WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Congratulations to Jenny Bellik, who passed the Qualifying Exam last quarter with her paper, “Turkish onset-cluster repair: an acoustic and ultrasound study”. The committee – Jean E. Fox Tree (Psychology), Grant McGuire, Susan Lin (UC Berkeley), and Jaye Padgett – agreed that it was outstanding work.
Late last quarter Jenny, Grant, Maho, and Jaye attended the Acoustical Society of America Conference, which took place in Honolulu, Hawai’i. Jenny, Grant, and Jaye presented a poster on “Tongue body shape during the production of Irish palatalization and velarization” (work in collaboration with UCSC alum Ryan Bennett of Yale and Máire Ní Chiosáin of University College Dublin). Maho was there to present two posters, “Acoustic characteristics of liquid geminates in Japanese”, and “Acoustics of phonation types and tones in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec” (work in collaboration with Jeff Adler).
Dhyana Buckley and Alissa Trowbridge have each been awarded a Koret Undergraduate Research Scholarship. They will receive a $1,500 scholarship and up to $500 for research expenses. Their faculty mentors are Pranav Anand and Sandy Chung, respectively.
We are happy to report that 3rd year Linguistics major Sabrina Tran has been selected as a 2016-2017 Undergraduate Research Mentorship Participant by Merrill College. Congratulations go to Sabrina and her mentor, Maziar Toosarvandani (who, you can deduce by entailment, is a Merrill fellow).
Sabrina and Maziar summarize the project they will be pursuing here:
Many, though not all, languages restrict possible combinations of arguments (subject, direct object, indirect object) based on certain semantic features, such as person and animacy. The Zapotec languages of Oaxaca, Mexico do this in a particularly spectacular fashion, drawing on elaborate distinctions in person and animacy, as well as formality, age, humanness, and divinity. We will investigate these person-animacy effects in Zapotec, first by constructing an annotated bibliography of linguistic resources for these languages. We will use this bibliography to identify resources for individual languages that describe the distinctions they make and how these shape the combinations of arguments that are or are not allowed. At the end of the project, we will have a better understanding of the grammatical source in Zapotec for these person-animacy effects, and why some languages exhibit them while others do not.
Ben Meriçli returned to Indiana last week to speak at the 2nd Workshop on Turkish, Turkic, and the Languages of Turkey. He reports as follows:
I gave a talk based on bits of my MA thesis, entitled “Indirect Evidence in Denotation and Discourse: At Best Second-Best.” It was a top-notch time, with engaging speakers and interesting work. It was also wonderful to catch up with good friends who’d come all the way from Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University, where I spent much of my summer.
With so much data on puzzling syntactic topics in Turkish, the conference was perhaps most valuable to me for pointing out all the ways my own non-native grammar misses the mark. Who knew the subject of an objectless object relative clause in the locative is nominative, not genitive?!
(If you click through the link, you’ll note that Ben was supposed to have seen a talk by our own Jorge Hankamer, and invited speaker of the conference, but Jorge had to cancel last minute.)
In early December, Jason Ostrove will travel to the University of Arizona for Arizona Linguistics Circle 10. His talk, based on his fieldwork this summer in Scotland, is entitled “Post-Linear Case Assignment in Scottish Gaelic,” and he is looking forward to talking about the puzzles therein. Also speaking at the conference is 2011 BA alum (now UW graduate student) Kirby Conrod.
On November 15th, Kelsey Sasaki spoke at UCB’s F(ieldword)Forum. Below is her report:
A very welcoming group of Berkelians gathered for a lively and productive discussion of my QP work, “Predicate Initiality in Hawai’i Creole.” The opportunity to get FForum’s input on various aspects of my project, from data collection to educational material development, was well worth the harrowing experience of driving the 880.
To hear more about this project, visit S̅-Circle this week, at a special time (11.23 @11am)