WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ

Webster at 49. Österreichische Linguistiktagung

January 9, 2026

PhD student Nikolas Webster presented at 49. Österreichische Linguistiktagung (The 49th Austrian linguistics conference; ÖLT49), held in December in Klagenfurt am Wörthersee, Austria. He presented a talk entitled “Sino-Korean predicates and the nature of syntactic categorization” as part of the special workshop Native vs. Borrowed Word Formation in Synchrony and Diachrony, which focused on the interaction between lexical borrowing and grammatical structure across languages.

Niko at ÖLT49

Student News

Brasoveanu at CPL 2025

January 9, 2026

Professor Adrian Brasoveanu recently presented joint work with Jakub Dotlačil at the Computational Psycholinguistics Meeting (CPL 2025), held December 18-19, 2025 in Utrecht. The project is entitled “The Learnability of Model-Theoretic Interpretation Functions in Neural Networks”. Professor Brasoveanu led the development of the research project and attended remotely, with Professor Dotlačil participating on site.

Materials from the presentation are available here:

Poster spotlight slides: [link]
Poster: [link]

Faculty News

Tamura in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory

January 9, 2026

PhD student Jun Tamura has recently published a paper titled “Compounding words in the syntax can produce phrasal phonology: Evidence from Japanese Aoyagi morphemes” in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory. The paper grew out of Jun’s QP1, chaired by Ryan Bennett, with Rachel Walker and Mia Gong serving on the committee. Congratulations Jun!

Abstract: Various proposals have been made to account for mismatches between syntax and prosody in natural languages. Prosodic prespecification (i.e., prosodic subcategorization) attributes such mismatches to morpheme-specific prosodic requirements (Bennett et al. 2018; Tyler 2019). On the other hand, Hsu (2019) and Revithiadou and Markopoulos (2021) argue that some patterns previously analyzed through subcategorization can instead be captured in Gradient Harmonic Grammar (Smolensky and Goldrick 2016) without a syntax-prosody mismatch. This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion about the syntax–prosody mismatch by addressing ‘Aoyagi prefixes’ in Japanese (e.g., gen ‘current’ in gen-daijin ‘current Minister’). While the ‘word-internal phrase boundary’ associated with Aoyagi morphemes has been attributed to prosodic subcategorization (Poser 1990), I argue that such subcategorization is unnecessary. The key evidence lies in the fact that all Aoyagi morphemes are accented. Vance (2008) and Ito and Mester (2013) independently observe that a prosodic phrase boundary emerges between the first and second elements only when the first element is an accented prosodic word in Japanese. Building on this correlation between accent and prosodic phrasing, I put forward an alternative analysis: I propose that Aoyagi morphemes are not prefixes but syntactic words (X⁰), such that the entire Aoyagi construction should be analyzed as a syntactic compound [X⁰ X⁰ X⁰] (Booij 2010). Given this structure, their prosodic behavior follows from an XP-to-φ mapping system (Ito and Mester 2013), where constraints on accent placement play a crucial role in mapping syntactic heads to phonological phrases, overriding Match constraints.

Slugs Embrace Yolo @ CAMP[8]

November 21, 2025

Santa Cruzans migrated en masse to Yolo County last weekend for CAMP[8], to participate in the eighth edition of the California Meeting on Psycholinguistics, held at UC Davis from Nov 14-16. CAMP featured presentations (in chronological order) from Matt Wagers (“Hands-on LLM Tutorial”, with Rachel Ryskin), Matthew Kogan & Ruoqing Yao (“Sources of distortion and confusion in distributed representations of morphosyntactic structure”, with Wagers) & Cal Boye-Lynn (“A Fricative by Any Other Name: A Close Replication of Shinn & Blumstein (1984)”, with Grant McGuire & Amanda Rysling).

It also featured encounters with a number of barn-yard animals, like a Muscovy duck (pictured), some friends from UCLA (also pictured), and near-collisions with Davis’ famously numerous cyclists (imagined anxiously).

Promenading duck at the Ruhstaller Farm. Photo credit: Subhs Shrestha.

Linguists, Applied Linguists and Psychologists, oh my! L to r: Shrestha, Liu, Chan (APLX), Boye-Lynn, Hoversten (PSYC), Rysling, Yao, Kogan, Duff (UCLA Linguistics; UCSC Ph.D. ’23), Carpick, Wagers. Photo credit: M. Afkir.

Beatty at NWAV

November 21, 2025

Sam Beatty, who graduated in Spring 2025, presented a poster at NWAV 53 at the University of Michigan (11/5-7), entitled ‘Gendered voices and transgender bodies: Interlocutor gender identity and linguistic variation in trans speakers’. The poster was co-authored with Grant McGuire and Ivy Sichel, and was based on their honors thesis. Sam reports that they received meaningful feedback, interacted with other sociolinguists, and had a great time overall.

Beatty, Sichel, & McGuire (2025)

Sichel & Toosarvandani in _Linguistic Inquiry_

November 21, 2025

Congrats to Ivy and Maziar, whose new article appeared this past month in Linguistic Inquiry:

Sichel, I., & Toosarvandani, M. (2025). The featural life of nominals. Linguistic Inquiry, 56(4), 751-806.

We introduce a novel locality violation and its repair in Southeastern Sierra Zapotec: an object pronoun cannot cliticize when the subject is a lexical DP. We develop an account in which pronouns and lexical DPs interact with the same probe because they share featural content. In particular, we suggest that the Person domain extends to include nonpronominal DPs, so that all nominals are specified for a feature we call [δ] (to resonate with DP), while all and only personal pronouns are specified for [π]. This account aims to unify the locality violation with the Weak Person-Case Constraint (PCC), as well as parallel constraints based on animacy, and requires a departure from Chomsky’s (2000, 2001) classical system of featural covariation (Agree). A functional head must be able to overprobe—that is, interact with more than one goal, even if its requirements appear to be met. We introduce a probe activation model for Agree in which, after applying once, the operation can apply again, subject to certain restrictions. We compare probe activation with two other systems recently proposed to account for overprobing: Deal’s (2015, 2022) “insatiable probes” and Coon and Keine’s (2021) “feature gluttony.” Neither can account for the locality pattern in Zapotec.