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Welcome to Rajesh Bhatt from the University of Texas, Austin who is visiting the department this week. He will be speaking on
"Long Distance Agreement in Hindi-Urdu"
Friday, November 15 - 3:30 p.m.
Stevenson Silverman Conference Room
To read the abstract, visit: http://ling.ucsc.edu/events/index.html
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THE PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT
COLLOQUIA SERIES
CASEY O'CALLAGHAN
Visiting Assistant Professor in Philosophy, UCSC
"The Event View of Sounds"
Thursday, November 14
4:00-6:00 pm
Stevenson Silverman Conference Room
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NEW COURSE OFFERING FOR FRESHMEN: GRAMMAR AS SCIENCE
LING 88A: Two credits
Call Number: 38622
Grammar as Science: The discovery of linguistic structure will be offered Winter Quarter, 2003. Taught by Geoff Pullum, the class will meet once a week starting on Monday, January 6 from 5:15-7 p.m. in Stevenson 221.
Grammar can be discovered from evidence rather than absorbed as dogma. This class offers both a taste of linguistic research and an opportunity to sharpen understanding of English sentence structure.
Linguistics 88A is part of a group of courses called Freshman Discovery Seminars. Priority is given to freshmen, but others may enroll if there is space. The course counts toward workload requirements, but not major requirements.
For more information: http://reg.ucsc.edu/soc/froshSeminars/
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REPORT ON NELS
Judith Aissen and Christopher Potts have returned from NELS 33 at MIT
(November 8--10).
Judith was an invited speaker at the special session on
nonconfigurationality, in honor of the late Ken Hale. She showed how
bidirectional OT informs issues of categorical semantic blocking effects
in cases where the morphology does not determine only one structure as
possible for a given string. The talk was characteristically rich in its
factual coverage (mainly Chamorro, K'ichee; also Navajo and others).
After warning that there would be some foul language, Chris used
expressive content modifiers ('friggin', 'the jerk') to motivate a two
dimensional semantics. Chris' presentation was masterful and spirited.
The talk was very well received and provoked interesting discussion.
As usual, many former UCSC students were on hand. Chris Barker (1991 UCSC
Ph.D.) had a poster with Chung-Chien Shan (Harvard) called 'A unified
explanation for crossover and superiority in a theory of binding by
generalized predicate abstraction'. Barker and Shan derive c-command
conditions on quantifier--variable binding from their more general
assumptions about the denotations of quantifiers and pronouns.
Shigeto Kawahara, who was at UCSC two years ago as an undergraduate
exchange student from Japan, had a poster called 'Sino Japanese as the
core stratum in Japanese' (joint work with Kohei Nishimura (Nagoya) and
Hajime Ono (UC Irvine)). Shigeto is in his first year as a graduate
student at UMass. And already with a conference presentation!
Eric Potsdam (1996 UCSC Ph.D., now at the University of Florida) used
evidence from Malagasy to argue that the conditions on identity under
ellipsis are semantic. The Malagasy evidence for this position, and
against a syntactic identity criterion, are compelling. The Malagasy
version of
*Someone offered a devastating counterexample, and we can all guess by
whom." is okay! Eric's talk was a model of clarity. It too generated a lot of interest from the audience.
Former UCSC and current MIT students Teal Bissell and Joey Sabbagh helped
to organize NELS 33. Joey is a third year graduate student and Teal,a fourth year.
Peter Svenonius (1994 UCSC Ph.D.), newly promoted
to a prestigious research position at Tromso, was on the scene as well
... and as usual; Peter is seemingly everywhere, and asks pointed
questions at basically every talk he attends.
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Geoff Pullum leaves for Spain on November 16 to spend a week
giving lectures on the application of formal language theory
to natural language at the Research Group on Mathematical
Linguistics at Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona.
While there he will also give two lectures on The Cambridge
Grammar of the English Language, one in Tarragona and probably
also one in Barcelona to be organized by UCSC Ph.D. Louise
McNally.
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EOP FACULTY MENTOR PROGRAM
WINTER & SPRING 2003
APPLICATIONS ARE DUE NOVEMBER 15 BY 4:00 P.M.
The Faculty Mentor Program is a two quarter intensive academic program that prepares students in the Arts, Humanities and the Social Sciences for future graduate study at the Master's and Doctoral level. The goal of the program is to encourage students to consider academic careers.
For information, call 459-2296.
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EACL 2003
The 10th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
will be held April 12-17, 2003 at the Agro Hotel in Budapest, Hungary. For more information, see: http://www.conferences.hu/EACL03
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Job Announcements
The Linguistics Department of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has a tenure-track opening for an assistant professor in phonetics and phonology. The deadline is January 10, 2003.
The Department of Linguistics at New York University announces a search for an Assistant/Associate Professor in either Phonetics or Syntax. The deadline is November 30, 2002.
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