Another successful LASC in the book

On March 11, the Department hosted its annual Linguistics at Santa Cruz (LASC) conference, attended by prospective graduate students, current students, faculty, and alumni. The program included presentations by three graduate students and alumnus Eric Potsdam (PhD, 1996), now Professor at University of Florida.

The student presentations showcased recent research going on in the department, featuring:

  • Eli Sharf (3rd-year): “Restrictive Modifiers in Parenthetical Positions”
  • Elifnur Ulusoy (3rd-year): “Effects of Hierarchical Structure in Agreement Attraction: Evidence from Turkish”
  • Maya Wax Cavallaro (5th-year): “The Syllable in Domain Generalization: Evidence from Artificial Language Learning”

The Distinguished Alumnus Lecture given by Eric is on “Exceptives, Ellipsis, and Negation“.

Thank you to all of the students, staff, and faculty who contributed to making this event a success!

  • LASC presenters (left-right): Elifnur Ulusoy, Maya Wax Cavallaro, Eli Sharf, Eric Potsdam

Slugs at UIUC

Undergraduate student Andrew Kato recently gave a talk at ILLS 16 (the Annual Meeting of the Illinois Language & Linguistics Society) titled “The scope-taking of relative measurements” hosted at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (March 1-2). Among the keynote speakers was alum Ruth Kramer (Ph.D. 2009), whose plenary talk was titled “The case against phonological gender assignment: Crosslinguistic evidence from Hausa, Guébie and beyond”.

Slugs in CDMX for FAMLi

UCSC linguists Ryan Bennett and Maya Wax Cavallaro presented at Form and Analysis in Mayan Linguistics (FAMLi) VII in Mexico City Feb 22-23. Maya presented ongoing work on the development of final devoicing processes (“Domain generalization in right-edge phonological phenomena in Mayan“), and Ryan presented an invited conference plenary on the phonology of laryngeal features and segments (Spanish title: Segmentos y rasgos laríngeos en la familia maya: Evidencia que la fonología es abstracta, y distinta de la fonética; English translation: Laryngeal segments and features in the Mayan family: Evidence that phonology is abstract, and different from phonetics).

Also present were Robert Henderson (PhD 2012), Jaime Pérez González (Chancellor’s Postdoc 2021-2023), Sadie Lewis (BA 2023), and Professor Emerita Judith Aissen. Like Ryan, Jaime presented an invited conference plenary, dealing with preferred argument structure in Mocho’, titled “Preferred plot structure in Mocho’“.

You can find the streaming of the conference here (Feb 22, with Ryan and Maya’s presentations) and here (Feb 23, with Jaime’s presentation).

  • Slugs in attendance (left to right): Ryan, Robert, Jaime, Judith (photoshop credit to Maya), Sadie and Maya

Kaplan published in Phonology

Six-year Ph.D. candidate Max Kaplan published an article, “Stratal overgeneration is necessary: metrically incoherent syncope in Southern Pomo” in Phonology.

His abstract is attached:

Southern Pomo (Pomoan, California) displays a process of rhythmic vowel deletion (syncope) reflecting two mutually incompatible metrical structures. This phenomenon, called metrical incoherence, can be derived by an ordered sequence of independent subgrammars, that is, strata. Metrical incoherence is under-attested crosslinguistically, and the stratal models of phonology necessary to generate it have been criticised for predicting counter-typological phenomena. Nevertheless, the Southern Pomo data cannot be generated in more restrictive frameworks. This article argues that overgeneration is a necessary property of the phonological component, and that metrical incoherence is rare because it is difficult to learn. In Southern Pomo, this difficulty appears to have caused grammatical competition and restructuring: a second pattern of syncope, occurring in only a limited context, suggests that learners have reanalysed the grammar as having consistent metrical structure across the derivation. This work thus supports the proposal that diachronic change – and therefore typology – is constrained by extragrammatical factors.

Congrats, Max!

Slugs presented at 2024 CAMP

Over the weekend, Jan 13-14, UCSC psycholinguists present their works at the 6th California Meeting on Psycholinguistics (CAMP) hosted at Stanford University. Third-year Ph.D. student Matthew Kogan presented joint work with faculty Matt Wagers on “Investigating Syntactic Gating during Subject Retrieval with English Ditransitives“. First-year Ph.D. student Ruoqing Yao presented joint work with Jiayi Lu and Judith Degen (Stanford) on “Perceived interpretability predicts stability for CNPC islands but not WH islands“.

 

Fourth-year Ph.D. student Nikolas Webster presented a poster “Investigating prominence alignment processing advantages in Korean nominal“, and first-year Ph.D. student Emily Knick presented a poster titled “Temporal stability and the online assignment of hierarchical prosodic structure“.

Slugs at Centennial LSA Meeting

UCSC Linguistics was well-represented at the centennial Linguistics Society of America meeting that took place in the heart of New York, NY, from Jan 4-7.

Poster-wise, fifth-year Ph.D. candidate Yaqing Cao presented a poster on “Modals and negations LF-PF (mis)matches in English and Mandarin” and second-year Ph.D. student Richard Wang presented a poster on “Distribution of neutral tone and retroflex lenition in Beijing Mandarin“.

Also in attendance were Profs. Matt Wagers and Maziar Toosarvandani, Robert Henderson (U. of Arizona, Ph.D. 2012), Caroline Andrews (U. of Zurich, B.A. 2011), Maura O’Leary (Swarthmore College, B.A. 2013).

  • UCSC Gathering (from left to right): Caroline Andrews, Maura O'Leary, Robert Henderson, Dan Brodkin, Yaqing Cao, Maziar Toosarvandani, Matt Wagers, Ruoqing Yao, Richard Wang

Duff and Hoeks defended dissertation

Recently, two slugs successfully defended their dissertations:

Language comprehension requires a complex series of decisions under uncertainty. This is especially obvious when one string may have multiple different interpretations, whether due to lexical ambiguity, or the potential for an inference beyond literal content. This dissertation profiles how the human system for language comprehension times those decisions, specifically when and why it sometimes postpones them. Evidence comes from nine reading experiments in English probing variation across a range of different types of uncertain meaning (homonymy and polysemy, predicate distributivity, scalar implicatures from some, and causal inferences from discourse coherence) and across two tasks (self-paced-reading and the Maze task of Forster et al., 2009). I highlight two key patterns. First, some decisions are delayed in normal reading, but occur immediately when a rapid decision would be more useful; I conclude that decisions to postpone are flexible and sensitive to a comprehender’s goals. Second, possible pragmatic inferences rapidly affect comprehension, but do not receive any decisive commitment until much later; I conclude that comprehenders may develop expectations gradiently based on multiple possible interpretations before they make a firm decision. Throughout the dissertation, I explore how these and related facts might be explained as a consequence of the ways humans attempt to rationally allocate cognitive resources under uncertainty.

Onto the next chapter, Jack will be working in Vera Demberg’s group in the Department of Language Science and Technology at Saarland University in the southwestern corner of Germany, gathering and modeling data on individual differences in pragmatic comprehension as part of the ERC grant “Individualized Interaction in Discourse”.

Morwenna‘s dissertation broadly aims to show how existing evidence regarding the on-line processing of focus can be brought more in line with an alternative-based understanding of focus as proposed in theoretical semantics, without losing sight of the way general comprehension pressures may shape its interpretation. Using a series of reading tasks, the dissertation shows that comprehenders arrive at a final interpretation of a focus-marked sentence by combining multiple sources of evidence, including lexical, conceptual and world-knowledge, as well as abstract and fine-grained linguistic representations that guide the incremental interpretation of focus independently from such general knowledge. It argues that the comprehension of foci is generally costly because the comprehension of focus involves the construction of an alternative set to a focus, and that comprehenders rapidly revisit semantic representations of the discourse context to do so. This view on focus comprehension then also accounts for the fact that previous results on the reading of foci have been inconsistent, because it allows us to outline more precisely what the contextual factors are that modulate the comprehension of focus and that have so far not been controlled for.

In February 2024, Morwenna will start as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Osnabrück, where she will be working on the incremental comprehension of scalar items, with the goal to better understand the connection between the cognitive and formal mechanisms involved in the interpretation of focus and scalar implicature.

Many congrats, Dr. Duff and Dr. Hoeks!

  • (From left to Right) Amanda Rysling, Jack Duff, Jesse Harris, Matt Wagers, Pranav Anand
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