Category: Faculty News

The 35th meeting of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT 35) recently took place at Harvard University (May 20-22). Professor Adrian Brasoveanu gave a talk entitled “Towards a Cognitively Plausible Quantitative Formalization of Counterfactual Interpretation.” Several department alumni were also in attendance, including Professor Chris Barker (PhD, 1991; NYU) and the following presenters:

• Jack Duff (PhD, 2023; Saarland) and Kelsey Sasaki (PhD, 2021; Oxford) — both soon to be Assistant Professors — presented a poster, “Incremental interpretation of discourse coherence: Evidence from reading times” (with Daniel Altshuler)
• Professor Robert Henderson (PhD, 2012; Arizona) presented a poster, “Semantic micro-variation in distributive marking in Highland Mayan Sign Language” (with Sybil Vachaudez, Samantha Prins, Juan Sian Ajsivinac, Carlo Geraci, and Jeremy Kuhn)
• Professor Scott AnderBois (PhD, 2011; Brown) gave two talks: “Cross-linguistic variation in the lexical semantics of conjunction” (with Daniel Altshuler, Shen Aguinda, Guillaume Guitang, and Nathaniel Scott) and “Propositional anaphora and salience in the semantics of ”in which case,” which was led by two of his undergraduate students (Daniel Kang and Koda Li).

Pictured (from left to right): Robert Henderson, Scott AnderBois, Jack Duff, Chris Barker, Adrian Brasoveanu, and Kelsey Sasaki

During May 16-17, Professor Pranav Anand traveled to the University of Maryland for Mayfest, where he spoke and met up with several BA alums. This year’s Mayfest focused on constraints and gaps in lexical meaning, and Pranav’s talk, English ‘coming-to-know’ predicates: evidence and knowledge, reported on joint work with Natasha Korotkova on the lexical structure of a rich class of semi-factives. Also presenting was Professor Aaron Steven White (BA 2009), whose talk, Inducing lexical semantic generalizations, detailed a computational model that learns distributional and inferential generalizations. In addition to White, Pranav got the chance to catch up with recent BA alums Jackson Confer and Sadie Lewis, who were finishing their Baggett Fellowships, and Sarah Lee, who is now attending the University of California, College of the Law.

Professor Pranav Anand

The Humanities Institute (THI), a center for scholarly inquiry in the humanities on campus, has been celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. A recent long-form piece in the UC Santa Cruz Magazine recognizes THI’s many achievements, building critical infrastructure to support research excellence and student success.

THI was founded in 1999 by Professor Emeritus Jorge Hankamer, then Dean of Humanities, and linguists have continued to be involved in its development. THI’s Managing Director is Irena Polić (BA, 2001, MA 2003), and the current faculty director is Professor Pranav Anand. 

Congratulations, THI!

Jorge Hankamer, with Mary-Kay Gamel (Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature), Jennifer H. Yearley (BA, 1991) and April Dawn (photo by Don Harris; courtesy of UCSC Special Collections)

Professor Jess Law recently published a paper with a former BA student Colin Hirschberg, entitled “An affectedness approach to Mandarin passives“, in the Journal of East Asian Linguistics. Colin is now pursuing graduate studies in Linguistics at Rutgers University. This paper stemmed from the course LING188 Structure of Chinese Linguistics, taught by Jess in Fall 2021 and sponsored by UCSC Global Engagement. On April 18, Jess also gave a zoom talk based on this work at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University in Taiwan. Congratulations, Jess and Colin! 

Abstract: Mandarin bei-passives differ from English be-passives in exhibiting robust semantic constraints. They need to be licensed, by telicity, the experiential perfect, or predicates allowing intention transmittion. These seemingly disjunctive licensing conditions can receive a unified account, based on the semantic notion of affectedness, which we analyze as a family of implicationally organized affectee roles following Beavers (2011). It is argued that Mandarin passives require the highest level of affectedness, which predicts the incompatibility with thematic liberality and the possibility of gapless passives. We also discuss how the affectedness approach can be extended in novel ways to understand the relevance of social impact in bei-passives and to capture cross-linguistic differences in passives.

The past year has seen a spate of faculty publications in phonology and phonetics. Two are a product of collaborations between Professors Ryan Bennett, Grant McGuire, and Jaye Padgett and co-authors. One, “Effects of syllable position and place of articulation on secondary dorsal contrasts: An ultrasound study of Irish” (Journal of Phonetics, vol. 107), co-authored with Jenny Bellik (PhD, 2019), shows that the Irish palatalization contrast is produced less robustly in syllable codas than in onsets, and more variably in labial consonants and in codas. These results are related to cross-linguistic asymmetries in the occurrence of a palatalization contrast. The second, “Russian palatalization is a matter of the tongue body” (Journal of Slavic Linguistics, vol. 32) argues what its title says and against alternative accounts that view the Russian contrast as primarily one involving pharyngealization or [ATR].

Jaye also saw another article come out over the past year, also a collaboration with co-authors. “An acoustic study of ATR in Tima vowels: Vowel quality, voice quality and duration” (Phonology, vol. 41, e2) provides an acoustic analysis of the ATR contrast in Tima, a very understudied language of Sudan, and shows that voice quality is implicated in the contrast along with the more familiar F1 differences.