Bennett and Padgett present at ICPhS 2023

In August, at the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS) in Prague, Ryan Bennett and Jaye Padgett presented a poster called “The timing of secondary dorsal articulations across syllable positions in Irish“. This is joint work with Grant McGuire, Jenny Bellik, and Máire Ní Chiosáin of University College Dublin.

Ryan Bennett had another talk at the same ICPhS called “Phonetic variability in the realization of glottalized stops in Uspanteko (Mayan)” (co-authored with Robert Henderson, UCSC Ph.D. 2012, now Associate Professor at U Arizona, and Meg Harvey, Brown University).

Ph.D. alumna Maho Morimoto (2020) was also present with her joint work with colleagues, one titled “Tongue contours for the Japanese moraic nasal by speakers of Standard Chinese“, and the other “Articulatory timing of the Japanese singleton and geminate /t/ produced by speakers of Standard Chinese“.

Slugs at CreteLing 2023

CreteLing celebrated its fifth anniversary this summer, which took place from July 15 to July 28 in Rethymnon, Greece. 

Professor Ivy Sichel co-taught a class with Karlos Arregui (Professor, University of Chicago) titled “Socio-grammar”, which focused on gender asymmetries and markedness in language and the actual world. And Professor Sichel described her experience at CreteLing as “a perfect balance between intense learning and a laid-back communal atmosphere”.

Professor Roumyana Pancheva co-taught a class on “Comparative Syntax and Semantics of Slavic” with Barbara Citko (Professor, University of Washington) and Sergei Tatevosov (Professor, Moscow State University).

Professor Emerita Donka Farkas co-taught “The Semantics of Mood” with Paul Portner (Professor, Georgetown University).

B.A. alumnus Eric Baković (Professor and Chair at UC San Diego) co-taught “Computation, Learning and Phonological Theory” with Adam Albright (Professor, MIT).

Ph.D. students Yağmur Kiper and Elifnur Ulusoy, M.A. students Duygu Demiray and Larry Lyu, and recent B.A. alumnus Jackson Confer were also in attendance.

  • Professor Ivy Sichel

(Photo credits: CreteLing Summer School Facebook)

Banana slugs at the Summer Institute

Linguists from UC Santa Cruz are well represented at the 2023 Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute, which is taking place June 19-July 14 at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Rising second year PhD student Richard Wang is in attendance, after receiving a highly selective Linguistic Institute Fellowship.

Professor Matt Wagers is co-teaching a course on Field Psycholinguistics, with PhD alumnus Jed Pizarro Guevara (PhD 2020), who is currently a postdoctoral researcher at UMass.

Other banana slugs in attendance include Professor Eric Bakovic (BA, 1993), who is teaching a course on What Exactly is Phonological Opacity, Professor Kyle Rawlins (PhD, 2008), who is teaching a course on Advanced Pragmatics, and Professor Aaron White (BA, 2009), who is teaching a course on Representation Learning for Syntactic and Semantic Theory.

Walker in Nijmegen

On June 1, Professor Rachel Walker presented a paper on “Metaphony and asymmetric positional activity” at the Phonetics and Phonology in Europe (PaPE) satellite workshop on “Metaphony: Theoretical, Descriptive, and Typological issues” at Radboud University in Nijmegen. She was also a co-organizer of the workshop. Aaron Kaplan (PhD, 2008), currently Associate Professor at the University of Utah), was also in attendance, giving an invited talk on “Prominence conflicts in Bolognese.”

Bennett at HISPhonCog

Last week, Professor Ryan Bennett presented a talk at HISPhonCog in Seoul, entitled “Syllable position in secondary dorsal contrasts: an ultrasound study of Irish.” While there, he had the opportunity to catch up with some past and future students in the department. Maho Morimoto (PhD, 2020) also presented at the conference, and incoming PhD student Hanyoung Byun was in attendance as well.

HisPhonCog

Maho Morimoto, Hanyoung Byun, Ryan Bennett (from left to right)

Chung on YouTube

PulanSpeaks is a Guam-based YouTube-channel devoted to the creating and sharing of video discussions of cultural and political issues affecting Pacific island cultures and communities. It is hosted by Edward Leon Guerrero, who became a cultural and language activist as an undergraduate at the University of Guam. In the most recent installment of PulanSpeaks (April 15th), Guerrero hosted Professor Emerita Sandy Chung in a discussion of her career-long commitment to the study of the Chamorro language (or Chamoru as it is known in Guam), and of the character, origin, and history of the language. They also consider the issues that the language currently faces in the Mariana Islands, and the history of her own involvement with the language and its communities. 

Toosarvandani at UCLA

This past Friday, Professor Maziar Toosarvandani gave a colloquium in the Department of Linguistics at UCLA. His talk on “Representing animacy in the grammar”, reported some recent results relating to the ongoing NSF funded project on animacy and resumption. The abstract for his talk is below:

We are used to thinking about person, number, and gender as features to which the grammar is sensitive. But the place of animacy is less familiar, despite its robust syntactic activity in many languages. I investigate the pronominal system of Southeastern Sierra Zapotec, identifying an interpretive parallel between animacy and person. Third person plural pronouns, which encode a four-way animacy distinction in the language, exhibit a cluster of interpretive properties I call “associativity”; these have been argued also to characterize first and second person plural pronouns. Building on Kratzer’s (2009) and Harbour’s (2016) theories of person, I propose a plurality-based semantics for animacy that captures their shared properties. The compositional mechanism underlying this semantics ties person and animacy features to a single syntactic position inside the noun phrase. This enables an understanding of these features’ shared relevance to syntactic operations, including those underlying pronoun cliticization.

While down south, Maziar had the opportunity to catch up with fellow Oto-Mangueanist Ben Eischens (PhD, 2022), who is now on the linguistics faculty at UCLA.

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