Month: October 2017

NIDO DE LENGUAS NEWS

This September 1st-3rd, UC Santa Cruz hosted a summer camp for community members and native speakers of two Oaxacan languages in a partnership with the non-profit organization Senderos. WLMA has a new website that shows what happened at the summer camp, check it out at the link:

http://wlma.ucsc.edu/nido-de-lenguas/summer-camp.html

Also, the Nido de Lenguas: Pop-Up will be making its first appearance this Saturday, November 4th at the Día de los Muertos festival sponsored by the Museum of Art History (MAH). See the schedule here. At the conclusion of the procession at Evergreen Cemetery (3:30-6 pm), Nido de Lenguas will have a table staffed by students with a game for learning the numbers in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec, as well as materials for learning about Nido de Lenguas events.

BENNETT AT CILLA VIII

This weekend Ryan Bennett attended CILLA VIII in Austin, TX. He had this to say:

“CILLA VIII brought together specialists on a wide range of indigenous Latin American languages, including languages spoken at the bottom of South America, the top of Mexico, and everywhere in between. I presented on the phonetics and phonology of stop consonants in Kaqchikel, and was very pleased to see friends and colleagues in the room from Mexico, Guatemala, and all over the United States. The diversity and quality of the work presented at the conference was truly impressive: I myself saw top-notch presentations on phonetics, phonology, syntax, morphology, diachrony, and anthropology, almost all of which drew on original fieldwork with indigenous languages of South America and Mesoamerica.

UCSC was well-represented at CILLA: apart from my own presentation, there were talks by UCSC alums Robert Henderson and Scott AnderBois, and UCSC Professor Emerita Judith Aissen was also in attendance. This was my first time participating in CILLA – I cannot believe I waited this long to attend, and will definitely be attending in the future if at all possible.”

HOW OUR READINGS ARE GROUPING THIS WEEK

SPLAP: Wednesday, 1:20 – 2:20 pm, LCR There will be a discussion of Aloni (2005), on the topic of “A Formal Treatment of the Pragmatics of Questions and Attitudes”

s/lab: Wednesday, 3:00 – 4:00 pm, LCR Nick Van Handel will be presenting his current research on adaptation to prepositional object gaps

LaLoCo: Thursday, 2:00 – 3:00 pm, LCR Discussion of chapter 4 of the textbook “Introduction to Connectionist Modelling of Cognitive Processes”, which introduces autoassociative neural networks

WLMA: Friday, 10:00 – 11:30 am, Stevenson 217 Judith Aissen will be leading a discussion of Kotek and Erlewine (2016), which is about “Unifying definite and indefinite free relatives: evidence from Mayan”

Phlunch: Friday, 12:00 – 1:00 pm, LCR Ryan Bennett will be leading a discussion of Shaw and Kawahara (2018), an experimental study of devoiced vowels in Japanese

S-Circle: Friday, 4:00 – 5:30 pm, LCR Jim McCloskey will be speaking on the subject of “Microparameters in a tiny space — stranding at the edge”

WILLIS TO UC SANTA BARBARA

Congrats to Alum Chloe Willis (B.A. 2014) who just started a Ph.D. in Linguistics at UC Santa Barbara this fall. She is primarily interested in sociolinguistics, especially how sexuality and gender interact with language, as well as issues regarding language and power. After her formative experiences at UCSC, she spent two years in Japan where she volunteered for TELL, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing support and counseling services to the international community, and teaching English as a second language. She is excited for this new chapter in her life!

BRASOVEANU AND DOTLACIL TEACH COURSE @ ESSLLI 2018

Adrian Brasoveanu and Jakub Dotlacil will be teaching a class at ESSLLI 2018 titled “Computing Dynamic Meanings: Building Integrated Competence-Performance Theories for Semantics”. A brief description of the course content is given below:

The course will introduce a theoretical and computational framework for developing integrated competence-performance theories for natural language semantics. Specifically, the framework explicitly models semantic interpretation as part of a general cognitive architecture. This computationally-implemented theory of semantic interpretation as a cognitive process satisfies the following properties: (i) it is incremental (e.g., it proceeds in the standard, left-to-right fashion); (ii) it models cognitive processes needed in interpretation (in particular, access to and retrieval from declarative memory); (iii) it can be tested against performance data (online behavioral measures collected, for instance, in self-paced reading or eye-tracking experiments). The theory is built by connecting dynamic semantics approaches to natural language meaning and interpretation (DRT, Kamp 1981, Kamp and Reyle, 1993, FCS, Heim 1982, DPL, Groenendijk and Stokhof, 1991) with the cognitive architecture ACT-R (Anderson and Lebiere, 1998). This overall research program of explicitly modeling natural language interpretation as a cognitive process branches in many directions, since it can be applied to a variety of detailed experimental (performance/behavioral) data related to natural language meaning and interpretation.

CUSP 10 @ UC IRVINE

On the weekend of 20-21 October, the 10th annual California Universities Semantics and Pragmatics (CUSP) conference was held at UC Irvine. In tribute to the pan-Californian spirit of CUSP, five graduate students from three California universities carpooled from the bay to SoCal — Deniz Rudin of UCSC, Maura O’Leary of UCLA (a former UCSC undergrad and current visitor to the department), and Lelia Glass, Ciyang Qing and Brandon Waldon of Stanford. Rudin spoke on rising imperatives, O’Leary on tense in cleft constructions, Glass on the correlation between causativity and distributivity, Qing on Mandarin dou, and Waldon on the strength and weakness of might and must. Also in attendance was Santa Crucian Hitomi Hirayama, who presented a QUD-based analysis of Japanese contrastive wa, and replaced Glass on the return trip to the North.

The conference was rich with presentations on other topics from students at other California universities, and on display throughout was an atmosphere of discussion that maintained a pleasant balance between trenchant, searching engagement and warm, welcoming collegiality — as always, CUSP serves as an annual reminder that we’re all very lucky to be studying meaning in the Golden State.

HOW OUR READINGS ARE GROUPING THIS WEEK

SPLAP: Wednesday, 1:20 – 2:20 pm, LCR There will be a discussion of Chapter 6 of Benjamin George’s dissertation

s/lab: Wednesday, 3:00 – 4:00 pm, LCR Jed Pizarro-Guevara will be presenting his work on filler-gap dependencies in Tagalog

WLMA: Friday, 10:00 – 11:30 am, Stevenson 217 Jason Ostrove will be talking about deriving “clitic doubling” in San Martín Peras Mixtec

Phlunch: Friday, 12:00 – 1:00 pm, LCR Nick Kalivoda will present his work on “Transparency and Opacity in Hiatus Resolution”

LIP: Friday, 3:00 – 3:45 pm, Stevenson 217 Maho Morimoto will be presenting a recent experiment on geminated liquids in Japanese

S-Circle: Friday, 4:00 – 5:30 pm, LCR Anissa Zaitsu will present her work on the subject of tenseless clauses in Why-questions

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