Author: beischen

On May 4, the Department of Linguistics at UCSC will host its second SPOT Research Cluster Workshop, a day-long workshop highlighting the Syntax-Prosody interface and Optimality Theory. The event will take place in Humanities 1, Room 210 and will feature a number of exciting presentations from invited speakers. More information about the event can be found on THI’s website.

Sluicing@50 was held at the University of Chicago from April 12-13. The conference marked and celebrated the 50th anniversary of the presentation of Guess Who by Haj Ross at the CLS meeting held in Chicago in April of 1969. Guess Who was the paper that first identified and named the ellipsis process now known as sluicing and its presentation and publication made possible a half century of investigation across many languages and language-types, one which has exposed for examination a host of issues in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, psycholinguistics and prosody.

Organized by alumnus Jason Merchant, whose 1999 UCSC dissertation and the 2001 book that emerged from it defined the landscape for the investigation of ellipsis in this millennium, the conference was a very large and very lively affair at which the UCSC community was unsurprisingly well represented. Apart from Merchant’s own presentation (Focus-marking inside Ellipsis Sites), grad student Margaret Kroll was an active participant. Jim McCloskey gave an invited talk on preliminary results emerging from the work of the Santa Cruz Ellipsis Project; Research Associate Dan Hardt presented a joint poster with alumnus Deniz Rudin (now at USC) on modal force in sluicing, and MA alumnus Matt Barros (now at Washington University in St. Louis) gave a paper (joint with Hadas Kotek of Yale) on the semantic conditioning of sluicing. Alumna Vera Gribanova of Stanford was also an invited speaker; her presentation was on the typology of V-stranding VP ellipsis. The workshop ended on Saturday with a talk by Ross himself—an emotional, humorous, and deeply felt meditation on language, linguistics, and life.

On May 17, the Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics at UCSC will host the Monterey Bay Applied Linguistics Symposium, with an impressive range of presenters from around the nation. The one-day event will take place in Humanities 2, Room 259, and a program can be found here.

This Friday, Charles Yang (University of Pennsylvania) will give a colloquium at 1:20 PM in Humanities 1, Room 210. The talk is titled “Learnability vs. Grammar,” and an abstract is given below.

Both the linguist and the child are tasked with capturing significant linguistic generalizations, which gives rise to a tension between learning and the theory of grammar. In this talk, I explore a learnability based approach to grammar, focusing three well-studied topics in English: certain selectional restrictions in derivational morphology, the verbal and adjectival passives, and the dative constructions. In all three cases, generalizations believed to be significant turn out to be marginal, and thus not worthy of codifying in the architectural principles of grammar. If successful, a learnability-based approach will, at least in part, shift the burden of explanatory adequacy away from the machinery of UG, leading to a less complex conception of language and its place in cognition.

Many congratulations are in order for Ryan Bennett, who was recently promoted to tenured Associate Professor. Congratulations, Ryan!

The Humanities Institute (THI) at UCSC recently released the names of summer fellowship awardees, which include two graduate students in Linguistics! Margaret Kroll earned a THI Summer Research Fellowship for her project “A Matter of Perspective: Constructing Meaning and Truth,” and Thomas Roberts earned a THI Summer Dissertation Fellowship for his project “Dimensions of Belief in Verbal Semantics.”  Congratulations, Margaret and Tom!