Two articles by Brodkin appear in print

Two journal articles by sixth-year PhD student Dan Brodkin have appeared by “early access” in print. One, “The prosody of the extended VP”, is forthcoming in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory and investigates the syntax-prosody interface in Mandar:

This paper investigates the syntax of VSO and VOS clauses in Mandar (Austronesian) by leveraging the prosody. This language allows free alternations between VSO and VOS orders, but phonotactic diagnostics reveal that VSO strings are optimally parsed into tight prosodic constituents while VOS strings are not. These results converge with syntactic diagnostics to show that VSO orders arise from leftward movement of the verb while VOS orders are generated through an additional step of rightward scrambling of the S. Targeted manipulations then reveal that phonological phrases can be built around substrings of arguments in the VSO string, providing a new type of evidence for fine functional structure in the extended VP (Larson 1988). The prosodic parse of scrambled arguments, finally, shows that scrambling places its targets in adjunct positions (Chomsky 1993) in Mandar, setting up an account of scrambling that is grounded in the principle of Greed (Lasnik 1995).

Another, “Suppletion in global perspective”, will appear in Linguistic Inquiry and analyzes a system of suppletion in Mandar (download the pdf):

This article documents and analyzes a system of suppletive alternations that are conditioned by top-down prosodic context. In Mandar (Austronesian), seven heads supplete at the right edge of the phonological phrase to satisfy an output constraint on foot structure. When phrase-external phonological context makes it possible to resolve this output constraint in a more optimal way, these patterns of suppletion are suspended. These effects suggest that the mechanism that regulates suppletion, Vocabulary Insertion, must be situated within a phonological calculus that can access global context and respond to output constraints.

Congratulations, Dan!

Banana Slugs at HSP

UC Santa Cruz was well represented at the 38th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing, held March 27-29 at the University of Maryland. A number of undergraduates and graduates were there to present their research, including Matthew Kogan, Joshua Lieberstein, Subhekshya Shrestha, and Ruoqing Yao. They were joined by current faculty members Dustin Chacón, Amanda Rysling, and Matt Wagers.

They ran into many grad alumni, including Jack Duff (PhD, 2023) and Duygu Demiray (MA, 2024), undergrad alumni/current Baggett Fellows Jackson Confer (BA, 2022) and Sadie Lewis (BA, 2023), as well as former LRC visitor Mandy Cartner (Tel Aviv University). Two other slugs, 2011 BA alum Caroline Andrews (Zurich) and 2013 MA alum Adam Morgan (NYU Langone), anchored a well-attended and engaging plenary session featuring field psycholinguistics on the last day. They presented their research on case and sentence planning in Shipibo (Andrews) and the comprehension and production of switch reference in Nungon (Morgan). Despite the riveting science, it seems everyone found an opportunity to slip out in the warm weather to see the cherry blossoms or at least to rub Testudo for good luck.

Presentations by current members of the department: 

and those by our alumni:

Another successful LASC

On March 10, the Department hosted its annual Linguistics at Santa Cruz (LASC) conference, attended by prospective graduate students and current students, faculty and alumni. The program included presentations by several graduate students and alumnus Rodrigo Gutiérrez Bravo, now Professor at El Colegio de México.

The student presentations showcased recent research going on in the department, and sparked lively and insightful discussion during the Q & A:

  • Jonathan Paramore led off the presentations with a talk on “Covert URs: evidence from Pakistani Punjabi”
  • Yaqing Cao followed with a talk on “Scope reconstruction in head movements as featural Valuations”
  • Matthew Kogan and Niko Webster presented a talk entitled “Subject islands are not reducible to discourse function”

The Distinguished Alumnus speaker was Professor Rodrigo Gutiérrez Bravo, who gave a talk entitled “Not in the complementizer system: Information Structure features in Spanish clefts and pseudo-clefts”, where he argued that structures which have a position that can show multiple informational properties can be particularly insightful for understanding the interaction between information structure and syntax.

The LASC dinner and celebration that followed at the Cowell Provost House featured delightful conversations, excellent food, and stunning views of the forest and ocean.

Thank you to all of the students, staff, and faculty who contributed to making this event a success!

Alumni Interview with Lisa Hofmann

Lisa Hofmann and Adrian Brasoveanu

The WHASC Editors recently got a chance to catch up with Lisa Hofmann, who received her PhD from the department in 2022. Her dissertation, advised by Professor Adrian Brasoveanu, was entitled “Anaphora and Negation“. Since graduating, Lisa has been a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of English Linguistics at the University of Stuttgart, working with Professor Judith Tonhauser’s group, where Lisa continues to pursue her research on issues related to formal semantics, pragmatics, syntax, and psycholinguistics.

What is your research about?

Recently, I published an article in Semantics and Pragmatics about how pronominal anaphora is constrained by negation and non-veridical operators. That work grew out of my dissertation, which investigated the interaction of Anaphora and Negation, and how anaphoric dependencies are interpreted in hypothetical and counterfactual discourse.

Expanding on the themes of my dissertation, I investigate how discourse dependencies—things like anaphora, presupposition, and ellipsis—interact with logical properties of linguistic expressions. I hope that this can contribute to better understanding how language users combine multiple sources of information—situational context, prior discourse, literal content—into a single representation of meaning.

Can you share a bit about your journey from UCSC to your current position at the University of Stuttgart?

When I graduated from UC Santa Cruz in early 2022, I had already been living in Germany since mid-2020. The move let me be closer to family during the pandemic and escape the Santa Cruz rent burden, but it also meant I had fewer day-to-day touchpoints with the UCSC environment. Finishing my degree remotely, I almost decided not to apply for academic positions at all—I kept hearing about how tough the academic job market was, and the uncertainty of the pandemic made it hard to see a path forward.

It was a former mentor, Daniel Altshuler, who reignited my motivation by advertising a postdoc position at Oxford. This one excited me, because I had a personal connection, and I like his work on discourse interpretation. Although I didn’t get that post (it was a much better match for fellow UCSC alumn Kelsey Sasaki), the process got me back in the right mindset: I realized I did still love doing research, and it was worth a shot. From there, I applied to a few more postdocs. I was rejected in Singapore but ended up receiving an offer from the University of Stuttgart to work with Judith Tonhauser, where I am very happy now.

When applying to postdoc positions, I think it really helps to look for that spark of excitement—whether it’s a personal connection to someone whose work you already admire, which motivated me to apply to Daniel Altshuler’s position, or a strong alignment of research goals, like I found in Stuttgart. Judith Tonhauser is an exceptional mentor, open to a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches. This fits perfectly with my interest in bridging formal semantics and experimental work, and helped me to bring my research on discourse interpretation to the next level.

What new research projects have you started since graduating?

Collaborating with Judith Tonhauser, who is an expert on experimental research on presuppositions, has been the perfect opportunity to investigate the logic of discourse interpretation in new ways. In one experimental project with her and Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, we investigated how the presupposed content of clause-embedding predicates (like discover or know) behaves under different entailment-canceling operators (negation, questions, conditionals…). Our findings were fascinating: the differences between these predicates shifted when testing them in these different contexts. These results challenge standard accounts and might push us to refine how we represent the interplay between lexical semantics, sentential operators, and pragmatic inference.

It’s a subtle phenomenon, but experimentally uncovering the nuances helps us see how grammar and pragmatics work together to guide interpretation. For example, it helped me with my goal—rooted in my dissertation on anaphora and negation—to develop a formally rigorous model of presupposition projection in counterfactual discourse. There were certain logical issues which I was only able to address by incorporating insights from empirical work showing subtle pragmatic modulation. Specifically, integrating QUD-partitions of context sets gave me a basic mechanism that finally worked. While there is still much to figure out in capturing the nuances more accurately, this research contributes to a more unified theory of how our linguistic knowledge interacts with broader pragmatic reasoning.

Where do you see your research heading in the future?

I have begun thinking more seriously about how formal semantic theories of discourse interpretation (like dynamic semantics) connect with cognitively plausible models of mental meaning representations. My doctoral advisor, Adrian Brasoveanu, has led the way by embedding formal theories in cognitive architectures such as ACT-R and using Bayesian methods to fit those models to psycholinguistic data. My hope is to keep bridging those theoretical and empirical approaches so that our theories of meaning can be both mathematically explicit and deeply informed by how people actually process language.

I recently began collaborating with Morwenna Hoeks, another fellow UCSC alumn, who is a psycholinguist and semanticist. We humans handle referents in hypothetical or counterfactual discourse. For example, if we say something like “Mary doesn’t have a dog, so at least she doesn’t have to walk it,” do we temporarily imagine a dog anyway when we process that pronoun it? We’re hoping to run experimental studies that tie directly into dynamic semantic models, testing how quickly people update their mental representation of discourse as soon as they hit a negation or hypothetical cue.

What advice would you give to current UCSC graduate students aspiring to enter academia or pursue similar career paths?

First, be sure you truly want it. Academic life is really special and can be incredibly rewarding: we’re paid to research what fascinates us, teach bright students, and we get to exchange ideas with brilliant and interesting colleagues from all over the world. But it isn’t always as romantic as it sounds: it’s highly competitive, can be isolating, and the stress around funding and publication demands can be emotionally draining. If you’re confident you love the work, that can really help sustain you.

Second, you may have heard this many times, but, learn to say no. Receiving requests and invitations can be very flattering, especially in early career stages. But it’s important to insist on clear communication about what exactly is requested of you, and to pause and double check with yourself if you actually have capacities, and whether you see some benefit or obligation there.

Finally, if you’re considering working in another country, look into the administrative rules early. When I started my job in Germany, I learned that the pay level was based on how many years I had already worked in a qualified role, since earning an MA degree. I hadn’t previously fully sorted my MA paperwork because I was focused on my PhD, so I had to do some scrambling to prove that I had fulfilled those requirements. More broadly, it taught me to reach out to people already in the system—colleagues can offer invaluable tips about contract lengths, salary scales, and other quirks that you’d otherwise find out too late.

Banana Slugs at Tromsø Workshop on Phonological Domains

From right to left: Junko Ito, Nick Kalivoda, Martin Krämer, Peter Svenonius, Maya Wax Cavarello, Armin Mester

On March 13–14, a group of Santa Cruz linguists participated in the workshop Exploring Boundaries: Phonological Domains in the Languages of the World, held at the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø—the northernmost university in the world.

Professor Junko Ito and Professor Armin Mester gave a talk entitled “Prosodic Windows as Tonal Domains: The Case of Kagoshima Japanese”.

Current PhD student Maya Wax Cavallaro presented her work titled “Evidence for the Syllable in Domain Generalization”.

Junko, Armin, and Maya also reconnected with Martin Krämer (UCSC LRC Research Associate, 2015), now Professor in the Department of Language and Culture at UiT and a co-organizer of the workshop; Nick Kalivoda (PhD 2018), who presented on “Linear and Structural (A)symmetries in Syntax-Prosody Mapping”; and Peter Svenonius (PhD 1994), now Professor in the Department of Language and Culture at UiT, who presented on “Words, Phrases, and the ‘Accentual Complex’ in Iron Ossetic” (joint work with Patrik Bye). 



Linguistics Students Recognized as 2024-2025 THI Undergraduate Research Fellows

The Humanities Institute (THI) at UC Santa Cruz has announced its 2024-2025 Undergraduate Research Fellows, with 40% of the fellowship awarded to Linguistics students. Among them, Linguistics major Elliot-Elyjah McWhinnie received the Bertha N. Melkonian Prize for submitting the top research proposal. 

Congratulations to the following Linguistics students on their outstanding projects:

  • Katherine Arnold, Linguistics and Applied Linguistics & Multilingualism
    “Nonnative Perception of Italian Consonant Length Contrast”
  • Sam Beatty, Linguistics
    “Gendered voices and Transgender bodies: Where are we? What are we doing? And who are we talking to?”
  • Joshua Lieberstein, Linguistics
    “Verbless Clauses in Mayan K’iche’: A non-copular approach”
  • Elliot-Elyjah Mcwhinnie, Linguistics
    “Zooming in on the regional differences of African American Language in California”
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