Category: Student News

Banana Slugs at GLOW, PLC, and TEAL

Over spring break, linguistics students and faculty were busy presenting posters and talks across the globe:

  • Professor Mia Gong and PhD student Niko Webster attended the 14th Workshop on Theoretical East Asian Linguistics (TEAL), hosted by USC on March 18-20. Mia gave an invited talk, “Two types of long distance scrambling in Khalkha Mongolian,” while Niko gave a talk entitled “Internal argument introduction in Korean complex predicates.”
  • Several UC Santa Cruz linguists attended the main colloquium of the 47th Annual Meeting of Generative Linguistics in the Old World) in Frankfurt am Main at Goethe University on March 25-27. Niko Webster and Professor Ivy Sichel gave a long talk entitled “Information structure alone cannot account for subject islandhood: An experimental study,” where they presented on collaborative work with Mandy Cartner (Tel Aviv University), Matthew Kogan, and Matt Wagers. PhD Student Yaqing Cao gave a lightning talk and poster presentation on “Scope reconstruction in head movements as featural valuations.” While there, they reconnected with Anissa Zaitsu (BA 2017, MA 2018, currently a PhD student at Stanford).
  • Yaqing Cao gave a talk at the 49th Penn Linguistics Conference (PLC), entitled “Ability modal, negation, causation: How to derive the (anti)-actuality entailments?” on April 5-6.

Two articles by Brodkin appear in print

Two journal articles by sixth-year PhD student Dan Brodkin have appeared by “early access” in print. One, “The prosody of the extended VP”, is forthcoming in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory and investigates the syntax-prosody interface in Mandar:

This paper investigates the syntax of VSO and VOS clauses in Mandar (Austronesian) by leveraging the prosody. This language allows free alternations between VSO and VOS orders, but phonotactic diagnostics reveal that VSO strings are optimally parsed into tight prosodic constituents while VOS strings are not. These results converge with syntactic diagnostics to show that VSO orders arise from leftward movement of the verb while VOS orders are generated through an additional step of rightward scrambling of the S. Targeted manipulations then reveal that phonological phrases can be built around substrings of arguments in the VSO string, providing a new type of evidence for fine functional structure in the extended VP (Larson 1988). The prosodic parse of scrambled arguments, finally, shows that scrambling places its targets in adjunct positions (Chomsky 1993) in Mandar, setting up an account of scrambling that is grounded in the principle of Greed (Lasnik 1995).

Another, “Suppletion in global perspective”, will appear in Linguistic Inquiry and analyzes a system of suppletion in Mandar (download the pdf):

This article documents and analyzes a system of suppletive alternations that are conditioned by top-down prosodic context. In Mandar (Austronesian), seven heads supplete at the right edge of the phonological phrase to satisfy an output constraint on foot structure. When phrase-external phonological context makes it possible to resolve this output constraint in a more optimal way, these patterns of suppletion are suspended. These effects suggest that the mechanism that regulates suppletion, Vocabulary Insertion, must be situated within a phonological calculus that can access global context and respond to output constraints.

Congratulations, Dan!

Banana Slugs at HSP

UC Santa Cruz was well represented at the 38th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing, held March 27-29 at the University of Maryland. A number of undergraduates and graduates were there to present their research, including Matthew Kogan, Joshua Lieberstein, Subhekshya Shrestha, and Ruoqing Yao. They were joined by current faculty members Dustin Chacón, Amanda Rysling, and Matt Wagers.

They ran into many grad alumni, including Jack Duff (PhD, 2023) and Duygu Demiray (MA, 2024), undergrad alumni/current Baggett Fellows Jackson Confer (BA, 2022) and Sadie Lewis (BA, 2023), as well as former LRC visitor Mandy Cartner (Tel Aviv University). Two other slugs, 2011 BA alum Caroline Andrews (Zurich) and 2013 MA alum Adam Morgan (NYU Langone), anchored a well-attended and engaging plenary session featuring field psycholinguistics on the last day. They presented their research on case and sentence planning in Shipibo (Andrews) and the comprehension and production of switch reference in Nungon (Morgan). Despite the riveting science, it seems everyone found an opportunity to slip out in the warm weather to see the cherry blossoms or at least to rub Testudo for good luck.

Presentations by current members of the department: 

and those by our alumni:

Another successful LASC

On March 10, the Department hosted its annual Linguistics at Santa Cruz (LASC) conference, attended by prospective graduate students and current students, faculty and alumni. The program included presentations by several graduate students and alumnus Rodrigo Gutiérrez Bravo, now Professor at El Colegio de México.

The student presentations showcased recent research going on in the department, and sparked lively and insightful discussion during the Q & A:

  • Jonathan Paramore led off the presentations with a talk on “Covert URs: evidence from Pakistani Punjabi”
  • Yaqing Cao followed with a talk on “Scope reconstruction in head movements as featural Valuations”
  • Matthew Kogan and Niko Webster presented a talk entitled “Subject islands are not reducible to discourse function”

The Distinguished Alumnus speaker was Professor Rodrigo Gutiérrez Bravo, who gave a talk entitled “Not in the complementizer system: Information Structure features in Spanish clefts and pseudo-clefts”, where he argued that structures which have a position that can show multiple informational properties can be particularly insightful for understanding the interaction between information structure and syntax.

The LASC dinner and celebration that followed at the Cowell Provost House featured delightful conversations, excellent food, and stunning views of the forest and ocean.

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

  • Rodrigo Gutiérrez Bravo [credit: Jungu Kang]
  • Distinguished Alumnus Address — Rodrigo Gutiérrez Bravo
  • Jonathan Paramore [credit: Jungu Kang]
  • Yaqing Cao [credit: Jungu Kang]
  • Matthew Kogan and Niko Webster [credit: Jungu Kang]
  • Yağmur Kiper [credit: Jungu Kang]
  • Matt Wagers offering Closing Remarks [credit: Jungu Kang]
  • Left to right: Maziar Toosarvandani, Matthew Kogan, Matt Wagers, Ivy Sichel, Joshua Lieberstein [credit: Jungu Kang]

Banana Slugs at Tromsø Workshop on Phonological Domains

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). 



Linguistics Students Recognized as 2024-2025 THI Undergraduate Research Fellows

The Humanities Institute (THI) at UC Santa Cruz has announced its 2024-2025 Undergraduate Research Fellows, with 40% of the fellowship awarded to Linguistics students. Among them, Linguistics major Elliot-Elyjah McWhinnie received the Bertha N. Melkonian Prize for submitting the top research proposal. 

Congratulations to the following Linguistics students on their outstanding projects:

  • Katherine Arnold, Linguistics and Applied Linguistics & Multilingualism
    “Nonnative Perception of Italian Consonant Length Contrast”
  • Sam Beatty, Linguistics
    “Gendered voices and Transgender bodies: Where are we? What are we doing? And who are we talking to?”
  • Joshua Lieberstein, Linguistics
    “Verbless Clauses in Mayan K’iche’: A non-copular approach”
  • Elliot-Elyjah Mcwhinnie, Linguistics
    “Zooming in on the regional differences of African American Language in California”

Byun in Phonology

An article by PhD student Hanyoung Byun recently appeared in the journal Phonology. Coauthored with Jongho Jun, Seon Park, and Yoona Yee, it is entitled, “How tight is the link between alternations and phonotactics?”

This study tests the hypothesis that alternation patterns with strong lexical support are more robust than those with no, or weak, lexical support. Focusing on three alternation patterns in Korean with varying productivity and generality, we measured lexical support in two ways. First, we conducted an acceptability-rating experiment investigating Korean speakers’ judgements on non-words with and without violations of the phonotactic constraints motivating the alternations. In addition, we performed a simulation of learning a maximum entropy (MaxEnt) Harmonic Grammar from a dictionary corpus. The results of the experiment and computational modelling confirmed the hypothesis by showing that if an alternation is robust, its associated phonotactic constraint is learned with a high weight from the MaxEnt simulation, and it affects the participants’ well-formedness ratings for non-words. Consequently, the results of this research support the claim of a tight link between alternations and phonotactics.

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