UCSC Alums and Linguists contribute to festschrift honoring Maria Polinsky

This month (January 2025) marked the publication of a rich and varied collection of research papers in linguistics in a festschrift honoring Maria Polinsky (Professor emerita at the University of Maryland). The volume, entitled Syntax in Uncharted Territories: Essays in Honor of Maria Polinsky, was published on the University of California’s open access eScholarship research repository. All papers in the collection are now available for download from the eScholarship platform. The collection was edited by Lauren Clemens (University at Albany, State University of New York), by Santa Cruz PhD alumna Vera Gribanova (Stanford University) and by Gregory Scontras (UC Irvine).

Among the papers in the volume is one co-authored by PhD alumna Ruth Kramer (Georgetown University) with Luke James Adamson (Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft). Their paper deals with the theoretical challenges posed by a passive-like construction in Jarawara (a language of Brazil), whose properties they link with recent research on Algonquian inverse systems. Also in the volume is a paper by professor emerita Sandy Chung. Sandy’s paper, titled “Antipassive in a Minimalist Universal Grammar” argues — drawing primarily on evidence from Austronesian languages — that antipassive should be deconstructed into two characteristic and independently varying properties: demotion of the internal argument, and voice marking.

Link to the full volume: [link]