WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
UC Santa Cruz celebrated the grand opening of its Silicon Valley campus at 3175 Bowers Ave. in Santa Clara on Wednesday, September 28th with a reception, rover ribbon cutting, and research talk series. Pranav Anand spoke along with Lyn Walker about their joint work on detecting high-level pragmatic categories such as sarcasm in social media, and about the importance of linguistic reasoning in natural language processing systems.
Karl DeVries will defend his dissertation entitled “Independence Friendly Dynamic Semantics: Integrating Exceptional Scope, Anaphora and their Interactions” on Thursday, September 29 at 5pm in HUM 1 – Room 210.
Abstract:
The goal of this dissertation is to provide a semantic account for exceptional scope indefinites in terms of independence friendly reasoning. I take the view that an indefinite takes exceptional scope when its witness is required not to vary with the value of a variable introduced by a syntactically higher quantifier. This dissertation shows that a straightforward implementation of this view in a static logic results in a system that assigns truth conditions to sentences containing wide scope indefinites that are too strong. I show, surprisingly, that a better implementation of this intuition requires dynamic logic. While using a dynamic logic is a necessary ingredient in the analysis of wide scope indefinites in terms of independence, it is not a sufficient one. I survey a number of recent dynamic systems, examine possible definitions of maximization, and show that only some of these permit the proposed analysis of wide scope indefinites. I show that a system of dynamic plural logic (DPlL) with unselective maximization can be modified to fully account for wide scope indefinites in terms of independent witness choice.
Our department hosted this year’s PHREND (PHonology Research weekEND) Workshop on Saturday, Sept. 24, 2016.
On Friday Sept. 30 in HUM 2 room 259 at 2:40pm there will be a colloquium with Itamar Francez (University of Chicago).
CUSP 9 (California Universities Semantics & Pragmatics) will be held on Friday/Saturday, Oct. 21-22, at UC Santa Cruz. Abstracts are due by September 30, 2016.
The Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference — or LURC — took place last Wednesday (June 1) and was a huge success! Organized by Undergraduate Director Grant McGuire, it featured talks by five undergraduates on topics in phonology and syntax, which drew on data from English, Muyang, and Spanish. The Distinguished Alumnus Address was given by Shayne Sloggett (BA, 2010), currently a graduate student at UMass Amherst, on “Do comprehenders violate binding theory? Depends on your point of view.”
LURC 2016 Presenters: Lydia Werthen, Dhyana Buckley, Grant McGuire, Drew Knochenhauer, Shayne Sloggett (back row); Jacob Chemnick, Anissa Zaitsu (front row)
More photos from LURC can be found here.
Last Friday (June 3), Anna Greenwood successfully defended her dissertation, “An experimental investigation of phonetic naturalness.” Anna’s work addresses the important question of how and why phonological typology reflects phonetic naturalness, and more specifically, why artificial grammar experiments that test for learning biases in favor of natural patterns so often fail to find them. Anna’s hypothesis (following other recent work) is that naturalness in typology is caused by perception and production acting as filters on what we grammaticize. Her artificial grammar experiments recreate in the lab the hypothesized conditions in the wild by manipulating the production (and therefore the perception) of stimuli, and her results support the hypothesis that naturalness comes from constraints on performance. Many who were present at the defense followed Anna to an after-party, where she was toasted and cheered. We are happy to see Dr. Greenwood move ahead, but we will also miss her.