WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Erik Zyman will be defending his dissertation at 3:00pm on Thursday, March 15th, in HUM 1 Room 202. Erik’s dissertation is titled “On the Driving Force for Syntactic Movement.” The committee consists of Jim McCloskey(chair), Sandy Chung, and Jorge Hankamer.
It’s that time of year again! This Saturday, March 10 will be Linguistics at Santa Cruz (LASC), the annual UCSC linguistics research conference showcasing second- and third-year graduate student research. The all-day event will take place in Stevenson Fireside Lounge. Four talks will be given this year spanning the subfields of syntax, semantics, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, and numerous combinations therein. Following the talks there will be a poster session with research devoted to a similar mix. The languages investigated this year include English, Somali, Hebrew, Old Japanese, and Gujarati. At the end of the day, the Distinguished Alumnus Lecture will be given by Peter Svenonius (University of Tromsø) on “The syntactic word.” Don’t miss it!
This Friday, March 2nd, at 1:30 pm in Humanities 1, Room 210, there will be a colloquium by Kristen Syrett (Rutgers). Her talk is entitled “Experimental evidence for context sensitivity in the nominal domain: What children and adults reveal.” The abstract is given below:
Part of what it means to become a proficient speaker of a language is to recognize that the context in which we communicate with each other, including what a speaker’s intentions or goals are, affects the way we arrive at certain interpretations. This seems entirely reasonable for context-dependent expressions like pronouns (they) or relative gradable adjectives (big, expensive), but what about seemingly stable expressions, such as count nouns (fork, ball)? Are words like these—words that appear early in child-directed and child-produced speech—also sensitive to context? In collaborative research with Athulya Aravind (MIT), we have asked precisely this question. We start with a curious yet robust puzzle observed in the developmental psychology literature: young children, when presented with a set of partial and whole objects (like forks) and asked to count or quantify them, appear to treat the partial objects as if they were wholes (Shipley & Shepperson 1990, among others). While children’s non-adult-like behavior may be taken to signal a conceptual shift in development, we adopt a different perspective, entertaining the possibility that children are doing something that adults might indeed be willing to do in certain instances, and that their response patterns reveal something interesting about the context sensitivity of nouns, which we argue is similar to that seen with gradable adjectives. Across three tasks, we show that adults and children are more alike than the previous research has revealed: both age groups not only include partial objects but also impose limits on their inclusion in a category, depending on the speaker’s intentions or goals and the perceptual representation of the object, and a comparison with gradable adjectives reveals (perhaps surprisingly) that adults recruit a minimum standard of comparison for nominals. Thus, we argue there is conceptual and linguistic continuity in this aspect of development, and that experimental data from both children and adults sheds light on the semantics of nominal expressions.
This Friday, February 16th, at 1:20 pm in Humanities 1, Room 210, there will be a colloquium by Adam Ussishkin (University of Arizona). His talk is entitled “Roots, or consonants? On the early role of morphology in lexical access.” The abstract is given below:
Words consist of a phoneme or letter sequence that maps onto meaning. Most prominent theories of both auditory and visual word recognition portray the recognition process as a connection between these units and a semantic level. However, there is a growing body of evidence in the priming literature suggesting that there is an additional, morphological level that mediates the recognition process. In morphologically linear languages like English, however, morphemes and letter or sound sequences are co-extensive, so the source of priming effects between related words could be due to simple phonological overlap as opposed to morphological overlap. In Semitic languages, though, the morphological structure of words reduces this confound, since morphemes are interdigitated in a non-linear fashion. Semitic words are typically composed of a discontiguous root (made up of three consonants) embedded in a word pattern specifying the vowels and the ordering between consonants and vowels. Active-passive pairs in Maltese illustrate this relationship (the root is underlined); e.g., fetaħ ‘open’-miftuħ ‘opened’. In this talk, I report on a series of experiments on the Semitic language Maltese investigating the extent to which root morphemes facilitate visual and auditory word recognition, and to what extent potential priming effects are independent of the phonological overlap typically inherent in morphological relationships. These experiments make use of the visual masked (Forster and Davis, 1984) and auditory masked (Kouider and Dupoux, 2005) priming techniques. The results of the experiments show that not only do roots facilitate visual and auditory word recognition in Maltese, but that these morphological effects are independent of phonological overlap effects.
This Friday, January 19th, at 1:20 pm in Humanities 1, Room 210, there will be a colloquium by Martina Wiltschko (University of British Columbia). Her talk is entitled “Nominal speech act structure. A personal view.” The abstract is given below:
The concept of person is in many ways tied to speech acts. This is obvious just by exploring the interpretation of pronouns: 1st person pronouns are used to refer to the speaker, 2nd person pronouns are used to refer to the addressee, and 3rd person is used for individuals other than the speech act participants. Another way in which person plays a role for speech acts has to with the fact that in much of the current literature that seeks to “syntacticize speech acts” (Ross 1970, Speas and Tenny 2003, Zu 2013, Miyagawa 2017, a.o.) speech act participants are part of the syntactic representation of sentences, as evidenced, for example, by speaker or addressee-agreement. However, 1st and 2nd person pronouns can receive an impersonal interpretation (Gruber 2013, Zobel 2014) while still triggering grammatical agreement for 1st and 2nd person. This suggests that there are at least two notions of person: one purely grammatical and the other pragmatic in nature.
In this talk I examine yet another way in which person may be tied to speech acts. In particular, assuming the well- established parallel between the functional architecture of clauses and nominal projections (Chomsky 1970, Abney 1987, Grimshaw 2005, Rijkhoff 2008), we might expect that – just as clauses – nominal projections too are dominated by a dedicated speech act structure. Specifically, I will argue that the arguments of (clausal and nominal) speech act structure do not correspond to speech act participants directly, but instead they correspond to each speech act participant’s ‘ground’ – hence I assume a speaker- and addressee-oriented projection. The function of this layer of structure is to encode the mutual process of grounding – the joint activity which allows interlocutors to establish common ground. To support this hypothesis, I review literature from dialogue based frameworks according to which referring to an individual is a collaborative effort between speaker and addressee (Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs 1986, Clark and Bangerter 2004). With this as my background assumption, I discuss the implications of the nominal speech act hypothesis for a number of empirical phenomena including: impersonals, logophors, and social deixis.
A workshop on pronoun competition will take place at UC Santa Cruz April 27-28, 2018 . The workshop is being organized by Jim McCloskey, Ivy Sichel & Matt Wagers. The abstract submission deadline is January 19th, 2018. Find more information about the workshop here.
Last Saturday (November 18), the department hosted an IHR-funded workshop entitled Syntax-Prosody in Optimality Theory (SPOT). The workshop, which was organized by Junko Ito and Armin Mester, featured invited talks from guests Shinichiro Ishihara (Lund University), Lisa Selkirk (UMass Amherst), and Nicholas Rolle (UC Berkeley). There were also several talks from UCSC students and faculty. Jenny Bellik and Nick Kalivoda presented their application SPOT, a computational tool for research on the syntax-prosody interface, and some theoretical consequences of the program’s constraint definitions. Ryan Bennett (UCSC) presented joint work with Jim McCloskey (UCSC) and Emily Elfner (York University) on “Incorporation, focus and the phonology of ellipsis in Irish”. The talks all resulted in stimulating discussion. In addition to the visiting speakers, interested faculty and students made the journey to Santa Cruz from Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Fresno State. The workshop culminated in a reception, where the warm and friendly air and conversation continued.
Below are a few photos from Junko’s phone. More photos from the IHR photographer coming soon!
