Month: April 2017

YOU MIGHT KNOW THIS PAPER

Congratulations to Deniz Rudin, whose paper “Uncertainty and Persistence: a Bayesian Update Semantics for Probabalistic Expressions” was just published in the most recent issue of the Journal of Philosophical Logic. The abstract can be read below, and the full article accessed here.

This paper presents a general-purpose update semantics for expressions of subjective uncertainty in natural language. First, a set of desiderata are established for how expressions of subjective uncertainty should behave in dynamic, update-based semantic systems; then extant implementations of expressions of subjective uncertainty in such models are evaluated and found wanting; finally, a new update semantics is proposed. The desiderata at the heart of this paper center around the contention that expressions of subjective uncertainty express beliefs which are not persistent (i.e. beliefs that won’t necessarily survive the addition of new information that is compatible with all previous information), whereas propositions express beliefs that are persistent. I argue that if we make the move of treating updates in a dynamic semantics as Bayesian updates, i.e. as conditionalization, then expressions of subjective uncertainty will behave the way we want them to without altering the way propositions behave.

MAIN EFFECT OF GOOD TIMES AT CUNY

Matt Wagers and Steven Foley recently attended CUNY2017 at MIT. The weather was wet and icy, but this induced minimal interference with the conference atmosphere, which – to no one’s Surprisal – was productive and collegial.

Steven delivered his poster on Georgian relative clause processing, while Matt was there for his paper on applying signal detection theory to the analysis of acceptability judgments (joint work with several UMass’ans: Brian Dillon, Caren Rotello and UCSC Linguistics alumna Caroline Andrews [BA ‘11]).

Many other Slugs were in attendance, including 2 other undergraduate alumni: Jeff Runner [BA ‘89] & Shayne Sloggett [BA ‘10]; and 2 MA alumni: Katia Kravtchenko [MA ‘13; currently Saarland University] and Adam Morgan [MA ‘13; currently UCSD]. Sloggett, Kravtchenko and Morgan each delivered a spoken presentation!

An excellent feature of this year’s conference was YouTube streaming of all talks; and poster/slide PDFs deposited via Open Science Foundation. You can view Steven’s poster here or listen to Dillon, Andrews, Rotello & Wagers here.

WLMA + UCSC = WSCLA

Continuing recent work on Meso-American languages, several WLMAns will be presenting their work at the 22nd Workshop on Structure and Constituency in Languages of the Americans (WSCLA), from April 21-23 at the University of British Columbia. There will be two talks by current UCSC students and faculty:

Jason Ostrove “Severing PRO from its silence”
Steven Foley, Nick Kalivoda & Maziar Toosarvandani “Gender Case Constraints in Zapotec”

The program can be found here.

ALUM REPORT: ELLIOTT CALLAHAN

This just in from Elliott Callahan (B.A. in Linguistics with honors, 2007), who has been in medical school at UCSF:

“I can’t believe it’s been almost 5 years since I applied to medical school! Needless to say, the time has flown by….[and now] I’ve matched for anesthesia residency at UCSF (so I will be staying for another 4 years). It’s a very good program, so I could not be happier. I still fondly remember my time at UCSC, and still try to work linguistics into life whenever I can (although doctors generally fail to appreciate that “vasa previa” is plural, or that aspiration really means the opposite of what they think). However, I did manage to do a brief project transcribing/translating/glossing a story in St’át’imcets, which I was super excited about.”

SAL @ BERKELEY

The second Symposium on Amazonian Languages (SAL) will take place over the hill on April 8 and 9 in 1229 Dwinelle Hall on the Berkeley campus. There is no registration — any and all interested are welcome to attend. A schedule with linked abstracts is available here. Please email Zach O’Hagan at zohagan@berkeley.edu with any questions.

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