandinavian languages and English. He will be working with Judith Aissen.
Kohei Nishimura is visiting from Japan and is sponsored by Junko Ito and Armin Mester. The main topic of his research is subgrammatical diversities in the phonological system of human languages.
Veronica Vasquez Soto comes to us from Mexico. She will be investigating clause structure and information structure in Cora, an indigenous language of Mexico. Her sponsor is Judith Aissen.
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IT’S A BOY!
Intrepid Undergraduate Advisor Ashley Hardisty and her husband Jon welcomed their son, Griffin Cade, into the world on July 6, 2003. Mother and son are doing fine. Congratulations to the three of them!!
Ashley will be on maternity leave through fall quarter. Connie Creel will be filling in for her, and has relocated to 241 Stevenson. Laura McShane will be filling in for Connie in the LRC.
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ACCOLADES
Congratulations to the following students who graduated summer 2003:
Linguistics
Adam Savel*
Language Studies
Roselyne Soto
Anne Wangler*
Sara Winston
(* = Graduating with Honors)
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Congratulations also to Florence Woo. Florence passed her QE, on the syntax and semantics of Cantonese nominals, on September 18, 2003. The members of the committee were Donka Farkas (chair), Jim McCloskey, Sandy Chung and Gail Hershatter (from History).
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Rodrigo Gutierrez Bravo’s position at CIESAS-Mexico City was upgraded from research fellow to associate professor. This is a tenure-track position, and needless to say he’s very happy about it. Congratulations!
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Quinn Gray successfully defended his Masters thesis, entitled “Language Transfer Effects on L2 Phonological Acquisition: L2 Perception and Production of Japanese Vowel Length Contrast,” on August 18, 2003. The members of his committee were Adam Albright (chair) and Jaye Padgett.
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Congratulations to our former MA, Juliette Tanner Wade, who received her
Ph.D. from Berkeley's School of Education, in May 2003.
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SUMMER NEWS
Geoff Pullum and Barbara Scholz each gave lectures in the philosophy of linguistics section at the 12th International Congress of Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science at Oviedo in northern Spain, and then made their way across a hot, humid Europe to teach a course on model-theoretic syntax at ESSLLI (the European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information, hosted by the Technical University of Vienna in Austria). In the audience were 40 people; typically for ESSLLI, they were from about twenty different countries (definitely including Australia, Austria, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, the UK, and the USA).
Robert Conde, as it happened, also traveled from Santa Cruz first to northern Spain (to get back in touch with the Basque language in the San Sebastian area) and then on to Vienna (to soak up some research on logic and language at ESSLLI).
Other Santa Cruzans at ESSLLI included Donka Farkas, who was a participant in a workshop on direct reference and specificity organized by Klaus von Heusinger and Hans Kamp, and Phokion Kolaitis from the Department of Computer Science, who taught a spectacular course on the links between logic, computational complexity, and constraint satisfaction problems.
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Bill Ladusaw and Jaye Padgett taught courses at the LSA's Linguistic Institute, held at Michigan State University this summer. Jaye taught a 3-week seminar within the framework of Optimality Theory. Bill taught the 6-week introductory semantics course. In addition, Bill sat in on various other classes, attended workshops, and made a presentation on the biasing effect of polarity items in questions at a workshop on "Where semantics meets pragmatics.”
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OTHER NEWS
A new book by Donka Farkas, written in collaboration with Henriette de Swart (who was an LRC visitor some years ago) just appeared. Its title is "The Semantics of Incorporation: From Argument Structure to Discourse Transparency,” published by CSLI, Stanford University.
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The 28th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development will be held October 31-November 2, 2003. For more information, visit their website at: http://www.bu.edu/linguistics/APPLIED/BUCLD.
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The Institute for Logic, Language and Computation will hold their 14th Amsterdam Colloquium December 19-21, 2003. For more information, visit them on the web at www.illc.uva.nl/AC03
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The Philosophy Department will have three visiting faculty in 2003-04:
JON ELLIS, a philosopher of mind and an epistemologist, will be spending his second year in the department as a Visiting Assistant Professor. Jon's UC Berkeley dissertation deals with color and color awareness; his dissertation supervisor was John Searle.
MARION LEDWIG, a philosopher of science who specializes in decision theory and the philosophy of psychology, is also a Visiting Assistant Professor in 2003-04. After receiving her Ph.D. from the University of Konstanz, Marion held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Pittsbugh and at Haifa University. Her dissertation deals with Newcomb's problem; she has also written on the theory of causation, social justice, and human motivation.
CHRIS HOM, a philosopher of language and philosopher of mind, has a two-year appointment as a Faculty Fellow. Chris received his Ph.D. from UC Irvine's Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science. His dissertation, on the metaphysics of propositions and the semantics of attitude reports, pursues an interdisciplinary approach that draws on linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive psychology. Chris's dissertation supervisor was Robert May; the other two members of his dissertation committee were Terence Parsons and Jeffrey King.
Jon and Marion are both teaching graduate Philosophy courses in 2003-04. Although Chris will not be teaching graduate courses, some of his upper-division courses might be of interest to linguists.
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Following is the current schedule of Philosophy colloquia for Fall 2003. All
are welcome! Philosophy colloquia are held in the Stevenson Silverman
Conference Room, 4-6 pm.
Thursday, October 2
SHAUN NICHOLS, College of Charleston
"Just the Imagination: Why Imagining Doesn't Behave Like Believing"
Thursday, October 30
EDWIN McCANN, University of Southern California
"Tinkering with Lockean Mechanism"
Friday, November 7
FIONA COWIE, California Institute of Technology
"Modules and Quasi-Mechanisms: Kicking Back in Cognitive Science"
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NEW IN THE LRC LIBRARY
EONEOHAG (Journal of the Linguistics Society of Korea), Vol. 35 (April 2003).
Del Cora al Maya Yucateo: Estudios Linguisticos Sobre Algunas Lenguas Indigenas Mexicanas, Paulette Levy, ed. 2002. Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. Thank you to Rodrigo Gutierrez Bravo for donating this volume. It contains a chapter by Rodrigo entitled "Formas verbales incorporadas transitivas en maya yucateo" (pp 131-178).
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Thanks to Bill Ladusaw for generously donating the following to the library:
Language Research, Vol. 39, No. 2 (June 2003)
Formal Semantics: The Essential Readings. Paul Portner and Barbara H. Partee, eds. 2002. Blackwell Publishers.
Dutch Syntax: A Minimalist Approach. C. Jan Wouter Zwart. 1993. University of Groningen.
Syllable Theory in Prosodic Phonology. Dissertation by Junko Ito. 1986. University of Massachusetts.
Lexical Grammar. Teun Hoekstra, Harry van der Hulst, and Michael Moortgat, eds. 1980. Foris Publications.
Licensing Conditions on Phrase Structure. Eric Hoekstra. 1960.
French Syntax: The Transformational Cycle. Richard S. Kayne. 1975. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Lectures on Contemporary Syntactic Theories. Peter Sells. 1985. Center for the Study of Language and Information.
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Thank you to Dylan Herrick for donating a copy of his dissertation, AN ACOUSTIC ANALYSIS OF PHONOLOGICAL VOWEL REDUCTION IN SIX VARIETIES OF CATALAN, to the LRC Library. It can be found on the bottom shelf in the Recent Acquisitions section.
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JOB OPPORTUNITIES
The following job listings are posted outside of the department office:
The Department of Linguistics, University of British Columbia, invites applicants for a tenure-track position in Formal Semantics to begin July 1, 2004, with appointment at the rank of either Assistant or Associate Professor. The successful candidate should have a primary specialization in Formal Semantics, hold a Ph.D. and have a strong commitment to research and ability to teach a variety of undergraduate and graduate linguistics courses. Expertise is encouraged in linguistics fieldwork; First Nation, African, or other less studied languages; language acquisition and processing; and cognitive science. Send a cover letter, cv, writing samples, teaching evaluations, and any supporting documents by December 5, 2003 to: Dr. Joseph Stemberger, Head, Department of Linguistics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC CANADA V6T 1Z1. Email: Stemberg@interchange.ubc.ca
The University of California, Berkeley, invites applicants for an Open-Rank Syntax position. A complete job listing can be found at: http://fea.chance.berkeley.edu/DetailsJobSearch.cfm?recordID=29
Applications must be received by November 15, 2003.
The Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Davis announces an Assistant professor (tenure-track) position in Second language Acquisition and Development, to begin fall 2004. They are seeking someone with strong interests in language pedagogy and teacher education. Applications must be postmarked by December 1, 2003. For more information, call (530) 752-1291 or email labyrns@ucdavis.edu (Lesley Burns, Office Manager).
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CALL FOR PAPERS - WCCFL XXIII
The 23rd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL XXIII) will be held April 23-25, 2004, at the University of California, Davis. This year again there will be both a General Session and a Special Session. Visit the WCCFL XXIII website at: http://linguistics.ucdavis.edu/wccfl23
CALL FOR PAPERS
General session: Abstracts from all areas of formal linguistics from any theoretical perspective are invited for 20-minute talks.
Special session: Formal Approaches to Spanish and Portuguese Linguistics. Abstracts are invited for 20 minute talks.
Deadline for receipt of abstracts: November 30, 2003. Notification of acceptance will take place in early February, 2004.
For abstract requirements and submission details, please view the full WCCFL XXIII Call for Papers at: http://linguistics.ucdavis.edu/call_for_papers.html
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Have a news item for WHASC? Send it to lrc@ling.ucsc.edu by 5:00 pm on Tuesday for inclusion in the next issue.