Month: February 2018

HOW OUR READINGS ARE GROUPING THIS WEEK

LIP: Thursday, 11:00 – 12:00 pm, LCR Netta Ben-Meir will be leading the discussion about a paper titled “Expectations and Speech Intelligibility” (Babel and Russell 2017)

s/lab: Thursday, 12:00 – 1:00 pm, LCR Jake Vincent will be presenting

Phlunch: Friday, 1:30 – 2:30 pm, LCR Jenny Bellik will be presenting

WLMA: Friday, 3:00 – 4:00 pm, Stevenson 217 Jed Pizarro-Guevara will be leading a discussion of the paper “Ergativity and the complexity of extraction: a view from Mayan” (Clemens et al 2015)

LUIS VICENTE REMEMBERED

The news of Luis Vicente‘s recent death has left the linguistics community at UCSC deeply saddened. Luis was an excellent linguist who made many important contributions to the field and he was a warm and loyal friend to many of us here. He was born in Bilbao in the Basque Country of Spain in 1979 and completed the PhD in Leiden in 2007, under the direction of Lisa Cheng. He spent 2008 in the Linguistics Department at UCSC as a postdoctoral researcher and formed in the course of that twelve months many lasting friendships and collaborations. It was here that he became an expert on ellipsis (particularly sluicing) and it was in the area of ellipsis that he was to make some of his many important contributions, often in collaboration with alumnus Matt Barros who was completing his MA at Santa Cruz in 2008. Luis seemed to be always smiling and always in the Stevenson coffee-shop and it was there that he met Amanda Shuman, a PhD student in history at the time completing a dissertation on contemporary China. It was Amanda who introduced Luis to the joys of trail running and they later made a family and professional life together in Europe — Amanda at the University of Freiburg, Luis at the University of Potsdam — with their daughter Emma. Luis was a person who faced life and work, and the challenges of living with brain cancer, with intelligence, humor, courage, commitment and warmth. He is sorely missed — as a linguist and as a friend.

USSISHKIN COLLOQUIUM

This Friday, February 16th, at 1:20 pm in Humanities 1, Room 210, there will be a colloquium by Adam Ussishkin (University of Arizona). His talk is entitled “Roots, or consonants? On the early role of morphology in lexical access.” The abstract is given below:

Words consist of a phoneme or letter sequence that maps onto meaning. Most prominent theories of both auditory and visual word recognition portray the recognition process as a connection between these units and a semantic level. However, there is a growing body of evidence in the priming literature suggesting that there is an additional, morphological level that mediates the recognition process. In morphologically linear languages like English, however, morphemes and letter or sound sequences are co-extensive, so the source of priming effects between related words could be due to simple phonological overlap as opposed to morphological overlap. In Semitic languages, though, the morphological structure of words reduces this confound, since morphemes are interdigitated in a non-linear fashion. Semitic words are typically composed of a discontiguous root (made up of three consonants) embedded in a word pattern specifying the vowels and the ordering between consonants and vowels. Active-passive pairs in Maltese illustrate this relationship (the root is underlined); e.g., fetaħ ‘open’-miftuħ ‘opened’. In this talk, I report on a series of experiments on the Semitic language Maltese investigating the extent to which root morphemes facilitate visual and auditory word recognition, and to what extent potential priming effects are independent of the phonological overlap typically inherent in morphological relationships. These experiments make use of the visual masked (Forster and Davis, 1984) and auditory masked (Kouider and Dupoux, 2005) priming techniques. The results of the experiments show that not only do roots facilitate visual and auditory word recognition in Maltese, but that these morphological effects are independent of phonological overlap effects.

ZYMAN IN SNIPPETS

Two squibs by graduate student Erik Zyman have been published in the latest issue of Snippets. The first argues that gestures and nonlinguistic objects can occur in DP positions, and when they do, the relevant DPs are subject to the Case Filter. The second argues that interjections can take complements and project InterjPs—i.e., that they select and project exactly like Ns, Vs, As, and Ps. A generalization that emerges from the two squibs is that phenomena that one might initially be tempted to dismiss as paralinguistic or even entirely nonlinguistic can turn out on closer scrutiny to interact directly with the core operations of syntax (Merge, selection, projection, Case assignment, etc.).

1 2 3