Slugs at Centennial LSA Meeting

UCSC Linguistics was well-represented at the centennial Linguistics Society of America meeting that took place in the heart of New York, NY, from Jan 4-7.

Poster-wise, fifth-year Ph.D. candidate Yaqing Cao presented a poster on “Modals and negations LF-PF (mis)matches in English and Mandarin” and second-year Ph.D. student Richard Wang presented a poster on “Distribution of neutral tone and retroflex lenition in Beijing Mandarin“.

Also in attendance were Profs. Matt Wagers and Maziar Toosarvandani, Robert Henderson (U. of Arizona, Ph.D. 2012), Caroline Andrews (U. of Zurich, B.A. 2011), Maura O’Leary (Swarthmore College, B.A. 2013).

  • UCSC Gathering (from left to right): Caroline Andrews, Maura O'Leary, Robert Henderson, Dan Brodkin, Yaqing Cao, Maziar Toosarvandani, Matt Wagers, Ruoqing Yao, Richard Wang

Duff and Hoeks defended dissertation

Recently, two slugs successfully defended their dissertations:

Language comprehension requires a complex series of decisions under uncertainty. This is especially obvious when one string may have multiple different interpretations, whether due to lexical ambiguity, or the potential for an inference beyond literal content. This dissertation profiles how the human system for language comprehension times those decisions, specifically when and why it sometimes postpones them. Evidence comes from nine reading experiments in English probing variation across a range of different types of uncertain meaning (homonymy and polysemy, predicate distributivity, scalar implicatures from some, and causal inferences from discourse coherence) and across two tasks (self-paced-reading and the Maze task of Forster et al., 2009). I highlight two key patterns. First, some decisions are delayed in normal reading, but occur immediately when a rapid decision would be more useful; I conclude that decisions to postpone are flexible and sensitive to a comprehender’s goals. Second, possible pragmatic inferences rapidly affect comprehension, but do not receive any decisive commitment until much later; I conclude that comprehenders may develop expectations gradiently based on multiple possible interpretations before they make a firm decision. Throughout the dissertation, I explore how these and related facts might be explained as a consequence of the ways humans attempt to rationally allocate cognitive resources under uncertainty.

Onto the next chapter, Jack will be working in Vera Demberg’s group in the Department of Language Science and Technology at Saarland University in the southwestern corner of Germany, gathering and modeling data on individual differences in pragmatic comprehension as part of the ERC grant “Individualized Interaction in Discourse”.

Morwenna‘s dissertation broadly aims to show how existing evidence regarding the on-line processing of focus can be brought more in line with an alternative-based understanding of focus as proposed in theoretical semantics, without losing sight of the way general comprehension pressures may shape its interpretation. Using a series of reading tasks, the dissertation shows that comprehenders arrive at a final interpretation of a focus-marked sentence by combining multiple sources of evidence, including lexical, conceptual and world-knowledge, as well as abstract and fine-grained linguistic representations that guide the incremental interpretation of focus independently from such general knowledge. It argues that the comprehension of foci is generally costly because the comprehension of focus involves the construction of an alternative set to a focus, and that comprehenders rapidly revisit semantic representations of the discourse context to do so. This view on focus comprehension then also accounts for the fact that previous results on the reading of foci have been inconsistent, because it allows us to outline more precisely what the contextual factors are that modulate the comprehension of focus and that have so far not been controlled for.

In February 2024, Morwenna will start as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Osnabrück, where she will be working on the incremental comprehension of scalar items, with the goal to better understand the connection between the cognitive and formal mechanisms involved in the interpretation of focus and scalar implicature.

Many congrats, Dr. Duff and Dr. Hoeks!

  • (From left to Right) Amanda Rysling, Jack Duff, Jesse Harris, Matt Wagers, Pranav Anand

Linguistics Undergrad won top prize for THI fellowship

Linguistics major Cal Boye-Lynn was selected to receive a 2023-24 Undergraduate Research Fellowship from The Humanities Institute, for his research project titled “Investigating visual information as a constraint on sound change”. Only a handful of students across all Humanities majors receive fellowships every year. Even more impressive, Cal’s project won the top award for THI fellowships, the Bertha N. Melkonian Prize. Congratulations, Cal!

New admits to BA-MA program

Two undergraduate Linguistics majors Cal Boye-Lynn and Josh Lieberstein were recently admitted to the department’s BA-MA program. This program puts Cal and Josh on a pathway that can obtain an M.A. in Linguistics possibly one year after graduating.

Congrats and welcome, Cal and Josh!

Toosarvandani published in Language

Associate Professor Maziar Toosarvandani published a journal article titled “The interpretation and grammatical representation of animacy” in the December issue of Language. Here is the abstract:

We are used to thinking about person, number, and gender as features to which the grammar is sensitive. But the place of animacy is less familiar, despite its robust syntactic activity in many languages. I investigate the pronominal system of Southeastern Sierra Zapotec, identifying an interpretive parallel between animacy and person. Third-person plural pronouns, which encode a four-way animacy distinction in the language, exhibit associativity, a cluster of interpretive properties that have been argued also to characterize first-and second-person plural pronouns. Building on Kratzer’s (2009) and Harbour’s (2016) theories of person, I propose a plurality-based semantics for animacy that captures their shared properties. The compositional mechanism underlying this semantics ties person and animacy features to a single syntactic position inside the noun phrase. This enables an understanding of these features’ shared relevance to syntactic operations, including those underlying pronoun cliticization. In these Zapotec varieties, it is constrained both by person (in the well-known person-case constraint) and by animacy.

Three slugs at AMP 2023

Three Ph.D. students presented their works at the 2023 Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP) hosted virtually on Oct 20-22. Fifth-year Ph.D. candidate Maya Wax Cavallaro gave a talk titled “The syllable in domain generalization: Evidence from artificial language learning” (see slides here). First Ph.D. student Hanyoung Byun presented a poster on “Aggressive Reduplication in Japanese high vowel devoicing” (see poster here) in addition to his joint work with Jaehyun Yim (Seoul National University) on “Extension of phonotactic constraints across morphological subdomains: Evidence from Korean” (see slides here). Second-year student Richard Wang presented a poster on “Distribution of neutral tone and retroflex lenition in Beijing Mandarin” (see poster here).

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