Author: nbenmeir

KRAUS DEFENDS DISSERTATION

Congratulations to Kelsey Kraus for a successful defense this past Tuesday of her thesis “Great Intonations”, with Pranav Anand (chair), Donka Farkas, and Grant McGuire serving as the committee. Kelsey’s dissertation explores the ways in which expectation violation is realized in discourse particles, intonation, and their interaction. In an instance of life mirroring art, Kelsey’s defense during the strike was an exercise in continual expectational recalibration. It really took a village to ensure this happened on time: Thanks to Jorge Hankamer for hosting her defense, to Maria Zimmer for coordinating all the details, and to Jenny Bellik for crucial A/V support.

Pictured: An intonationally contoured princess cake in celebration of the event, courtesy of Steven Foley and Tom Roberts.

NINJAL ICPP CALL FOR POSTERS

The National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL)  is inviting poster submissions for the 5th NINJAL International Conference on Phonetics and Phonology (ICPP), which will take place at NINJAL on October 26-28, 2018. The three-day conference features the following two main topics: (a) sokuon, or geminate consonants (b) accent, tone, and intonation. UCSC’s  Junko Ito and Armin Mester are invited speakers.

NINJAL invites abstracts for poster presentations related to at least one of the two main topics. If it is related, any presentation is welcome, even if it is not concerned with Japanese. Abstracts on the interface between lexical accent/tone and intonation will be particularly welcome. More information on abstract submission can be found here.

 

KALIVODA DEFENDS DISSERTATION

Congratulations to Nick Kalivoda on his successful dissertation defense on April 13th, 2018.   His Command Theory of Syntax-Prosody Interface generated a spirited discussion from the committee members (Junko Ito (chair), Armin Mester, Jim McCloskey, and Alan Prince on skype) as well as from the audience.  Well defended, Nick!

SICHEL AND VINCENT AT WCCFL

On April 20-22, Ivy Sichel and Jake Vincent travelled to UCLA to participate in the 36th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL). Maura O’Leary, former slug (BA ’13) and one of our recent visiting researchers, was one of the main organizers of WCCFL this year.

As an invited speaker, Ivy presented joint work on demonstratives with Martina Wiltschko (UBC) in a talk titled “Appraisal and Alternatives.”

Jake presented a poster on the research from his first QP about Chamorro internally headed relative clauses. He reports:

I had several helpful conversations that will help me push the research on that project forward. There were lots of interesting/inspiring talks and posters seeking to answer big theoretical questions. It was my first time visiting UCLA. Its campus is very different from UCSC’s, but is still very beautiful. Also, the inverted fountain is super cool.

The program is available here.

BENNETT AT MIT

The week before last Ryan Bennett spent three very enjoyable days at MIT, where he gave a mini-course on the phonetics, phonology, and morphology of Kaqchikel, along with a colloquium on the unique behavior of subject pronouns under focus and ellipsis in Irish. Ryan was very grateful for the hospitality he received, as well as the many thought-provoking, challenging, and constructive comments made by MIT students and faculty at his presentations.

COPPOCK COLLOQUIUM

This Friday, May 4th, at 1:45 pm in Humanities 1, Room 210, there will be a colloquium by Liz Coppock (Boston). Her talk is entitled “Most vs. the most in languages where the more means most.” Afterward, there will be a reception at 3:30pm in the Silverman Conference Room. The abstract is given below:

This paper focuses on languages in which a superlative interpretation is typically indicated merely by a combination of a definiteness marker with a comparative marker, including French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Greek (‘DEF+CMP languages’). Despite ostensibly using definiteness markers to form the superlative, superlatives are not always definite-marked in these languages, and the distribution of definiteness-marking varies across languages. Constituency structure appears to vary across languages as well. To account for these patterns of variation, we identify conflicting pressures that all of the languages in consideration may be subject to, and suggest that different languages prioritize differently in the resolution of these conflicts. What these languages have in common, we suggest, is a mechanism of Definite Null Instantiation for the degree-type standard argument of the comparative. Among the parameters along which languages are proposed to differ is the relative importance of marking uniqueness vs. avoiding determiners with predicates of entities that are not individuals.

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