Pancheva published in JSL

Faculty Roumyana Pancheva recently published a journal article titled “Morphosyntactic variation in numerically-quantified noun phrases in Bulgarian” in the Journal of Slavic Linguistics.

See a short abstract attached:

Bulgarian masculine nouns have a special form – a ‘count’ form – different from singular and plural, which is used in numerically-quantified nominal phrases. The count form is analyzed here as accusative singular. Several empirical arguments are offered in support of this un usual account, and potential challenges are addressed. The account places Bulgarian among an understudied group of languages, where singular vs. plural marking on nouns in numerically-quantified nominal phrases varies by noun class.

Congrats, Roumi!

Sichel at Berkeley SS-Circle

Professor Ivy Sichel was invited to give a talk at the Berkeley Syntax and Semantics Circle on Friday (Feb 2), titled “Parasitic gap licensing without movement”.

A leading empirical claim in the study of parasitic gaps (henceforth, PGs) is that they are licensed by an A-bar movement chain which stands in a particular structural relation to the PG (Engdahl 1983, and many others). Here I argue, based on the distribution of PG licensing by Hebrew RPs, that the requirement is actually weaker, and should be recast in terms of a licensing A-bar chain, which may or may not involve actual movement. I will show that a non-movement A-bar dependency culminating in a resumptive pronoun (RP) may also license a PG, as long as the structural condition on the relation between the licensing chain and the PG is met. This structural condition is identical to classical cases of PG licensing (Nissenbaum 2000) dubbed by Arregi & Murphy (2023) Parasitic Scope (following Barker 2007):

(1) Parasitic Scope for PG licensing: The PG-containing XP must take the scope of the binder of the licensing variable.

Crucially, I show that the variable may be realized as an A-bar Operator bound RP *which does not involve movement*. In the talk, I present differences and similarities in distribution between Hebrew PGs licensed by gaps and PGs licensed by non-movement RPs. The differences follow, I argue, from differences in the placement of the Operator heading the chain and determining the placement of the PG-containing XP (1). Whereas in movement chains launched from the complement of V, the immediate binder is the trace of movement left in specvP (Nissenbaum 2000), in A-bar binding chains which do not involve movement, the immediate binder is in specCP. Since the PG-containing phrase must take the scope of the licensor’s binder, this derives the core difference in PG-licensing: PGs contained within vP-level clausal adjuncts are licensed by a movement chain but not when the RP is not associated with movement (Sells 1984, and more recently Hewett 2023, based on much broader cross-linguistic coverage) – the binding Operator is too high. In other environments, where the Op binder does satisfy (1), these RPs do license PGs, showing that a movement derivation is not absolutely required.

Kaplan published in Phonology

Six-year Ph.D. candidate Max Kaplan published an article, “Stratal overgeneration is necessary: metrically incoherent syncope in Southern Pomo” in Phonology.

His abstract is attached:

Southern Pomo (Pomoan, California) displays a process of rhythmic vowel deletion (syncope) reflecting two mutually incompatible metrical structures. This phenomenon, called metrical incoherence, can be derived by an ordered sequence of independent subgrammars, that is, strata. Metrical incoherence is under-attested crosslinguistically, and the stratal models of phonology necessary to generate it have been criticised for predicting counter-typological phenomena. Nevertheless, the Southern Pomo data cannot be generated in more restrictive frameworks. This article argues that overgeneration is a necessary property of the phonological component, and that metrical incoherence is rare because it is difficult to learn. In Southern Pomo, this difficulty appears to have caused grammatical competition and restructuring: a second pattern of syncope, occurring in only a limited context, suggests that learners have reanalysed the grammar as having consistent metrical structure across the derivation. This work thus supports the proposal that diachronic change – and therefore typology – is constrained by extragrammatical factors.

Congrats, Max!

Lunar New Year Breakfast in DRIP

On Lunar New Year’s Eve (Feb 9), Assistant Professor Amanda Rysling hosted a festive breakfast with traditional (microwaved and homemade) Asian food with contributions from reading group participants in the LCR. DRIP, or “the Directed Reading in Implicit Prosody” also discussed a paper, Barnes et al. (2012) on Tonal Center of Gravity, led by first-year Ph.D. student Emily Knick.

Participants at DRIP’s Lunar New Year Breakfast

Slugs presented at 2024 CAMP

Over the weekend, Jan 13-14, UCSC psycholinguists present their works at the 6th California Meeting on Psycholinguistics (CAMP) hosted at Stanford University. Third-year Ph.D. student Matthew Kogan presented joint work with faculty Matt Wagers on “Investigating Syntactic Gating during Subject Retrieval with English Ditransitives“. First-year Ph.D. student Ruoqing Yao presented joint work with Jiayi Lu and Judith Degen (Stanford) on “Perceived interpretability predicts stability for CNPC islands but not WH islands“.

 

Fourth-year Ph.D. student Nikolas Webster presented a poster “Investigating prominence alignment processing advantages in Korean nominal“, and first-year Ph.D. student Emily Knick presented a poster titled “Temporal stability and the online assignment of hierarchical prosodic structure“.

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