…it doesn’t mean it’s silent in CASTL. Despite the prolonged radio silence (sorry about that!), we’ve been keeping ourselves busy. Here are some highlights of the past couple of weeks:
- CASTL phonologists traversed basically the entire continent (and then some) to invade Marrakech and give not one, but several talks at OCP8, one of the field’s premier conferences. On the program were PhD students Pavel Iosad (Explaining licensing mismatches in Welsh), Violeta Martínez-Paricio (Vowel sequences, vowel clusters and unmarked stress in Spanish), Dragana Šurkalović (Phase-Phase Faithfulness), and Islam Youssef (Labialization in Baghdadi Arabic: features and constraints), while CASTL affiliate Martin Krämer presented Optimizing Lexical Optimization. Also on the program were former CASTL postdoc Christian Uffmann (now of the University of Sussex) and Patrycja Strycharczuk of the University of Manchester, a graduate of the Master’s program here in Tromsø.
- Keeping to the topic of CASTL phonologists, senior researcher Bruce Morén-Duolljá spent the week in the Netherlands teaching a course on Phonological Feature Theory at the important LOT Winter School 2011 (see course description here)
- CASTL affiliate Tom McFadden and PhD student Sandhya Sundaresan also headed for warmer climes – but that is not to say they were in it just for the sun. In fact, they gave a talk at JNU Delhi entitled Against the dependence of nominative case on finiteness. Also, be sure to check out this workshop on Finiteness in South Asian languages that Sandhya, Tom and CASTL senior researcher Gillian Ramchand are organizing in Tromsø in June.
Whew, that was a long blog entry. Actually, more news are coming up, but let’s keep it shorter, shall we? Just watch this space.