Message from the Chair
Southern California Linguistics Circle
Faculty Spotlight on Robert Stockwell
With Tip and Blade through the Central Australian Desert
Summer Mentorship Program
UCLA Hosts African Language Institute
Three Months in the Basin
Woolworths Says "Welcome Linguists!"
Processing: It's Not Just For Meat and Cheese By-Products Anymore
UCLA Conference on Tense and Aspect
Codename: Kenji
Swot Slot Got Hot Spot
AFLA
Greetings from Provence
Instructional Enhancement Initiative
Faculty & Student News
Hot News of Note -- We continue to be the number one ranked department at UCLA! --Vicki Fromkin was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (the only one from UCLA that year). She and Peter Ladefoged were already Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and your truly was just elected this year. – Our Phonetics Lab boasts of a major grant – Phonetic Structures of Endangered languages, among the largest given when it was awarded (five years ago). And we now have a proper up and running Psycholinguistics Lab complete with an eye tracker.
Administrative Update: These past six months have been active to say the least. Tim Stowell passed the Chair's baton to yours truly; Anna Meyer retired, and John Bulger has taken a different post within the university. Our new staff is one that is merged with the staff in Spanish and Portuguese. We share an "MSO" (Management Services Officer) Todd August. We have two full time staff in our department, Natasha Brown, Student Affairs Officer, and Patrick Manalastas, Front Office Coordinator. In addition, we share the services of Olivia Diaz, Academic Personnel Coordinator, and Mary Hoang, Accounting Coordinator, with the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. And we finally have Henry Tehrani now as full time Engineer in the Phonetics Lab and the Psycholinguistics lab. Bruce Hayes is functioning as our Director of Graduate Studies. Also: we remodeled the front office so that it has a reception area and three offices, mine, Natasha's, and Todd's, with walls up to the ceiling. Wish us luck in our new cooperative enterprise! Your new chair, Ed Keenan
The first biannual meetings of the Southern California Linguistics Circle (SCLC) took place at UCLA on November 13. Speakers came from UCLA, USC, and private industry. Those in the Language, Mind and Brain session were Mark Seidenberg & Pat Keating, Dan Kempler, Eran Zaidel and Susan Curtiss. Those in Computational Linguistics were Bonnie Glover Stalls, Kathleen Dahlgren, Lynne Bernstein, and Edward Stabler. Attendees, numbering about 80, came from as far away as Cal State Fresno and UC Riverside. The SCLC was organized by myself, Vicki Fromkin and Joseph Aoun (at USC). The intent is to bring together all those in S. Ca. whose work or research interests involves lan-guage analysis in some way. S. Ca. Boasts enormous talent in this area. Our intent is that constructive meetings like the one we just had will lead to cross institutional and cross disciplinary activities, ultimately joint research projects and joint grants. Next meetings in February, 1999 at USC. All invited!
Our department owes its existence to the vision, energy, and organizational genius of Prof. Robert Stockwell, who founded the department in 1966, and who served as its Chair for many years (1966-1970, 1971-1973, and 1980-1985). We are fortunate that Prof. Stockwell enjoyed the confidence of Franklin P. Rolfe, who was the head of the college at that time; he managed to convince Rolfe and other members of the administration that Linguistics was an exciting new field that was worth investing resources in. He persuaded them to create our department, over-coming the initial opposition of some other departments on campus, who feared that we might encroach on their interests. Prof. Stockwell was also responsible for recruiting young and promis-ing scholars such as Peter Ladefoged and Barbara Partee (then Barbara Hall), who came to UCLA and joined existing faculty from other departments, such as William Bright and Paul Schachter, to form the nucleus of the new department. In less than five years' time, UCLA Linguistics rose to prominence in the field, and was ranked #2 in the country in two subsequent national reviews of graduate programs. None of this would have happened without Prof. Stockwell's efforts.
With the new department up and running, Prof. Stockwell's teaching had a powerful influence on many people, including not only the new cadre of gradu-ate students attracted to the program, but also some faculty in other departments, such as Prof. Carlos Otero in the department of Spanish and Portuguese, who describes Stockwell's lectures as inspiring. Indeed, he was the first member of our department to receive UCLA's Distinguished Teaching Award, in 1968. For many years thereafter, he continued to be one of the department's best teachers; graduate students loved his promotion of vigorous debates in his classes, and he supervised many important Ph.D. dissertations. Although he eventually "retired" in 1994, he has continued to teach two courses per year for us to this day, and he still plays an active role in the life of the department.
Prof. Stockwell's reputation in the field is based on much more than what he did for us at UCLA, however. Although he was trained in the framework of traditional structuralist linguistics--he was a student of Archibald Hill at the University of Virginia--he was deeply impressed by the revolutionary new theo-retical framework of transformational- generative linguistics being developed by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle at MIT, and he quickly became a leading participant in the new approach, and one of its most effective spokesmen, serving the role of an informal ambassador to more traditionally minded linguists. Leading historians of the field have observed that Prof. Stockwell's early public embrace of the new research paradigm played an influential role in its swift takeover of the field.
In his own research, Prof. Stockwell made important contributions to the early development of generative theory, both in phonology and in syntax. Notable among his achievements was an ambitious research project that he co-directed, with Profs. Schachter and Partee, funded by the US Air Force Advanced Systems Command. The project sought to document the major research results of the first decade of generative syntactic theory, and to integrate them in a theoretically consistent whole. The outcome of this work, published in 1971 as The Major Syntactic Structures of English, had considerable influence on the field as a standard reference source for several years thereafter. Concurrent with his interest in generative theory, Prof. Stockwell continued to pursue research on Old English syntax and phonology, and with early Germanic languages more generally. His published work in this area has earned him the richly deserved reputation of being one of the leading scholars in the world in these areas too.
Outside of Linguistics, Prof. Stockwell has lived a full and varied life. He has been an accomplished musician throughout his adult life, and was good enough to have considered pursuing a professional career in music before being diverted to wartime military service. In his academic pursuits, he studied Greek, English, and a wide variety of Old Germanic languages before turning to Linguistics. He also worked as a Spanish instructor at the State Department's Foreign Service Insitute in Washington from 1952 to 1956, despite the small problem of knowing "very little Spanish", in his own modest words! Luckily for us, he was lured to the UCLA English Department to accept a position as Assistant Professor in 1956, for the princely salary $5,500 per year! (By 1964, he was already a full professor, with the even more staggering annual salary of $12,000, making it somewhat easier for him to keep up with the mortgage on his house, which cost over $30,000.)
In his years here, Prof. Stockwell has seen UCLA develop from being the often-overlooked younger sister of UC Berkeley into one of the premier research universities in the nation; he has played an important role in this process of change, for which we, as members of the department that he created and nur-tured, will forever be grateful.
As some of you ph-folk might know, I’m completing my dissertation, “Giving Weight to Phonetic Principles: The case of Place of Articulation in Western Arrernte.” One of the theoretical hypotheses of this thesis is that phonetically–driven constraints on the sound structures of languages may involve “domain–specific weighting.” An example follows, though things are unlikely to be as cut and dried as this: If it is true that vowels are more naturally defined on auditory rather than articulatory targets, then constraints which ensure perceptual distinctiveness may outweigh constraints which guarantee articulatory ease or pattern congruity, in the “domain” of vowels. On the other hand, the drive toward pattern congruity may outweigh the drive to-ward perceptual distinctiveness in the “domain” of consonants.
The dissertation looks for evidence of perceptual distinctiveness or pattern congruity as the most heavily-weighted forces in determining consonant Place of Articulation, in a language of Central Australia. Instrumental articulatory and perceptual data for coronals (tongue tip and blade articulations) were gathered for Western Arrernte (['a|´=?å]), which makes use of four contrastive coronal Places, two articulated with the tip, and two with the blade. This is not uncom-mon among Australian languages but is fairly rare elsewhere in the world. In short, we did not find evidence that perceptual considerations are more heavily weighted in the domain of consonant Place; evidence seems to point to pattern congruity as the more heavily weighted force.
While in Australia I did some fun things besides linguistics. One of the ways I tried to be useful to the communities in which I was working was to provide transportation––aboriginal people have limited access to vehicles, and mobility is difficult. People no longer live a traditional lifestyle, but still enjoy going into bush and collecting traditional foods. A group of ladies and their children would take me out on bush trips lasting a day or two and we would collect seeds, wild fruits and ngkwarle ['NgWað´] (honey-based foods), dig for honey ants and witchetty grubs, and catch and prepare lizards and echidnas. The stamina and hunting skills of even elderly women was a continual source of astonishment to me.
I’ll soon be moving up to the San Jose area to start a job with a speech technology company called fonix. I’ll be contributing to the creation of synthetic speech, which has been in use for some time by the vision– and speech–impaired communities, but is gaining wider currency as the human–computer interface continues to develop beyond keyboard–and–mouse input to in-clude speech as an additional way for people to interact with computers.
Over the summer of ’97, two of our linguistics graduate students – Misha Becker and Temmi Szalai -- participated in a new summer mentorship program organ-ized by the Graduate Division.
The main goal of the program was to encourage a high level of interaction between students and faculty mentors within the social sciences and humanities. To achieve this goal, the program provided funds to the students that enabled them to work over the summer with faculty members on individual projects that would result in papers ready for publication or presentation at a conference.
Each of the 40 students in the program met with his or her mentor during the summer to discuss the progress of their projects and to talk over any problems or ideas concerning the projects.
“This was not too different from our [Ed’s and my] normal schedule of meetings (since we had been working together previously),” noted Misha Becker whose mentor was Ed Stabler, “but it seemed that for other students in other depart-ments, this was something extraordinary.”
The entire group of students and mentors met 3 times during the summer in order to touch base with the program organizers and to hear about the projects of all those involved in the program. Several students even found useful ties to people in other departments.
In the summer of '97, during the 8-week summer session, UCLA hosted the 5th annual Cooperative Summer African Language Institute, of which Russ Schuh was Director. Through UCLA Summer Sessions, the Institute offered intensive courses in seven African languages:
Bambara, taught by Moussa Konate, a recent Ph.D. of the UCLA Anthropology program; Chichewa, taught by Sam Mchombo of the UC Berkeley Linguistics Department; Hausa, taught by our own Alhaji Maina Gimba; Swahili, taught by John Mugane of the Stanford Linguistics Department; Tigrinya, taught by Elilta Hagos, a Public Health graduate student at UC Berkeley; Yoruba, taught by Steven Adewole, a UCLA Linguistics Ph.D. alumnus; Zulu, taught by another one of our own, George Vilakazi.
The total number of students was about 35, including Russ Schuh, who took the opportunity to be a Tigrinya student for the full course. Other local participants were Janine Ekulona, who is now the resident Bambara expert, and incoming graduate, Jason Schiffman will undoubtedly be conversing with Tom Hinnebusch in Swahili.
Besides being a student once again, Russ took the opportunity to develop computer-aided study materials for Tigrinya, a language which has not escaped the scrutiny of linguists over the years, but which has very little in the way of materials for learners.
While we were waiting for permission to land I looked out of the window of the airplane. Probably, many residents of L.A. have experienced it, are used to it, maybe even bored by it, but I found what I saw on that evening of March 2 awe-inspiring: a seemingly infinite blanket of lights, the nocturnal face of no doubt a large part of the L.A.-area.
The sight of the ocean of lights gave me a mixed feeling of fear and excitement: I would spend three months down there which was certainly something to look forward to, but how on earth would I be able to find my way to UCLA in an area which covers almost one third of the whole of the kingdom of the Netherlands, as my country of origin is referred to in every Dutch passport. Thanks to the most friendly driver of supershuttle who showed me the way to UCLA, my fear disappeared. My excitement only increased during the three months.
What struck me at the linguistics department was the excellent organization of the Ph.D.- program and notably the fact that the students are well trained in several fields. Together with the highly qualified staff this aspect makes the Ph.D. program of UCLA the best system I ever witnessed. Although large parts of the Ph.D. program at the Holland Institute of Generative Linguistics HIL, a cooperative body, in which the University of Amsterdam, my employer, partici-pates, have been restyled after the American system we still have a long way to go.
Another remarkable aspect of the linguistic community is the support the Ph.D.-students get from their supervisors. They have the opportunity to meet their supervisor regularly. The Dutch situation is sometimes quite the opposite in this respect. A particularly striking illustration of the attention for the Ph.D.-students was the pampering of prospective students during their introduction in March.
Doing research in a professional, well-organized department was a pleasure, which was reinforced by the willingness of staff and students to discuss my research without immediately pushing their own ideas down my throat.
Life in the USA is not so different from life in Holland, when you live there for only a short period. The three months in LA were no exception to that. Nonetheless, there were a few things that caught the eye. I had just become ac-customed to the sales-tax which is added to the price of the product at the cash desk, which might cause some frustration with bargain hunters among which Dutchmen seem to figure most prominently, when I found out that one has to pay a deposit for basically every public utility such as water, gas, and electric power. It is true, you get it back in the end. Nevertheless, it restricts your budget enor-mously.
I feared driving in the L.A.-area because the very first lesson about the U.S.A. a taxi driver in New York taught me long ago: "one of the most difficult things in life, brother, is to make a left turn in L.A." And he was right: it was horrible, it was nerve-wracking, and it gave me palpitations.
On the other hand, the disciplined way of driving on the interstate constituted such a nice change to the hasty, agitated, aggressive way of driving on the inter-state in the Netherlands. Ultimately, driving was incredibly relaxing.
There were quite a lot of social gatherings organized by the students. They were absolutely fabulous, although we never got to one of my favorite pastimes "het doorzakken" (hang around in bars till dawn, while talking and drinking). Doorzakken was impossible, because bars in Westwood close rather early and, it must be said, many students were so disciplined, which I really envy, that such an enterprise was out of the question anyway.
The upside of the absence of some nightlife was that I could devote my energy to sports. So, I discovered rollerblading thanks to the rollerblader of all rollerbladers Christine Tellier, did some beach volleyball with the astonishing Andrew Simpson and, again, Christine Tellier and the last but not least there was the soccer game every Friday afternoon with the equally astonishing Manuel Espanol, Matt Gordon, Ed Garret (three excellent strikers), John Foreman (best defender), Marco (terrific goalie) and many others.
During my stay, the linguistics department was visited by a lot of my colleagues from Holland. I really wish the same would happen to the Holland Institute of Generative Linguistics. Therefore, I would like to make a plea for a lively exchange, a constant flow of students from L.A. to the Netherlands and vice versa.
Probably, many have already heard about the cooperation between the Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics (L.O.T.) and the UC-universities including UCLA. The LOT has made available funds which allow Ph.D.-students, post docs and staff from Holland to spend some time in the U.S.A. and students etc. from the U.S.A. to stay in the Netherlands for a while. A prerequi-site is that you have to get a formal invitation from the university where you would like to do some research. Tim Stowell can fill you in on the details. Although we do not have the natural wonders such as the Grand Canyon and the interesting animals such as hummingbirds, rattle snakes, coyotes and deer, we have certainly something to offer in the cultural realm, such as the famous tor-ture museum, just to name a highlight.
So go out, make contact with some linguist/university and come hither to live a while among the `cloggies' in `cloggyland'.
At the LSA Summer Institute at Cornell this past summer, Pat Keating taught a 2-week course on (what else) "Phonetics-Phonology Interface". About 50 people attended, and she was kept quite busy with individual appointments with many of them. (It is always a surprise to be reminded how little instruction and research guidance in phonetics is available in most departments, given the level of interest in the subject.) The course had been scheduled to be co-taught by her and Abby Cohn (Associate Prof. of Linguistics at Cornell, Assoc. Director of the Institute, and UCLA Ph.D. 1990), but instead Abby gave birth to twin daughters on the day of the last class, and Pat taught the course alone.
Since Peter Ladefoged was teaching an experimental phonetics course, and Bruce Hayes's phonology course had a large phonetics component, the UCLA phonetics presence at the Institute was strong.
As a student, Adam Albright found that the Institute was a great way to attach faces to the names of prominent linguists whose works we read in introductory classes.
For those who wanted to take a break from linguistics and experience beautiful Central New York, there were Sunday excursions to go hiking amidst the gorges and waterfalls of local state parks, to tour the nearby wine region, and to see attractions such as Corning and Niagara Falls. For people with more free time (if there were any), the Institute office also distributed a calendar of art exhibits, folk dancing, lectures, concert series, and other events offered at Cornell and in Ithaca at large.
Although the Institute did more than enough to provide linguistics-related activities at every waking moment, it was nice to see this unusual invasion wel-comed by the surrounding town (which is incidentally the hometown of both Adam Albright and of Bruce Hayes!) It's not every day that you see Woolworths put up a "Welcome, Linguists!" banner over the front door!
If you're interested in attending an LSA Linguistic Institute, mark your calendars now! The next Institute will be held at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in the summer of 1999.
Rm. 2224, a former classroom obtained by the department in spring 1997, has been renovated and now contains Carson's office, four student/RA desks and two testing rooms for language processing and related experiments. The latter are equipped with networked computers, which are available for use by members of the department when they are not needed for running experiments or doing research. The larger of these rooms houses an eye-tracker and associated equip-ment; this device records where on a computer screen the subject is looking every millisecond. The inaugural experiment was run in this new space in Octo-ber and involved morphological processing. The lab also recently obtained several large corpora of text and associated materials on CD-ROM from the Linguistic Data Consortium; these are available to everyone in the department.
During the Spring quarter of 1998 (May 17-19), the Linguistics Department hosted a very successful conference on the syntax and semantics of tense and aspect. The conference was organized by Stefano Vegnaduzzo, Gerhard Brugger, and Tim Stowell, and was supported in part by funds from the UCLA Graduate Division and the Graduate Students' Association. It featured a number of leading scholars working in this area from around the world, as well as assorted faculty, graduate students, and visiting scholars from our own department. Non-UCLA speakers included Guglielmo Cinque (U. of Venice), Teun Hoekstra (U. of Leiden), Myriam Uribe (Univ. of the Basque Country), Hamida Demirdache (UBC, Vancouver), Ronny Boogaart (VU, Amsterdam), Fabio Pianesi (IRST, Trento), Richard Larson and Peter Ludlow (SUNY Stony Brook), Toshi Ogihara and Karen Zagona (U of Washington, Seattle), Hagit Borer (USC), and Bart Hollebrandse (U Mass, Amherst); UCLA speakers included visiting scholar Gerhard Brugger, faculty members Nina Hyams and Tim Stowell, and graduate students Matt Pearson, Felicia Lee, Edward Garrett, Stefano Vegnaduzzo, and Sean Fulop. Many other members of the Los Angeles linguistics community also attended and took part actively in the debates and discussions.
The workshop was an outgrowth of two graduate seminars on tense and aspect held at UCLA over the past year; it was designed to provide our faculty and graduate students working on tense and aspect with the opportunity to ex-change ideas with these leading scholars in the field. Some of the talks were held on campus, but the main part of the program took place at UCLA's Lake Arrow-head Conference Center, enabling our graduate students to interact more fully with the outside participants in the informal and congenial atmosphere of Lake Arrowhead's mountain setting. Everything worked out superbly, as planned. Several of the outside participants told us how impressed they were by the high quality of our graduate students' presentations, and more generally by the lively research atmosphere of our department. Our graduate students got a rare oppor-tunity to enjoy the fine meals and accommodations of Lake Arrowhead, and to get to know the outside speakers in a way that would not have been possible with a conventional conference held on campus, where participants tend to disappear at the end of the formal presentations. The consensus was that we should try to host other conferences at Lake Arrowhead in the future.
The Phonetics Lab now has a workstation for working with video images: a Pentium 266 with a Miro video capture card and Adobe Premiere for digitizing video clips, and NIH Image (a free program) for making measurements from video frames.
This workstation dubbed Kenji will be used by faculty and students who make video recordings of speakers. For example, this is now generally done during palatography sessions, so that articulatory information about tongue-palate con-tact is measured from the video recordings rather than still photos.
In Spring 1996 the Phonetics Lab made a major acquisition, its first move-ment-tracking system.
The Carstens AG-100 is an "electromagnetic midsagittal articulograph" that uses an electromagnetic field (EMF) to track the positions of five receiver coils attached to the speech organs of a speaker. The speaker wears a kind of helmet that sets up an EMF around the head, and the coils are attached with dental adhesive to lips, tongue, or whatever. The information about the positions of the coils in the EMF is recorded by a computer.
Since Spring 1996 we have learned about the system, obtained permission from the UCLA Human Subjects Protection Committee to use it, and have practiced attaching coils to each other. We also had a visit from the Carstens family (makers of the system) this past summer, and Peter Ladefoged served as our demonstration subject, producing tongue twisters.
Last spring, Ian Maddieson offered a graduate pro-seminar about articulography for students to perform their first experiments with the system.
SWOT ("Southwest Work-shop on Optimality Theory") was held at UCLA on May 31 and June 1 1997. About 50 people showed up, and a wonderful time was had by all, especially during the pasta dinner Saturday night (venue provided by Bruce Hayes and Pat Keating, pasta-cooking expertise provided by Donca Steriade). Participants and spectators came from all over the south-western U.S. and slightly further north in California, including UCLA, UCI, UC San Diego, U. of Arizona, Stanford, and UC Berkeley. The program included:
· Junko Ito: "Prosodic Interludes and Sympathy Effects"
· Katherine Crosswhite: "Avoidance of Homophony in Trigrade Bulgarian Vowel Reduction"
· Edward Flemming: "Optimization without Strict Constraint Dominance"
· Amy Fountain: "Output-Output Correspondence in the Navajo Verb"
· Orhan Orgun: "Syllable Faithfulness and Privative [voice]"
· Matt Gordon: "Projecting Phonological Constraints from Phonetics: The Case of
Syllable Weight"
· Moira Yip: "An OT Typology of Dialect Variation in Nasalization"
· Laura Moll-Collopy: "Eastern Catalan Vowels: Support for a FEA-TURES/STRESS Constraint
Family?"
· Luther Liu: "Rap Songs in Two Chinese Dialects and in English"
· Michael Hammond: "Many Moras"
· Larry Hyman: "Harmonic Troughs and Plateaus in Yaka"
· Julliete Blevins and Sharon Inkelas: "Umpila Reduplicative Allomorphy"
· Sharon Rose: "Epenthesis and Syllable Contact: Pooling Violations"v
From the 25th to the 27th of April, 1997, UCLA hosted the fourth annual meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (or AFLA) an informal organization of linguists from around the world who work on the syntax, semantics, phonetics, and phonology of Austronesian languages from a formal perspective. Approximately sixty people attended the conference, most of them from UCLA and other universities in the US and Canada, but some from as far away as Holland and Malaysia.
Participants presented papers on a variety of languages from all branches of the Austronesian family, though with a heavy emphasis on Malayo-Polynesian. Some of the languages discussed include Bahasa Indonesia, Balinese, Kambera, Leti, Makassarese, Malagasy, Malay, Niuean, Riau Indonesian, Selayarese, Tagalog, Toba Batak, Tongoan, Yapese, and the languages of Sulawesi and Micronesia as well as the Austronesian based creole Bislama.
The centerpiece of the conference was a series of five invited talks on a variety of topics. Ian Maddieson discussed the phonetic characteristics and origins of glottalized consonants in Yapese (an unusual phenomenon from a language family, which is often thought of as phonetically unexciting). Ed Keenan discussed the complex facts pertaining to possessor raising in Malagasy. Peter Cole and Gabriella Hermon of the University of Delaware presented a theory of wh-movement in Malay, a language which is typologically unusual in that wh-movement to a scopal position, wh-in-situ, and partial wh-movement are all attested.
Carol Georgopoulos discussed direct object definiteness effects in a number of Indonesian languages. And finally, Lisa Travis of McGill University addressed the question of theta-sensitive binding in Austronesian and used binding facts from Balinese, Malagasy, and Tagalog to argue for a layered VP structure for these languages.
This was the second AFLA conference in as many years which UCLA has hosted. The first AFLA conference was held at the University of Toronto in 1994, while the second conference (which attracted more than twice as many people as the first) took place at McGill University in 1995.
This year, AFLA 5 was hosted by the University of Hawaii. Then in 1999, the conference will again take place at the University of Toronto.
The purpose of the AFLA conference is to provide a small, low-key forum for the exchange of ideas on the structure and formal analysis of Austronesian languages, and all linguists who are interested in these languages are encouraged to join us for next year’s meeting in Toronto.
During the summer of 1997, from Aug. 11th to Aug. 22nd, a merry team of UCLA Linguistics graduate students attended the 9th edition of ESSLLI, a.k.a. The European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information, in Aix-en-Provence (Southern France). The team included Cathryn Donohue, Sean Fulop and me.
ESSLLI is a two week summer school in which two level courses (introductory and advanced) are taught by leading scholars in several fields sharing a formal approach to the study of language. This year courses (and associated seminars, symposia, lectures etc.) were split into six areas: Logic, Computation, Linguistics and their interfaces Logic & Computation, Logic & Linguistics and Computation and Linguistics.
To the honor of our department, a second merry team of UCLA Linguistics professors, Ed Keenan and Ed Stabler, taught an advanced course in the area of Logic and Linguistics about Mathematical Linguistics and Abstract Grammar. Moreover, Sean Fulop gave a talk within a symposium about compositionality presenting (quite successfully) his joint work with Ed Keenan. Participation to ESSLLI is highly recommended as a unique chance to meet and get in touch with people doing research in areas related to ours or in the same areas but with different approaches, maximizing the possibility of exchanging useful information and maybe establishing contacts for future projects. Given that the school attracts some of the best and cutting-edge researchers in Europe (but also in the US, see above...), both at the faculty and student levels, the intellectual atmosphere is always exciting and rewarding.
A crucial point for graduate students in our department: notwithstanding appearances, ESSLLI is not devoted only to syntax and semantics narrowly understood. People interested in phonetics, phonology, morphology, language acquisition, processing etc. might find it useful. Look for the next ESSLLI in 1999 at Utrecht, Netherlands.
It's here. The Instructional Enhancement Initiative is taking our classes by storm, threatening to improve the efficiency of the learning process.
Chancellor Young invoked a $10.00 fee for every undergraduate class, in order to pay for various computerized enhancements to instruction. Each Division chose its own way of "wiring" their courses, so long as the result was the appearance of class materials on-line, accessible via the web using Netscape. Each of our undergraduate courses now has a web site maintained by Humanities Computing on their E- Campus web server. Professors are encouraged to use these web sites, which are created and modified using Web Course Tools, a user-friendly web-mastering environment. By default, each course is provided with a number of features including message boards (good for virtual office hours), chat rooms (uncensored, unlike AOL), and a calendar for the instructor to mark important events. In theory, instructors can use WebCT to modify the web site and add various materials. In practice, this has so far proven to be easier said than done. One difficulty is posed by WebCT itself, which is similar to early web browsers in being heavily biased toward HTML documents.
Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML) has about the same typographic capabilities as my old Commodore 64 -- which is to say, none. No mathematics, no phonetics, nothing fancy at all. Einstein couldn't even have said E = mc2 on his home page if he had to use HTML!
To handle this problem, the department has been moving the system away from HTML toward a more useful standard. Current plans are to use Adobe Acrobat software to post documents in a general format that allows them to both be viewed on the screen in Netscape and to download a printable file. More good news: such documents can in principle be directly converted from a variety of formats and can show modern typographic content on-line
The department has managed to implement a precursor to the hoped-for scheme on the Linguistics 1 web site, by posting documents as PostScript files. The software to view these files is less user-friendly than Acrobat, and students have so far had great difficulty putting the system into practice for themselves.
The technology folks behind this initiative seem to have gravely overestimated the computer know- how of the average undergraduate student. I must admit that I am somewhat surprised at how few linguistics students have ever done this sort of thing before.
Some professors have expressed opposition to the initiative, but I think that it could theoretically streamline the process of distributing and archiving class materials. Unfortunately, the availability to students of computers, laser printers, and helpful people who know what they are doing currently seems too limited to permit this project to reach its potential any time soon. Visit the College Library Instructional Computing Center (CLICC) at around 11:00 on a weekday and you'll see what I mean. Still, someone must go first, and I think it will benefit our department in the long run if we set a good example now, even though many students may never access the materials at present. This is a case of supply preceding demand, but the foresight is probably 20/20.