WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
On Saturday, July 9, a performance — The Voice Bank — will be held in tribute to Mary Zavanelli, a teaching professor of biology who was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gherig’s disease) in 2014. The performance will chronicle the journey of ALS from the patient’s perspective and educate people on the benefits of vocal coaching and voice banking. Admission is free, and the performance begins at 2 pm in the Digital Arts Research Center (Room 108).
The department’s traditional end-of-the-year celebration will take place this Friday (June 10) from 11:30 am to 1 pm in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge. After that, Santa Crucians have a busy summer ahead of them. Many students and faculty will be travelling, presenting at conferences, and doing fieldwork around the world. Some will stay put, enjoying a more quiet and contemplative summer:
This Tuesday (May 31), Pranav Anand will receive the Dizikes Faculty Teaching Award in the Humanities. It recognizes Pranav for his ability to inspire and engage students over the years and for creating an inclusive learning environment that challenges and encourages all students. In his teaching statement, Pranav writes:
“For me, successful teaching begins in imaginative engagement, in divining the epistemic state of my students, both as I am designing materials weeks before meeting them and in answering questions in the classroom. To be sure, this process is partly atavistic communion with my earlier scholarly self. However, I have found that my teaching has improved as I have down-weighted impressions of my own experience and concentrated simply on understanding the psyches of the persons directly in front of me. Such a process is indelibly empathic, and it is for this reason that all the potentially tired analogies of teaching and parenting ring so true for me. Both cases are virtually unique in granting one the longitudinal privilege of beholding someone mature in real time over several years.”
Each year’s recipient selects a student to receive a scholarship in their name. The 2016 Pranav Anand Scholarship will go to linguistics undergraduate Dhyana Buckley. Both Pranav and Dhayana will be honored at the Celebrating the Humanities event, which will take place on Tuesday from 4 to 6 pm at the Cowell Provost House.
This year’s Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC) will take place on Wednesday (June 1). It will feature talks by five current students:
Shayne Sloggett (BA, 2010), who is currently a graduate student at UMass Amherst, will give the Distinguished Alumnus Address on “Do comprehenders violate binding theory? Depends on your point of view.” The conference will run from 12:45 to 4:45 pm in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge. The complete program can be found here.
This Friday (June 3), Anna Greenwood will defend her dissertation, entitled “An experimental investigation of phonetic naturalness”:
The goal of this dissertation is to use experimental methods to investigate the driving force behind typological asymmetries that are based on phonetic naturalness. It has been widely observed that patterns that are grounded in phonetics are common, whereas the unnatural equivalents of these patterns are either rare or unattested. I argue that these observed naturalness asymmetries can be explained entirely by perception and production, as opposed to an ingrained learning bias against unnatural patterns. The experiments in this dissertation support this: participants do struggle to learn the unnatural pattern, but not when the experimental stimuli are exceptionally clear. This account also provides some explanation for the discrepancies between previous research on naturalness in the lab. The findings of this dissertation pave the way for a better understanding of how to accurately recreate naturalness-based asymmetries in the lab.
The defense will take place at 2 pm in Humanities 1 (Room 210).
Also last Wednesday (May 18), Bern Samko endured her final trial in the long journey towards the doctorate. Bern defended (successfully and in style) her dissertation — “Syntax and information structure: The grammar of English inversions” — before a large crowd of well-wishers and critics. The dissertation investigates some important theoretical questions about the driving forces of movement and, more broadly, about how syntactic processes and discourse-centered information structural processes interact with one another. The questions are addressed by way of a focus on some non-canonical word orders in English (participle preposing and VP preposing) and is notable both methodologically (it combines theoretical work with large-scale corpus work) and theoretically (informed equally by current strands in minimalist thinking about syntax and by the work in theoretical pragmatics that the SPLAP group has been reading and doing). Bern has been a leading member of SPLAP since its inception and her presence at its meetings will be sorely missed.
This Monday (May 23), alumna Vera Gribanova (PhD 2010; Stanford) will present in S-CIRCLE on “Case, agreement, and differential subject marking in Uzbek”:
In this talk I use novel evidence from Uzbek nominalized clauses to distinguish between two competing approaches to case licensing. Baker and Vinokurova (2010) have argued that two modalities of case licensing are necessary to account for the entire range of case patterns in Sakha (Turkic) embedded clauses. One modality is structural licensing of noun phrases by matching of phi and case features on functional heads via agree (Chomsky, 2000, 2001). A second is configurational case assignment (Marantz, 1991 et seq.), in which a noun phrase is assigned case on the basis of the head that c-selects it or on the basis of that phrase’s position with respect to other noun phrases in the same clause. Baker and Vinokurova’s (2010) argument for the necessity of structural case assignment via AGREE with a functional head rests crucially on evidence from Sakha nominalized clauses, in which structural subjects receive genitive case marking: genitive on subjects is licensed if and only if there is also subject agreement, and vice versa. Levin and Preminger (2015) have argued against the position that such evidence forces the use of AGREE via a functional head for case licensing, and provide a purely configurational account of the same set of facts.
Two syntactic factors determine the distribution of genitive case in Uzbek nominalized clauses. First, the position of the subject internal to its nominalized clause matters: it can stay low (spec vP) and receive nominative case, or raise to a higher position ([Spec, DP] of the nominal shell) and receive genitive case. Second, the position of the entire clause containing that subject in the broader context of the matrix clause matters: genitive case is only ever available in clauses which are arguments of verbs or nouns, but never within adjunct clauses. Subject agreement inside the embedded clause remains obligatory throughout. Inside those clauses where genitive is permitted, it serves as a differential subject marker and comes with interpretive effects (specificity).
This state of affairs provides us with enough evidence to differentiate between the two accounts of case. I demonstrate that structural case licensing via AGREE can model the above pattern, while the configurational case assignment theory (as it stands) cannot. In the latter part of the talk, I investigate how the configurational case theory would need to be modified to deal with the facts; the discussion gives rise to a significantly different view of differential subject marking in which the genitive, although homophonous with the genitive case, it actually the exponent of a movement relation (like focus or topic marking). I then explore what kinds of crosslinguistic predictions this makes for situations in which apparent case markers actually mark both a derived position for the relevant argument, and the differential status of an argument.
The talk will take place at 2 pm in the Cave.