Category: Faculty News

The most recent issue of the journal Semantics and Pragmatics is now available online. Included in it is a paper by Maziar Toosarvandani on ‘Contrast and the Structure of Discourse.’ The paper deals with the meaning of the coordinator ‘but’ and proposes that it makes conventional reference to the question under discussion (QUD), in the sense of Craige Roberts. The analysis provides a new perspective on the relationships between the different uses of ‘but’ (as a type of modal polysemy in Kratzer’s sense), and suggests that other expressions that have been argued to have conventional implicatures might also make conventional reference to the QUD. The abstract can be read here and the paper itself can be downloaded here.

It was announced during the week that Amy Rose Deal had won a Hellman Fellowship. The UCSC Hellman Fellows Program was established in 2011 to provide research support to pre-tenure faculty members who show a capacity for great distinction in their research. The Hellman Follows Program has been established at thirteen institutions, nine of them campuses of the University of California.

Maziar Toosarvandani travelled to the Linguistics Department at UC San Diego on Monday April 14th to give a colloquium. The talk was based on Maziar’s ongoing fieldwork and it was entitled The temporal interpretation of clause chaining in Northern Paiute.

During the break between Winter and Spring quarters, Amy Rose Deal travelled to the northeast, where she gave two talks about relative clauses. One was a colloquium at McGill, and the other was a guest lecture in Rajesh Bhatt‘s seminar on syntactic theory in Amherst. Both talks were entitled Cyclicity and connectivity in Nez Perce relative clauses and were based on a paper now available here.

Meanwhile Adrian Brasoveanu also travelled to the northeast recently—to Rutgers on the weekend of April 5th and 6th to present a paper in a workshop there organized by the Philosophy Department and by RUCCS on Quantifier Domain Restriction and Epistemic Modals (the program for the workshop is available here). Adrian was one of three speakers invited to present at the workshop (along with Kai von Fintel of MIT and Craige Roberts of OSU). The title of his talk was Updating Quantifier Scope Representations in Discourse: An Experimental Study.

A new paper by Grant McGuire and co-authors has just appeared online in the Journal of Laboratory Phonology. The paper—Novelty and social preference in phonetic accommodation—deals with the interaction between vocal imitation and mechanisms of language change (the abstract is available here). The paper results from a collaboration among Grant, Molly Babel of UBC, Sophia Walters also of UBC, and undergraduate alumna Alice Nicholls.