WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
At the beginning of this month, Jenny Bellik presented at the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Her talk, “Onset cluster repair in Turkish: an ultrasound study,” detailed work from her Qualifying Exam. She reports good vibes from the East Bay and great feedback from fellow ultrasoundists Susan Lin and Sarah Bakst.
This Thursday, February 9th, Juliet Stanton (MIT) will be giving a colloquium talk at 1:30pm in Hum 2, Room 259. Her talk is titled “Constraints on the Distribution of Nasal-Stop Sequences: An Argument for Contrast”, and an abstract is included below:
It has been argued that certain typological generalizations regarding the distributional properties of nasal-stop sequences can be explained by explicitly referencing contrast (e.g. Herbert 1977, 1986; Jones 2000). This work explores the hypothesis that all generalizations regarding the distribution of nasal-stop sequences can be explained by explicitly referencing contrast, and presents results of multiple cross-linguistic studies designed to test that hypothesis. I show first that taking into consideration cues to the contrast between oral and nasal vowels allows us to accurately predict generalizations regarding the distribution of allophonic nasal-stop sequences (i.e. those that are not phonemically contrastive with other segment types). Following this, I show that taking into consideration cues to the contrasts between nasal-stop sequences and their component parts (nasals and stops) allows us to accurately predict generalizations regarding the distribution of phonemic nasal-stop sequences (i.e. those that are phonemically contrastive with other segment types). Broadly, the results presented here contribute to a larger body of evidence that constraints on contrast are a necessary component of the phonological grammar.
The most recent issue of Language to hit the newsstands (Volume 92, Number 4) includes Maziar Toosarvandani‘s paper ‘The temporal interpretation of clause-chaining in Northern Paiute’. The paper argues for a coordination-like analysis of the clause-chaining structures used in Northern Paiute to express what is expressed in English by way of subordinators like before and after. The paper is available for download here.
A recent paper by Donka and former LRC visitor Floris Roelofsen (Amsterdam), entitled ‘Division of Labor in the Semantics of Declaratives and Interrogatives’ has recently been published in the Journal of Semantics. The paper concerns the semantic and discourse effects of different types of declarative and interrogative sentences. You can check it out here.
Last Sunday, the UCSC-Stanford Sentence Types Workshop, featuring students from Donka Farkas’s and Cleo Condoravdi’s sentence type seminars, was a roaring success. The presentations, including both over-the-hill linguists and philosophers and the home team of Deniz, Lauren, and Hitomi, were engaging and provoked vigorous discussion among all participants. Moreover, the veritable smörgåsbord of cheeses and glazed pear cakes didn’t stand a chance against the linguists as ravenous for snacks as for knowledge. If you’re interested in viewing any handouts from the workshop or the program, you can do so here.
On Tuesday, January 31st, Hannah Sande (UC Berkeley) will be giving a colloquium at 1:30pm in Hum 1, Room 210. Her talk is entitled “Modeling the morphology/phonology interface: Evidence from process morphology in Guébie”, and the abstract is below.
Work on the relationship between morphology and phonology has long been split between two views: 1) phonological phenomena occur due to the concatenation of underlying items, or 2) phonological phenomena occur due to the application of some process (Hockett, 1954; Anderson, 1992).
Here I present novel data from Guébie, an endangered Kru language spoken in Côte d’Ivoire, which bears on the crucial question of whether morphology involves item arrangement or processes. I describe two distinct phenomena in Guébie–scalar tone shift and phonologically determined agreement–which demonstrate that not all morphology involves affixation (contra Trommer and Zimmermann, 2014; Zimmermann 2016). I present a unified analysis of these two phenomena, in which morphological processes are modeled with cophonologies (Ito and Mester, 1995; Anttila, 2002; Inkelas and Zoll, 2005) that can apply in phrasal as well as in lexical contexts (cf. McPherson 2014, McPherson and Heath 2016).
In an exciting double-header, we’ve got a second colloquium this week: Dustin Chacón (Minnesota) will be giving a talk this Thursday, February 2nd, at 1:30pm in Hum 1, Room 202. (Note the room difference between the two colloquiua!) His talk is entitled “Filling in Gaps in Comparative Syntax”, and the abstract is given below.
In comparative syntax and typology, linguists have discovered that languages can vary along a number of ways, which sometimes can be subtle or surprising. However, psycholinguistic work has largely focused on a small set of closely related languages, and careful cross-language psycholinguistic and language acquisition work is still in its infancy. In this talk, I will present findings from cross-language studies on the processing and acquisition of filler-gap dependencies. Filler-gap dependencies are the relation between a word or phrase that appears in one position in the sentence, but is interpreted in another position, e.g., who in who did Dale say that Sarah saw __ behind the bed?. Filler-gap dependencies are a particularly useful case study, because their properties are well-described in syntax and psycholinguistics. The first set of studies examine filler-gap dependency processing in Bangla, which shows that comprehenders do not actively construct filler-gap dependencies into embedded contexts, unlike Japanese speakers (Aoshima et al 2004; Omaki et al 2014). The second set of studies examine resumptive pronoun dependency processing in English. I argue that resumptive dependencies are formed “passively”, likely due to their ungrammaticality status. This contrasts with recent findings in Hebrew, which suggest active resumptive dependency formation processes (Kishev & Asscher-Meltzer 2015). Finally, the last set of studies investigate the learnability of constraints on filler-gap dependencies, specifically the that-trace constraint. I argue that there is not sufficient evidence for English and Spanish learners to infer whether their grammar has the constraint or lacks it, respectively (Torrego 1984; Pearl & Sprouse 2012; Phillips 2013). I argue that the learner must instead rely on related properties to learn this constraint, as in “parametric” theories of language learning (Rizzi 1982; Torrego 1984; Pearl & Lidz 2013; pace Newmeyer 2004).