WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
This past week saw Jenny Bellik mount an excellent and successful defense of her second qualifying paper, “Turkish onset repair: An ultrasound study.” The committee was chaired by Jaye Padgett and included Jorge Hankamer and Grant McGuire. Congratulations, Jenny!
The linguistics department welcomes a new event this quarter — S-Circle — the reading group incarnation of S-Circle. The informal group will meet on weeks when there is no S-Circle. The inaugural meeting will be held this Monday (April 11) at 2 pm in the Cave, where Jim Wood’s (2014) paper “Reflexive -st verbs in Icelandic” will be discussed. Snacks will be provided.
This Friday (April 15), Sabine Iatridou (MIT) will give a colloquium on “Fake things here and there; evidence from now and then.” As usual, it will start at 2 pm in Humanities 1 (Room 210). There will be potluck in the evening, with details announced after the talk. The abstract for the talk can be found here.
Also this Friday (April 15), Sergei Tatevosov (Lomonosov Moscow State University) will present in MRG on “Subevents and their relations: A case for radical predicate decomposition.” It will take place at 12:30-1:30 in the LRC. The abstract for his talk is available here.
Last week, it was announced that graduate student Lauren McGarry received an honorable mention for the highly competitive National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program. Congratulations, Lauren!
Pranav Anand is this year’s recipient of the Dizikes Faculty Teaching Award in Humanities. Named in honor of Professor Emeritus John Dizikes, the award celebrates the Humanities faculty’s commitment to excellence in teaching and its transformative impact for students. The announcement of the award mentioned that “students and colleagues alike offered high praise for Professor Anand’s ability to inspire and engage students over the years, and for creating an inclusive learning environment that challenges and encourages all students.” Pranav joins several other linguistics faculty who have received the award in the past, including Donka Farkas (2013), Jorge Hankamer (2011), and Jaye Padgett (2006). He will be presented with the award during the Celebrating the Humanities event on Tuesday, May 31.
This Friday (April 8), fifth-year graduate student Karl DeVries will present his research on “Cumulative readings of bare cardinal partitives” in S-Circle:
Sentences like (1) have played a modest role in the literature on partitives, appearing in lists of sentences counter-exemplifying the partitive constraint (roughly, that the inner DP must be definite).
(1) That book could belong to one of three people (Ladusaw 1982).
There are two strategies for reconciling bare cardinal partitives with the partitive constraint. Ladusaw (1982) argues that the inner cardinal is a specific indefinite and Barker (1998) suggests that bare cardinal partitives can also be used when the inner cardinal exhausts the restrictor set; (2) has such an interpretation.
(2) Sybil is one of three people Otis admires.
Sentences like (3) suggest that matters are more complex. When a bare cardinal partitive appears in the scope of a universal quantifier it can give rise to a cumulative reading.
(3) Every student read one of three papers. (i.e. every student read one paper and three papers were read overall)
Sentence (3) does not require that the inner cardinal be specific nor does it require that there be only three (contextually salient) papers. I develop a compositional account of cumulative readings using an extension of First Order Logic with Choice (Brasoveanu and Farkas 2011) and discuss how cumulative readings fit into larger debates about the status of the partitive constraint.
As usual, S-Circle will start at 2 pm in the LCR.