Category: Student News

Webster at 49. Öster­rei­chi­sche Lin­guis­tik­ta­gung

PhD student Nikolas Webster presented at 49. Öster­rei­chi­sche Lin­guis­tik­ta­gung (The 49th Austrian linguistics conference; ÖLT49), held in December in Klagenfurt am Wörthersee, Austria. He presented a talk entitled “Sino-Korean predicates and the nature of syntactic categorization” as part of the special workshop Native vs. Borrowed Word Formation in Synchrony and Diachrony, which focused on the interaction between lexical borrowing and grammatical structure across languages.

Niko at ÖLT49

Tamura in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory

PhD student Jun Tamura has recently published a paper titled “Compounding words in the syntax can produce phrasal phonology: Evidence from Japanese Aoyagi morphemes” in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory. The paper grew out of Jun’s QP1, chaired by Ryan Bennett, with Rachel Walker and Mia Gong serving on the committee. Congratulations Jun!

Abstract: Various proposals have been made to account for mismatches between syntax and prosody in natural languages. Prosodic prespecification (i.e., prosodic subcategorization) attributes such mismatches to morpheme-specific prosodic requirements (Bennett et al. 2018; Tyler 2019). On the other hand, Hsu (2019) and Revithiadou and Markopoulos (2021) argue that some patterns previously analyzed through subcategorization can instead be captured in Gradient Harmonic Grammar (Smolensky and Goldrick 2016) without a syntax-prosody mismatch. This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion about the syntax–prosody mismatch by addressing ‘Aoyagi prefixes’ in Japanese (e.g., gen ‘current’ in gen-daijin ‘current Minister’). While the ‘word-internal phrase boundary’ associated with Aoyagi morphemes has been attributed to prosodic subcategorization (Poser 1990), I argue that such subcategorization is unnecessary. The key evidence lies in the fact that all Aoyagi morphemes are accented. Vance (2008) and Ito and Mester (2013) independently observe that a prosodic phrase boundary emerges between the first and second elements only when the first element is an accented prosodic word in Japanese. Building on this correlation between accent and prosodic phrasing, I put forward an alternative analysis: I propose that Aoyagi morphemes are not prefixes but syntactic words (X⁰), such that the entire Aoyagi construction should be analyzed as a syntactic compound [X⁰ X⁰ X⁰] (Booij 2010). Given this structure, their prosodic behavior follows from an XP-to-φ mapping system (Ito and Mester 2013), where constraints on accent placement play a crucial role in mapping syntactic heads to phonological phrases, overriding Match constraints.

Slugs Embrace Yolo @ CAMP[8]

Santa Cruzans migrated en masse to Yolo County last weekend for CAMP[8], to participate in the eighth edition of the California Meeting on Psycholinguistics, held at UC Davis from Nov 14-16. CAMP featured presentations (in chronological order) from Matt Wagers (“Hands-on LLM Tutorial”, with Rachel Ryskin), Matthew Kogan & Ruoqing Yao (“Sources of distortion and confusion in distributed representations of morphosyntactic structure”, with Wagers) & Cal Boye-Lynn (“A Fricative by Any Other Name: A Close Replication of Shinn & Blumstein (1984)”, with Grant McGuire & Amanda Rysling).

It also featured encounters with a number of barn-yard animals, like a Muscovy duck (pictured), some friends from UCLA (also pictured), and near-collisions with Davis’ famously numerous cyclists (imagined anxiously).

Promenading duck at the Ruhstaller Farm. Photo credit: Subhs Shrestha.

Linguists, Applied Linguists and Psychologists, oh my! L to r: Shrestha, Liu, Chan (APLX), Boye-Lynn, Hoversten (PSYC), Rysling, Yao, Kogan, Duff (UCLA Linguistics; UCSC Ph.D. ’23), Carpick, Wagers. Photo credit: M. Afkir.

Goings-on in Gotham

Santa Cruz was well represented at NELS56, recently held at NYU (October 17-19, 2025).

Current and erstwhile slugs delivered at least four talks and four posters at this year’s edition of NELS:

Talks

  1. Yağmur Kiper, “Ellipsis as leverage for dependent case theory”
  2. Emily Knick, “Proximate futures in English and Turkish: An analogy between spatial and temporal proximity”
  3. Aidan Katson, “Expanding the nominal in English ACC- and POSS-ing nominalizations”
  4. Emilio Gonzalez, (UCSC B.A. ’22), now a graduate student in Linguistics at UCSD, “Condition A, logophors, and wh-movement”

Posters

  1. Emma Slater-Smith,”An Agree-based Account of PCC in English Double Object Constructions”
  2. Mandy Cartner (Tel Aviv University), “Intra-sentential code switching at the syntax-prosody interface”, co-authored with Julia Horvath
  3. Niko Webster and Ivy Sichel, “Subject islands do not reduce to construction-specific discourse function”, co-authored with Mandy Cartner, Matthew Kogan, and Matt Wagers

Front (l to r): Sichel, Cartner & Gonzalez;
Back (“”): Katson, Slater-Smith, Webster, Kiper, Knick

Six Slugs A-sinnin’!

According to Wiktionary, a collective of slugs may be referred to as a cornucopia. With all due emphasis on that modal, there’s no denying that Banana Slugs were copious at last month’s edition of Sinn und Bedeutung. Held at Goethe University Frankfurt, SuB30 featured presentations from many community members:

You can see most of these folks pictured below!

(l to r): Sharf, Knick, Hofmann, Unidentified Frankfurter, Li, Tamura. Not pictured: Cao.

Banana Slugs at AMP 2025

This year’s Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP 2025) was held September 25–26 at UC Berkeley, and UCSC was well represented by both current graduate students and alumni.

Among our current grads, Jonathan Paramore gave a talk titled “Modeling Phonetic Neutralization in Exemplar Theory.” Hanyoung Byun presented “Lenis obstruent voicing in Seoul Korean: Phonological or phonetic?”. Hanyoung’s abstract was also selected for the Best Student Abstract Award. Larry Lyu presented a poster, “The local meets the non-local: assimilation-induced transparency in vowel harmony.”

Hanyoung Byun
Jonathan Paramore
Larry Lyu

We were also delighted to see several UCSC alumni at AMP this year, including Eric Baković (UC San Diego; BA 1993), Ben Eischens (UCLA; PhD 2022), Sara Finley (Pacific Lutheran University; BA 2003), Aaron Kaplan (University of Utah; PhD 2008), and Ben Sommer (BA 2025).

From left to right: Ben Sommer, Jonathan Paramore, Hanyoung Byun, Ben Eischens, Aaron Kaplan, Larry Lyu, Eric Baković

Paramore in Journal of the International Phonetic Association

PhD student Jonathan Paramore recently published an article in Journal of the International Phonetic Association titled “The acoustic correlates of word-level stress and focus-related prominence in Mankiyali,” coauthored with Aurangzeb, a native speaker of Mankiyali. Congratulations, Jonathan!

Abstract: This paper investigates the acoustic correlates of word-level stress and phrase-level focus-related prominence in Mankiyali, a highly endangered Indo-Aryan language spoken in Northwest Pakistan that utilizes a weight-sensitive stress system. Of the acoustic properties measured (duration, f0, intensity, spectral tilt, and vowel quality), duration was the only feature found to robustly and consistently correlate with word-level stress across syllable types. In contrast, phrase-level focus-related prominence corresponded to an amplification of all five acoustic features measured. Given that vowel duration serves a vital role in preserving lexical contrast in Mankiyali, these findings present difficulties for a strong version of the Functional Load Hypothesis, which claims that acoustic properties bearing a high functional load in a language will not be used to mark prominence. In addition, results support an analysis of Mankiyali’s stress system as having five distinct levels of weight, a pattern which is extremely rare, if not unattested, elsewhere in the world’s languages.

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