Category: Student News

It’s the season of strawberries, cherries and defenses: Lauren McGarry defended her MA thesis on May 8th, entitled ‘Pragmatic conditions on non-polar responses’. The thesis is an in-depth investigation of the ways in which indeed and correct, used as responses, differ from polar particles (yes, no) and from one another. One of the results of Lauren’s work is showing that notion of relative epistemic authority (discussed in the formal pragmatics literature in Northrup 2014) is relevant to characterizing these responses. The committee (made up of Adrian Brasoveanu, Donka Farkas (chair), and Jim McCloskey) declared itself very satisfied indeed.

Karen Duek was at the UCSC Graduate Research Symposium last Friday, presenting a poster entitled “Meaning flexibility: the view from containers”. The Graduate Research Symposium is an annual event where graduate students from across UCSC showcase their research to other students, faculty, administrators, and the public at large.

This week, we had not one, but two of our graduate students advance to candidacy by successfully defending their qualifying exams:

Kelsey Kraus defended her QE on April 17, entitled “Performance of English Discourse particles,” with committee Pranav Anand (chair), Donka Farkas, Grant McGuire, and Jean E. Fox Tree (Psychology).

Jason Ostrove defended his QE on April 20. His was entitled “Linear adjacency and case morphology in Scottish Gaelic”, with committee Sandy Chung (chair), Jim McCloskey, Jorge Hankamer, and Ruth Kramer (Georgetown).

Congratulations, Kelsey and Jason!

Graduate student Jeff Adler has been awarded acceptance into the NSF East Asia and Pacific Summer Institute this summer in Japan. Jeff will be conducting research on experimental Japanese phonology at Keio University in Tokyo under the direction of Shigeto Kawahara, a former undergrad exchange student at UCSC. Congratulations!

Hats off to Deniz Rudin and Jenny Bellik, who were awarded Summer Dissertation Fellowships from the Institute for Humanities Research, to help fund work on their dissertations over the summer. In addition to the fellowship, Deniz and Jenny were invited to present their research at the Grad Symposium in Spring 2018. Congratulations!

Congratulations to Deniz Rudin, whose paper “Uncertainty and Persistence: a Bayesian Update Semantics for Probabalistic Expressions” was just published in the most recent issue of the Journal of Philosophical Logic. The abstract can be read below, and the full article accessed here.

This paper presents a general-purpose update semantics for expressions of subjective uncertainty in natural language. First, a set of desiderata are established for how expressions of subjective uncertainty should behave in dynamic, update-based semantic systems; then extant implementations of expressions of subjective uncertainty in such models are evaluated and found wanting; finally, a new update semantics is proposed. The desiderata at the heart of this paper center around the contention that expressions of subjective uncertainty express beliefs which are not persistent (i.e. beliefs that won’t necessarily survive the addition of new information that is compatible with all previous information), whereas propositions express beliefs that are persistent. I argue that if we make the move of treating updates in a dynamic semantics as Bayesian updates, i.e. as conditionalization, then expressions of subjective uncertainty will behave the way we want them to without altering the way propositions behave.