SCaMP 2017 at UCLA

On Saturday, May 6th, UCLA Linguistics hosted the 2017 Southern California Meeting on Phonology (SCaMP 2017), organized by Jesse Zymet. This was an informal gathering of phonologists and phoneticians mostly from the Southern California region, and featured presentations by investigators from CSULB, UCLA, USC, UC San Diego, and even UC Berkeley and UC Merced. Our own Isabelle Lin and Andy Xu gave talks, and Eleanor Glewwe and Jesse Zymet gave posters.

Some pictures of the merriment below. The very high-quality photograph on the top left was taken by Stephanie Shih, and the other eight were taken by Jesse with his phone.

 

Jobs for Aly, Chong, Tanaka and Kuo

We are thrilled to congratulate Ann Aly, Adam Chong, Grace Kuo (Ph.D. 2013, now at Concordia U., Montreal) and Yu Tanaka on accepting full-time positions!

Ann Aly will be starting as a Program Manager at ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) in Washington DC in May 2017. 

Adam Chong will be starting as a Lecturer in Linguistics (= US tenure-track Assistant Professor) in the Department of Linguistics at Queen Mary, University of London in September 2017.

Grace Kuo will be starting as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at National Taiwan University in Taipei, beginning in Fall 2017.

Yu Tanaka has just started as an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Culture and Information Science at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan.

This is wonderful news – congratulations to everyone!

UCLA Linguistics at GLOW

GLOW (Generative Linguistics in the Old World) is taking place this (starting Wednesday) at Leiden University. Here is a list of UCLA students and alumni who will present their work:

 

Maayan Abenina-Adar and Nikos Angelopoulos: Subjectivity and Necessity

Laura Kailin (UCLA alumna): Nominal licensing is driven by valued (phi-)features

Peter Hallman (UCLA alumnus) and Maris Camilleri: Existential and Universal Perfect in Arabic

Kie Zuraw and Isabelle Lin at the OCP

The Old World Conference on Phonology was held in Düsseldorf at the end of February, 2017. Kie Zuraw gave an invited talk, “The Breadth of the Candidate Set,” and Isabelle Lin gave a talk entitled “Tone sequences in lexical processing in Beijing Mandarin.”

UCLA linguists at Going Romance

This year’s Going Romance (GR30) was held in Frankfurt, Germany from December 7th through December 10th.  Representing UCLA were  Nikos Angelopoulos and Dominique Sportiche with a talk entitled: “Reconstructing Scrambling Paths in French and Greek,” and Iara Mantenuto with a poster entitled: “Demonstratives in Teramano: a Decompositional Approach.”

UCLA Linguistics alum Jeff Heinz honored at LSA

Jeff Heinz, a 2007 Ph.D. graduate of our program and now Professor of Linguistics at the University of Delaware, was awarded the LSA’s Early Career Award at January’s LSA Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas. This award recognizes scholars who earned their Ph.D. in the past ten years and have made “outstanding contributions to the field of linguistics.” Here is the LSA’s citation of Jeff:

“Citation: For contributions leading to a new computational science of inference and learning as applied to language. Jeffrey Heinz has shown that all phonological generalizations in the world’s languages are computationally simple, belonging to a small group of distinct sub-regular classes within the Chomsky hierarchy. This deep result, which ensures that phonological generalizations are efficiently computable and learnable, could only be obtained through a remarkable synthesis of mathematical linguistics, computational formalisms, and linguistic theory. These linguistic insights can benefit practical problems in artificial intelligence and robotics. Dr. Heinz has published widely in linguistics and beyond, including Science, and already has an outstanding record of training successful young scholars.”

Congratulations, Jeff!!

http://www.linguisticsociety.org/news/2016/11/15/lsa-members-receive-awards-annual-meeting

UCLA at Acoustical Society of America

The department was well-represented at the Fall meeting of the ASA in Honolulu the week of Nov. 28 2016. Current and former department members (PhDs, postdocs, faculty, undergrads, visitors) attending and/or with presentations at the conference included: Ann Aly, Victoria Anderson (PhD 2000), Dani Byrd (PhD 1994),  Adam Chong,  Keith Johnson (post-doc and faculty 1990-92), Allard Jongman (post-doc 1991),  Sun-Ah Jun,  Sue Banner Inouye (PhD 1995),  Pat Keating,  Jody Kreiman (visiting student 1982-88), Kuniko Nielsen (PhD 2008),  Ho-hsien Pan (visiting scholar 2010),  Adam Royer,  Amy Schafer (post-doc 1998-2001), Diana Van Lancker Sidtis (visiting student and lecturer ~1971-77), Rebecca Scarborough (PhD 2005), Joan Sereno (post-doc 1991), Yu Tanaka, Megha Sundara, Richard Wright (PhD 1996), Jie Zhang (PhD 2001).

 

Pat organized a UCLA dinner at a local restaurant for 22 who were still in Honolulu after the conference ended. We remembered to take a group photo only after most people had left, but here are Sue Banner Inouye, Victoria Andersen, Pat Keating, and Richard Wright:

UCLA linguistics at NELS47

NELS47 (North East Linguistics Society) met at UMASS Amherst this October.

UCLA was well represented:

Richard Stockwell gave a talk entitled “VP ellipsis with symmetrical predicates”

Jesse Zymet with co-author Jeff Adler (UCSC) gave a talk entitled “Irreducible Parallelism in Process Interactions”

Tim Hunter with co-author David Potter presented a talk called “Distinguishing approaches to island insensitivity”

Isabelle Charnavel  and Dominique Sportiche gave a talk entitled “Icelandic sig: a standard anaphor, after all”

Laura Kalin gave a talk entitled “Dropping the F bomb: An argument for valued features as derivational time bombs”

UCLA Linguists at AMP 2016

UCLA Linguistics was well-represented at this year’s Annual Meeting on Phonology at the University of Southern California.

Invited talk:

Bruce Hayes: Varieties of Noisy Harmonic Grammar

Talk:

Adam Chong: Examining the lexicon in derived-environment effects: Korean and Turkish

Posters:

Jeffrey Adler & Jesse Zymet: Irreducible parallelism in process interactions

Eleanor Glewwe: An OT analysis of Efik contrastive verbal reduplication

Ryan Sandell: Phonologically driven allomorph selection and variation in the Sanskrit perfect

Yu Tanaka: The correlation between rendaku and accent in Japanese surnames: A foot-based account

Meng Yang: The role of phonological phrasing in Vietnamese lục bát meter

Anthony Yates: Against root faithfulness in Cupeño stress

A number of UCLA alumni also presented their work at AMP.

UCLA Students at CUSP 9

 Two UCLA linguistics grads presented at CUSP 9 (California Semantics and Pragmatics) that took place between Oct. 21 and 22 at UC Santa Cruz. The titles of the talks were:

T. Hendrik Kim: The relevance of logophoric conditions to the interpretation of the Korean anaphor caki

Daniela Čulinović :’Some’, to a degree