California Writers Series

On Wednesday, November 18 at 7:00 p.m., the California Writers Series and Walter Stiern Library will host a reading by the poet Matthew Zapruder.  Zapruder earned a BA in Russian literature at Amherst College, an MA in Slavic languages and literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in poetry at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  His honors include a Lannan Literary Fellowship and a 2008 May Sarton Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has taught at the New School; the University of California Riverside, Palm Desert; and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst’s Juniper Summer Writing Institute. He lives in San Francisco, where he teaches in the St. Mary's MFA program, works as Editor-at-Large for Wave Books, and rocks out as a guitarist in the band The Figments.

For more on Zapruder's work, vist his page at The Poetry Foundation, and visit Divedapper to read a great interview.

Lectures in Language and Linguistics

On Wednesday, November 4 at 7:30pm, Kristen Greer, Ph.D (Lecturer in Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles) will present her talk "How Many Is Many?: Quantities in Semantic Theory" in Science III Room 108.

Semantics is a notoriously tricky field within linguistics. Not only is it difficult to state exactly what words mean, but even more fundamentally, it’s hard to know what meanings even are. It is tempting to say that meanings are mental concepts--the ideas that are generated in our minds when we hear words like dogs, swim, happy, or frustration. But what are the mental concepts associated with words like every? some? two? many? hella? We might say that these mental concepts are quantities...but exactly what quantities? How many is many, after all? This talk explores these questions, arguing that in order to answer them, we need a theory of semantics that treats the meaning of a word not as the mental concept it evokes but as the way it points to objects in the world around us.

Kristen Greer received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from UC Davis in 2014. Before that, she completed a B.A. in Spanish and an M.A. in Spanish Linguistics, also at UC Davis. She is currently a lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at UCLA. Her research focuses on the meaning of quantity-denoting expressions (every, some, many, few, two/three and the like) in context. Her work has been published in the semantics journal Linguistics and Philosophy, and she has spoken at conferences at UC Davis, UC Berkeley, and UCLA, as well as to smaller audiences at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz.