WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Professor Roumi Pancheva gave two invited talks recently, in Texas and (virtually) in Vienna:
From right to left: Junko Ito, Nick Kalivoda, Martin Krämer, Peter Svenonius, Maya Wax Cavarello, Armin Mester
On March 13–14, a group of Santa Cruz linguists participated in the workshop Exploring Boundaries: Phonological Domains in the Languages of the World, held at the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø—the northernmost university in the world.
Professor Junko Ito and Professor Armin Mester gave a talk entitled “Prosodic Windows as Tonal Domains: The Case of Kagoshima Japanese”.
Current PhD student Maya Wax Cavallaro presented her work titled “Evidence for the Syllable in Domain Generalization”.
Junko, Armin, and Maya also reconnected with Martin Krämer (UCSC LRC Research Associate, 2015), now Professor in the Department of Language and Culture at UiT and a co-organizer of the workshop; Nick Kalivoda (PhD 2018), who presented on “Linear and Structural (A)symmetries in Syntax-Prosody Mapping”; and Peter Svenonius (PhD 1994), now Professor in the Department of Language and Culture at UiT, who presented on “Words, Phrases, and the ‘Accentual Complex’ in Iron Ossetic” (joint work with Patrik Bye).
Mia Gong at Tu+10
Duygu Demiray presenting their poster
In early March, Professor Mia Gong attended the 10th Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic (Tu+ 10) at the University of Southern California, where she delivered two talks, “Specification of D Derives Variation in Relative Clauses” (with Eszter Ótott-Kovács), and “Central Asian Turkic and Khalkha past tense systems arose through balanced Turkic-Mongolic contact” (with Joshua Sims and Jonathan Washington).
While at the conference, Mia also reconnected with UCSC alum Duygu Demiray (MA 2024, now a PhD student at UMass Amherst), who presented their joint project with Professor Matt Wagers “Processing covert dependencies: A study on Turkish wh-in-situ”.
PhD student Myke Brinkerhoff and Professor Grant McGuire just saw an article, “Using residual H1* for voice quality research”, appear in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Express Letters.
One of the most common ways of assessing voice quality is through the spectral slope measure H1*–H2*. However, Chai and Garellek [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 152(3), 1856–1870 (2022)] propose and demonstrate the robustness of a new measure—residual H1*. In this study, we test the reliability of residual H1* in capturing voice quality contrasts in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec. We find that residual H1* is a more robust measure of voice quality than H1*–H2* and can capture the differences in voice quality in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec, which supports the use of this measure in voice quality research.
Professor Dustin Chacón recently published two articles. The first, “Disentangling semantic prediction and association in processing filler-gap dependencies: An MEG study in English,” co-authored with Liina Pylkkänen (NYU), appeared in Language, Cognition and Neuroscience.
In this study, we examine plausible filler-gap dependencies (‘which counters did the maids clean?’) with sentences that have an unexpected thematic role (‘which mops did the maids clean __ fastidiously?’). We find that neural activity distinguishes these kinds of sentences ~800ms in right inferior frontal cortex. This is longer and in a different location than other plausible/implausible argument-verb relations (‘Do you think maids/mops clean fastidiously?’), which are distinguished ~400ms in left inferior frontal cortex.
The second article, “Evaluating the time courses of morpho-orthographic, lexical, and grammatical processing following rapid parallel visual presentation: An EEG investigation in English,” co-authored with Donnie Dunagan (UGA), Tyson Jordan (UGA), John Hale (UGA/JHU), and Liina Pylkkänen (NYU), appeared in Cognition.
In this paper, we examine how the brain responds to short sentences displayed for 200ms. We found that the brain distinguishes grammatical sentences (the dogs chase a ball) from scrambled alternatives (ball a chase dogs the) around ~300ms. We show that this brain response is different from brain responses sensitive to (il)legal letter strings, morphological form, and word frequency, suggesting a distinct stage of processing grammatical structure in short sentences read quickly.
The winter issue of Linguistic Inquiry included a new journal article by Professor Mia Gong: “Case in wholesale late merger: Evidence from Mongolian scrambling“.
Takahashi and Hulsey (2009) suggest that wholesale late merger is controlled by case. This article presents novel evidence for this idea from Condition C reconstruction effects in Mongolian local and long-distance scrambling. Departing from previous accounts, I argue that the complexity of the phenomenon reveals that Condition C connectivity is related neither to the position of underlying binders nor to A/Ā-properties—scrambling bleeds Condition C, so long as the case requirement of the late-merged NP can be satisfied. Crucially, I motivate a hybrid case system for Mongolian in which accusative case is assigned as a dependent case. I show that this is both necessary and independently motivated, thereby introducing a fine-grained view of case into the wholesale-late-merger mechanism.
Professor Ivy Sichel saw a journal article appear in a recent issue of the Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies on “The double standard in Modern Hebrew,” co-authored with recent visitor to the department Professor Uri Mor (Ben Gurion University).
In this paper we analyze the social meanings associated with the new native vernacular (NNV) variety of Modern Hebrew as a complex positive stance, constructed via differentiation from its alternatives. NNV is reflexive, and it speaks for itself: for the authority of experience, as opposed to the traditional authority of the text. A speaker of NNV is necessarily an active agent in the propagation of the new collective and its values. We also explore the consolidation and dissemination of these values by cultural agents, focusing on a 1950s column by Dahn Ben Amotz, which presents snapshots of “everyday life” in multiple sites in Israel, as part of the modernist project of constructing a hegemonic folk identity. We show how variation in the use of spoken Hebrew, together with other tropes such as location and ethnic descent, are implicated in the construction of the new folk identity.