Linguistics faculty and students gathered together last Friday afternoon for the first colloquium of the year, given by Professor Emeritus Jim McCloskey. In a talk entitled “Clauses without Verbs: The Irish Landscape and Beyond,” Jim argued that Irish clauses instantiate one of two basic shapes, one more familiar and another less so. In the latter, a predicate — often something other than a verb — can appear with some, but not all of the regular functional structure of a clause. The talk provided a detailed investigation of a less studied clause type in Irish, and invites re-examination of so-called copular clauses in other languages. The talk was followed by a lively question and answer period, and later that evening a potluck at Ivy’s house.
This past week, Professor Roumyana Pancheva gave a joint talk with Iliana Krapova (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) on “Bulgarian Language and Generative Grammar” at the “Bulgarian Studies and Contemporary Humanities” conference, hosted by the Bulgarian Cultural Institute and Humboldt University in Berlin, (October 27-28).
Together, Dustin and Hareem presented three posters (with co-authors):
“Readers extract some grammatical information in a single fixation, across sentence structures” Dustin A. Chacón, Donald G. Dunagan, and Tyson Jordan
“Quick, don’t move! Wh-movement and wh-in-situ structures in rapid parallel reading—EEG studies in English, Urdu, and Mandarin Chinese” Hareem Khokhar, Jill McLendon, Donald G. Dunagan, Zahin Hoque, Tyson Jordan, and Dustin A. Chacón
“Whisps and whispers in the brain: A crossmodal investigation into morphological decomposition” Tyson Jordan, Donald G. Dunagan, and Dustin A. Chacón
At the beginning of the summer, Professor Maziar Toosarvandani traveled to the town of Santiago Laxopa in the Sierra Norte mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico, as part of the ongoing NSF grant on animacy resumption, co-directed with Ivy Sichel and Matt Wagers, and the Zapotec Language Project. Alongside research activities, Maziar assisted Maestra Fe Silva Robles—a two-time instructor in the graduate field methods course and co-founder of Senderos—as she led a five-day workshop for the town’s residents on reading and writing their Zapotec language.
The workshop built on several years of related activities, including the two field methods classes, a previous literacy workshop in Laxopa, and the ongoing Zapotec language classes here in Santa Cruz that are part of the Department’s Nido de Lenguas initiative. Participants learned how to use a Zapotec alphabet that had been modified to accommodate the unique sounds of the Laxopa variety, and practiced reading and writing with it.
This year’s workshop saw the introduction of two new books to the literature for this Zapotec language, including one written by Maestra Fe herself entitled Bdze’ wenh llinh (“The hardworking ant”). At the conclusion, these books were presented to the municipal authorities, alongside other products from the past year’s workshop: an alphabet poster, additional books, and a number of signs for posting in the town’s streets.
Maestra Fe Silva Robles and workshop participants reading Bdze’ wenh llinh (“The hardworking ant”)
Eli delivered a solo talk on “Speech Acts Without Sincerity: An Analysis of Parenthetical Say in English.” Jess, along with Professor Haoze Li, presented a joint talk titled “Discourse Dynamics as a Cure to the Problem of Too Many Uniqueness Conditions.” Jun presented two posters: one solo poster on “Relative Readings of Japanese ichiban Superlatives” and a joint poster also with Haoze titled “Embedded Questions as Definite Descriptions: An Insight from Japanese.”
In addition to exciting intellectual exchanges, they had the pleasure of reconnecting with some UC Santa Cruz alumni: Lisa Hofmann (currently a postdoctoral researcher at University of Stuttgart), Kelsey Sasaki (currently a research fellow at University of Oxford), and Kyle Rawlins (Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins University).
From left to right: Jess Law, Lisa Hofmann, Kelsey Sasaki, Eli SharfJun Tamura presenting his poster
In September, the 30th Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP) conference took place at the University of Edinburgh, with many current and former students and faculty of the Department presenting posters or talks:
Linguistic boundaries delineate contextual domains in memory Lalitha Balachandran and Matt Wagers
Beyond the left hemisphere: MEG evidence for right temporal lobe recruitment in Bangla morphosyntax processing Dustin Chacón, with Swarnendu Moitra and Linnaea Stockall
Breaking down inflected words and putting the pieces back together involve the left occipitotemporal and orbitofrontal regions: MEG evidence from Tagalog Dustin Chacón, with Dave Kenneth Cayado, Samantha Wray, Marco Chia-Ho Lai, Suhail Matar, and Linnaea Stockall
Processing covert dependencies: A study on Turkish wh-in-situ Duygu Demiray (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and Matt Wagers
Effects of foil processing, decision-making, and initial attention in the Maze task Jack Duff (Saarland University), Pranav Anand, and Amanda Rysling
Deprioritizing linguistic material: The role of givenness on focus and filler-gap processing Morwenna Hoeks (University of Osnabrück), Maziar Toosarvandani, and Amanda Rysling
Linguistic boundaries reduce encoding interference in temporal order memory Stephanie Rich (Concordia University), Lalitha Balachandran, and Matt Wagers
Animacy and long-distance pronominal anaphora in discourse: Evidence from the Maze Kelsey Sasaki (Oxford University), Pranav Anand, Amanda Rysling
Subject islands are not caused by information structure clashes: evidence from topicalization Niko Webster, Matthew Kogan, Mandy Cartner (Tel Aviv University), Matt Wagers, and Ivy Sichel
