Author: jduff

On Wednesday, June 10th, Jed Pizarro-Guevara successfully defended his dissertation, “When human universal meets language specifics.” The virtual attendees participated in a wide-ranging question period with Jed and his committee members, Matt Wagers (chair), Amanda Rysling, and Sandy Chung. The defense was followed by toasts to Jed’s achievement by all who were gathered, alongside much laughter and high spirits. Congratulations, Jed!

Pictures of the defense and defender are included below.

Dr. Pizarro-Guevara immediately following his successful defense, sporting a gift from Kelsey Sasaki.

A dissertation tiramisu for Dr. Pizarro-Guevara, prepared by Margaret Kroll and Steven Foley. In particular, a mango tiramisu inspired by the slogan of the Philippine-brand mangos Jed champions, “Sweet Memories of Cebu”.

An interview with Jess Law has been shared on our department website!

Jess joined us this fall, after completing her PhD at Rutgers University in Spring 2019. Since then, she has been busy teaching, advising, and conducting her own research in semantics, where she carefully examines the mapping of linguistic form to various components of meaning across languages. In the interview, Jess shares details about her work, how she’s found her first year at Santa Cruz, and her own journey to the discipline of linguistics.

Maya Wax Cavallaro has received a Small Grant from the UCSC Student Health Center’s Radical Resilience Initiative. Maya writes that she will be using the grant to organize a monthly addiction recovery discussion series on campus next year with a focus on demystifying 12-step recovery. Congratulations, Maya!

In addition to the successful dissertation defenses of Margaret, Steven, and Jed, we have other milestones to share from this quarter:

Andrew Angeles defended his qualifying exam, entitled “Recursivity and prosodic adjunction in the compound prosody of Kyoto Japanese,” and will advance to candidacy. His committee consisted of Ryan Bennett (chair), Junko Ito, Jaye Padgett, and external member Haruo Kubozono (NINJAL). Congratulations, Andrew!

Ben Eischens defended his second qualifying paper, entitled “Root shortening in Mixtec: Phonetics in phonology.” His committee consisted of Ryan Bennett (chair), Junko Ito, and Grant McGuire. Congratulations, Ben!

Morwenna Hoeks defended her first qualifying paper, entitled “Decomposing the focus effect: Evidence from reading.” Her committee consisted of Amanda Rysling (co-chair), Maziar Toosarvandani (co-chair), and Adrian Brasoveanu. Congratulations, Morwenna!

Stephanie Rich defended her first qualifying paper, entitled “Semantic similarity and temporal contiguity in subject-verb dependency processing.” Her committee consisted of Matt Wagers (chair), Adrian Brasoveanu, and Ivy Sichel. Congratulations, Stephanie!

Nick Van Handel defended his qualifying exam, entitled “Studying implicit prosody with delexicalized melodies: Evidence from a Match / Mismatch task,” and will advance to candidacy. His committee consisted of Matt Wagers (chair), Amanda Rysling, Ryan Bennett, and external member Mara Breen (Psychology, Mt. Holyoke). Congratulations, Nick!

This year, the department awarded a Ladusaw supplemental travel award to Ben Eischens, for his travel to New Orleans in January 2020, where he presented two talks at the annual meeting of the LSA and the concurrent annual meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA). Congratulations, Ben!

To celebrate the conclusion of a quarter on working on Zoom, members of the graduate Field Methods course have become intimately familiar with the empirical contours of user linearization in the software. For general edification, they present the following Hasse diagram modeling the data they have observed. Note that their present proposal for the model is based on derivational uses of OT, with inputs as pairs of a previous linearization and a single-argument operation like JOIN(user), LEAVE(user), MUTE(user), and so on. Constraints are defined below.

• AllowJoin assigns one violation for every argument of a JOIN operation in the input which is not present in the output.
• AllowLeave assigns one violation for every argument of a LEAVE operation in the input which is present in the output.
• Max assigns one violation for every user in the input who is not present in the output.
• Dep assigns one violation for every user in the output who is not present in the input.
• Wackernagel’sVanity (WackVan) assigns one violation for every user with value [+self] who does not have peninitial order in the output.
• VideoPriority (VidPri) assigns one violation for every pair of users (α,β) where user α has value [-video] and user β has value [+video] and user α is linearized before user β in the output.
• AudioPriority (AudPri) assigns one violation for every pair of users (α,β) where user α has value [-audio] and user β has value [+audio] and user α is linearized before user β in the output.
• JoinLow assigns one violation for every pair of users (α,β) where user α is not present in the input linearization and user β is, and user α is linearized before user β in the output.
• Ident(Order) assigns one violation for every pair of users (α,β) where the relative order of user α and user β differs between input linearization and output linearization.

Familiar Zoom users may note that this captures handily a few odd patterns:

• New members of a chat will join to the right of all current members with video on, but to the left of those who have video off;
• Members with video off are ordered based on when they turned video off;
• Audio muting has no effect on linearization;
• The linearization displayed varies from user to user, with all users seeing themselves in second position.

Tableaux arguing for the ranking above will undoubtedly be given in the authors’ forthcoming LingBuzz manuscript, please stay tuned. In the meantime, you can direct any comments and data troublesome for this account to the WHASC editorial team.