Month: October 2018

The most recent issue of Natural Language and Linguistic Theory (Volume 36 Number 4) has just appeared. It includes a paper by recent alumnus Jason Ostrove called “Stretching, spanning, and linear adjacency in Vocabulary Insertion,” which deals with the complexities of verbal morphology in Irish and Scots Gaelic. Also in the issue is a paper by alumna Ruth Kramer of Georgetown, one which grows out of her collaboration with Mark Baker of Rutgers University. Their paper is titled “Doubled clitics are pronouns.”

UCSC faculty Junko Ito and Armin Mester were in complementary distribution in Santa Cruz during the past two weeks, thanks to their travel schedules. Junko travelled first to the East (Boston, Mass), where she was an invited speaker at WAFL (Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics) at MIT on October 20th, and then Armin to the Far East (Tokyo, Japan), where he was an invited speaker at ICPP 2018 (International Conference on Phonology and Phonetics) at NINJAL (National Institute of Japanese Languages and Linguistics) on October 27th. In each of these venues, they presented their recent work on “Preaccentuation and tonal alignment,” which proposes a new version of the antepenultimate accent principle which defines the default location of pitch accent in Japanese. The chief innovation in this work is that accent in compounds with “short” second nouns (one or two moras—so-called “preaccentuation” at the end of the first noun) now follows from the same principle, as does the prototypical junctural N2-initial accent in compounds with “long” N2 (three to four moras), given a very simple extension of the analysis of unaccentedness in Japanese in Ito and Mester (2016, Linguistic Inquiry), a PDF of which can be accessed here.

Ryan Bennett spent a crisp fall weekend at UMass Amherst for Sound Systems of Latin America III, held from Oct. 19-21. Along with co-author Robert Henderson (UCSC PhD 2012), Ryan presented ongoing work on the interaction of tone and intonation in Uspanteko. The conference was a lovely event, and showcased top-notch research on the phonetics and phonology of indigenous languages of the Americas. Also in attendance was Scott AnderBois (UCSC PhD 2011), presenting collaborative work on the use of falsetto in A’ingae discourse.

s/lab: Monday, 3:30-4:30 PM, LCR: s/lab will host an abstract workshop for CAMP 2018.

LIP: Wednesday, 12:00-1:00 PM, LCR: Maho Morimoto will present on a project with UCSC faculty member Shigeko Okamoto on gender construction in Japanese.

SPLAP: Wednesday, 3:00-4:00 PM, LCR: the group will discuss Deal (2017): “Shifty asymmetries: universals and variation in shifty indexicality.”

MRG: Friday, 9:00-10:00 AM, LCR: the group will discuss Embick and Halle (2005) “On the status of stems in morphological theory.”

Phlunch: Friday, 12:00-1:00 PM, LCR: Richard Bibbs will present work in progress on laryngeal segments in Chamorro.

S-Circle: Friday, 1:20-2:50 PM, LCR: Jed Pizarro-Guevara will present work on the interaction between voice morphology and A’-dependencies in Tagalog.

WLMA: Friday, Time TBD, LCR: UCLA PhD student Iara Mantenuto will present current work on San Sebastián del Monte Mixtec.

This Saturday, October 27, the UCSC Linguistics Department will host a conference entitled “Semantics-Pragmatics Interface,” featuring a wide variety of invited speakers and exciting topics. A program including the event schedule and location can be found here.

Amanda Rysling gave a colloquium talk at UCLA on October 19. The topic touched on her dissertation work, along with some newer developments of those and related ideas. The abstract is below:

Regressive spectral assimilation is a default in speech perception

The vast majority of work on segmental perception focuses on how listeners differentiate adjacent speech sounds from each other, or compensate for coarticulation. Much of this work assumes that listeners are so successful at differentiating successive speech sounds that their failures, cases when adjacent speech sounds are heard as similar, are vanishingly rare (e.g., Ohala, 1981, 1993, i.a.). The first part of the talk demonstrates that such failures are not as rare as they have been assumed to be: listeners in clear listening conditions productively hear the first of two sounds as similar to the second, effectively failing to use available context information to compensate for coarticulation. Four claims are then advanced: (1) that segmental perception is better understood as a process of incremental evidence accumulation and evaluation, which is neutral as to whether acoustics are attributed to their source segments or gestures, (2) that the auditory system defaults to treating different types  of acoustic properties (e.g. spectral weight, duration, intensity) differently, (3) that perceptual spectral assimilation on clear speech, which previous accounts of compensation for coarticulation have predicted should not occur, has a domain-general basis, and (4) that this tendency represents a default in speech perception that is responsible for the overwhelming typological prevalence of regressive major place assimilation in the phonologies of the world’s languages.