Another successful LASC in the book

On March 11, the Department hosted its annual Linguistics at Santa Cruz (LASC) conference, attended by prospective graduate students, current students, faculty, and alumni. The program included presentations by three graduate students and alumnus Eric Potsdam (PhD, 1996), now Professor at University of Florida.

The student presentations showcased recent research going on in the department, featuring:

  • Eli Sharf (3rd-year): “Restrictive Modifiers in Parenthetical Positions”
  • Elifnur Ulusoy (3rd-year): “Effects of Hierarchical Structure in Agreement Attraction: Evidence from Turkish”
  • Maya Wax Cavallaro (5th-year): “The Syllable in Domain Generalization: Evidence from Artificial Language Learning”

The Distinguished Alumnus Lecture given by Eric is on “Exceptives, Ellipsis, and Negation“.

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

  • LASC presenters (left-right): Elifnur Ulusoy, Maya Wax Cavallaro, Eli Sharf, Eric Potsdam

Pi(e) day celebration

The Department continued its newly inaugurated tradition from last year and hosted the second annual pi(e) party in the Cave on March 14. This year, we saw a mixed line-up of pies from sweet (Matcha, key lime, tangerine, to name a few) and savory (empanadas, veggie pizza, quiche, etc.), brought and made by faculty and staff. Everyone had a great time tasting and celebrating the success of this year’s open house and LASC events.

 

A big thank-you to all the pie-bringers and everyone for their service at the department events!

McCloskey gave a podcast on Irish

Professor Emeritus Jim McCloskey recently participated in a podcast about the Irish Language Renaissance, which is also featured on the LSA website. Here is a summary of the podcast:

Irish is among Europe’s oldest languages. It’s a near miracle that anyone speaks it today. Patrick talks with online Irish teacher Mollie Guidera whose students include a Kentucky farmer who speaks Irish to his horses; also with Irish scholar Jim McCloskey who developed a love of the language when he spent a summer living with Irish speakers. Irish is changing fast, with far more of its speakers learning it as a second language, while the native-speaker population declines.

Slugs at UIUC

Undergraduate student Andrew Kato recently gave a talk at ILLS 16 (the Annual Meeting of the Illinois Language & Linguistics Society) titled “The scope-taking of relative measurements” hosted at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (March 1-2). Among the keynote speakers was alum Ruth Kramer (Ph.D. 2009), whose plenary talk was titled “The case against phonological gender assignment: Crosslinguistic evidence from Hausa, Guébie and beyond”.

Slugs in CDMX for FAMLi

UCSC linguists Ryan Bennett and Maya Wax Cavallaro presented at Form and Analysis in Mayan Linguistics (FAMLi) VII in Mexico City Feb 22-23. Maya presented ongoing work on the development of final devoicing processes (“Domain generalization in right-edge phonological phenomena in Mayan“), and Ryan presented an invited conference plenary on the phonology of laryngeal features and segments (Spanish title: Segmentos y rasgos laríngeos en la familia maya: Evidencia que la fonología es abstracta, y distinta de la fonética; English translation: Laryngeal segments and features in the Mayan family: Evidence that phonology is abstract, and different from phonetics).

Also present were Robert Henderson (PhD 2012), Jaime Pérez González (Chancellor’s Postdoc 2021-2023), Sadie Lewis (BA 2023), and Professor Emerita Judith Aissen. Like Ryan, Jaime presented an invited conference plenary, dealing with preferred argument structure in Mocho’, titled “Preferred plot structure in Mocho’“.

You can find the streaming of the conference here (Feb 22, with Ryan and Maya’s presentations) and here (Feb 23, with Jaime’s presentation).

  • Slugs in attendance (left to right): Ryan, Robert, Jaime, Judith (photoshop credit to Maya), Sadie and Maya

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.

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