The Linguistics Research Center (LRC) at UC Santa Cruz facilitates research and education in the areas of theoretical linguistics — syntax, phonetics, phonology, morphology, and semantics. The members of the linguistics community at UCSC (faculty, students, and visiting scholars) work together under the auspices of the LRC to conduct and disseminate the results of their research to the larger linguistics community. In effect, the LRC serves as a liaison between researchers at other institutions and researchers at UC Santa Cruz. Among other efforts, the LRC hosts visiting scholars from other institutions interested in conducting research in the UC Santa Cruz linguistics community, organizes workshops featuring participants from other US and international institutions, engages in online publication of research conducted at UC Santa Cruz, coordinates the logistics of externally funded research projects, and in general works to enhance the environment for linguistic research at UCSC.
Examples include UC Santa Cruz's hosting of the 1991 LSA Linguistic Institute, the editing of the Squibs and Discussions section of Linguistic Inquiry by UC Santa Cruz linguistics faculty (1993–1996), and the hosting of various conferences such as Semantics and Linguistic Theory (1999), the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (2002), and the Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop (2006). Upcoming events sponsored by the LRC include UC Santa Cruz's hosting of the 16th Annual Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistic Association (2009) and Formal Approaches to Japanese Linguistics (2010).
Furthermore, a collection of books and journals in linguistics, including working papers from many other linguistics departments, is maintained in the LRC Library, which is available for use by any LRC affiliate. And finally, the LRC sponsors visiting scholars for an entire academic year (or for shorter periods) through the Research Associate Program.
We are very excited for the upcoming Linguistics Ph.D. Program Alumni Conference, on September 12 and 13.