WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
On Saturday February 10, Nick Kalivoda presented joint work with Jenny Bellik on “Danish Stød in Recursive Prosodic Words” at Fonologi i Norden (FiNo; Phonology in the Nordic Countries). The conference was hosted by Lund University in southern Sweden, and featured many interesting talks and lively discussion.
Two squibs by graduate student Erik Zyman have been published in the latest issue of Snippets. The first argues that gestures and nonlinguistic objects can occur in DP positions, and when they do, the relevant DPs are subject to the Case Filter. The second argues that interjections can take complements and project InterjPs—i.e., that they select and project exactly like Ns, Vs, As, and Ps. A generalization that emerges from the two squibs is that phenomena that one might initially be tempted to dismiss as paralinguistic or even entirely nonlinguistic can turn out on closer scrutiny to interact directly with the core operations of syntax (Merge, selection, projection, Case assignment, etc.).
On Friday January 26, graduate students Nick Kalivoda and Erik Zyman gave a talk on “XP- and X⁰-movement in the Latin Verb: Evidence from Mirroring and Anti-Mirroring” at Stanford’s Syntax and Morphology Circle. They report that they received a warm welcome and a great many helpful questions and suggestions, for which collēgīs Stanfordiēnsibus grātiās agunt.
Double congratulations are in order for undergraduate Christopher Garcia, who has received both a Koret Scholarship and a Humanities Undergraduate Research Fellowship (HURF, formerly HUGRA). The project for which Garcia received both awards is titled “Relative Clauses in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec: Islands, Crossover, and Parasiticity”. His faculty mentor for the Koret scholarship is Maziar Toosarvandani. Additionally, as part of the HURF award, he will be invited to present his work at the Humanities Spring Awards event and poster presentation session.
Congratulations again, Christopher!
In the fall quarter of 2017, two of our graduate students advanced to candidacy by successfully defending their qualifying exams:
Margaret Kroll defended her QE on December 1, 2017. The QE is part of a larger project exploring the ways in which prosody and discourse status interface with working memory. Her committee included Matt Wagers (chair), Pranav Anand, Adrian Brasoveanu, and Brian Dillon (UMass, Amherst).
Steven Foley defended his QE on December 6, 2017, entitled “Cues and preferences in relative clause processing: Reading time evidence from Georgian.” The project comprises a series of self-paced reading studies on relative clauses in Georgian, aiming to understand how parsers navigate the language’s split-ergative case system and flexible word order while they process filler–gap dependencies. A lively discussion with committee members Sandy Chung, Masha Polinsky (University of Maryland), Maziar Toosarvandani, and Matt Wagers (chair) revealed promising avenues for future work, including the proper syntactic analysis of null-operator relative clauses, and how to distinguish cataphora with silent pronouns from gap-before-filler wh-dependencies.
(Belated) congratulations, Margaret and Steven!
The streets of Salt Lake City were full to their 132-foot-wide brim with slugs over the January 4-7 weekend at the annual meeting of the Linguistics Society of America. Featured were a slew of presentations and posters by current graduate students: Jenny Bellik, Steven Foley, Nick Kalivoda, Tom Roberts, and Erik Zyman. The greater UCSC diaspora was also well-represented with the many alumni presenting work, including Aaron Kaplan (Utah), Anya Lunden (William & Mary), Ruth Kramer (Georgetown), Nick LaCara (Toronto), Mark Norris (Oklahoma), Jason Riggle (Chicago), and Nathan Sanders (Toronto)–to say nothing of the scores of alums in attendance. Attendees reported a collegial, stimulating atmosphere and expressed both joy at reuniting with old friends and pleasant surprise at the robustness of the SLC craft brewing scene.
Tom Roberts was in Amsterdam December 18-19 at InqBnB2, a workshop on inquisitivity organized by former LRC visitors Jakub Dotlačil (Groningen) and Floris Roelofsen (Amsterdam). Tom presented a talk on “Relating Form and Meaning in Negative Polar Questions,” based on ongoing work about the semantics/pragmatics divide in the interpretation of Estonian NPQs. Alum Scott AnderBois (Brown) also contributed to the strong showing among Santa Crustaceans with an invited talk on QUD downdating in Tagalog. Tom describes the atmosphere as equal parts convivial and informative: in addition to engaging with people on the cutting-edge of investigating meaning in questions, he was pleased to obtain extensive secondhand knowledge about the activities of the Amsterdam counterculture in the 1970s.