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WHASC Newsletter December 9, 2004
("What's Happening at Santa Cruz")
WHASC is the weekly electronic newsletter of the UCSC Linguistics
Department. We welcome your news items, comments and feedback.
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ACCOLADES
Well-deserved congratulations to Dan Karvonen who successfully defended his dissertation on "Word Prosody in Finnish" on December 3. His committee members are Junko Ito, Armin Mester and Jaye Padgett. Dan teaches Finnish and linguistics at the University of Minnesota.
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Recognition goes to Pete Alrenga who recently had a paper accepted to the journal Syntax.
Title: A Sentential Subject Asymmetry in English and its Implications for Lexical Theory.
The paper should appear by the end of 2005.
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Many thanks to Junko Ito and Armin Mester for the wonderful hospitality and delicious Finnish food last Friday celebrating Dan's success, as well as the end of the quarter.
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Linguists Sweep 2nd Place Victory at Trivia Night
The UCSC Linguistics Team, *LOSE (named appropriately after an Optimality Constraint that prohibits losing), won 2nd place at 99 Bottles' weekly "A Brit[sic] of Trivia" contest. After a tie for first place, including correctly answering the tiebreaker question, the team failed to get the 2nd tiebreaker question right, thus earning them a free appetizer rather than the 1st place prize of 10 free beers. The team consisted of Tabby Ellett, Allison Largent, Justin Nuger, Marc Sciglimpaglia, Dave Teeple, and Jeremy Weissmann. Congratulations!
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POETRY READING
Dennis Holt, a Research Associate of the LRC, will be presenting a program of poetry (his own & translations of certain Latin American poets) as one of two featured readers (the other will be Kate Hitt) at the monthly reading-series held at the Main Library in Santa Cruz (Church at Center Streets), this coming Sunday afternoon, December 12th, at 2 o'clock.
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WAIL 2005
The Eighth Annual WAIL 2005 (Workshop on American Indigenous Languages)
Keynote Speaker: Lyle Campbell (University of Utah, Salt Lake City)
With a special panel on: Language Endangerment and Fieldwork
Panelists: Wallace Chafe (UCSB), Spike Gildea (University of Oregon), Marianne Mithun (UCSB), Pamela Munro (UCLA)
April 21-23, 2005
University of California, Santa Barbara
For more information, please visit: http://orgs.sa.ucsb.edu/wailsg
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ESSLLI WORKSHOPS
Calls for papers for workshops for the
European Summer School on Logic, Language and Information 2005 to be held in Edinburgh, Scotland
http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/esslli05/
Workshop on Empirical Challenges and Analytic Alternatives to Strict Compositionality , August 8-12, 2005 http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/%7Efr/esslli/05/
Cross-Modular Approaches to Ellipsis , August 8-12, 2005
http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/esslli05/giveabs.php?16
Foundations of Natural-Language Grammar , August 16-20, 2005
http://semantics.phil.kcl.ac.uk/ldsnl/ESSLLI05-Workshop-Foundations_of_Natural_Language_Grammar/index.htm
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CALL FOR PAPERS
Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics 2005 (LENLS 2005)
The Kitakyushuu International Conference Center, Japan
June 13-14, 2005
Deadline for receipt of abstracts: March 31, 2005
For more information, visit: http://cobalt.lang.osaka-u.ac.jp/~ogata/LENLS2005.html
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Short-term Job Opportunity for a Phonetician
The Spoken Language Technologies group in Apple Computer is looking for a full-time contractor for 3 months, starting in January 2005, to perform phonetic segmentation and prosodic transcription of recordings of human speech. The ideal candidate will be able to accurately and consistently mark phoneme boundaries, word boundaries, pauses, disfluencies, and misarticulations. In addition knowledge of the ToBI prosodic transcription standard will be required.
As well as carrying out the phonetic and prosodic transcription, the job will also entail writing of scripts to help automate aspects of the transcription.
Others in the team will also be transcribing, and so it will be necessary to coordinate with others, seeking consensus and consistency in treatment of ambiguous cases.
Qualifications:
Must be experienced with:
* acoustic phonetics of spoken General American English
* prosodic transcription using ToBI or a derivative of ToBI
* interactive tools for labelling and editing waveforms (preferably Praat)
* Unix scripting (shell, perl and/or awk)
Must be able to work independently with minimal supervision
Prefer:
* Familiar with Mac OS X
* Experienced working in a speech analysis environment, such as Praat
* Familiarity with speech synthesis technology.
The work will be carried out in Cupertino, California.
Candidates please send your resume to:
Kim Silverman
Apple Computer
One Infinite Loop
Cupertino, CA 94040
kimsilv@apple.com
(408) 862 0545
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Employment Opportunity
Cabrillo College English Instructor
CR04-70 (Four Tenure Track Positions)
http://www.cabrillo.edu
Application Deadline: Thursday, March 24, 2005 by 4:00 p.m.
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Important Dates
Course Reports due Tuesday, December 14
Open enrollment ends December 16
Evals due Monday, January 10
Campus closure: Friday, December 24 - Sunday, January 2
Winter Quarter begins Monday, January 3
Instruction begins Tuesday, January 4
Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday: January 17
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Do you have a news item for WHASC? Please send it to lrc@ling.ucsc.edu by noon on Thursday, January 6, 2005. Have a wonderful winter break!
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