WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Graduate student Margaret Kroll traveled to nearby Berkeley a couple Fridays ago (April 8) for their linguistic department’s Syntax and Semantics Circle. She gave a talk on “Polarity reversals under sluicing.” Margaret reported that she received a warm welcome and a variety of interesting questions and comments on her paper. After the talk, she and her accompanying UCSC-ers joined their hosts for drinks and food at a local establishment.
Also not too long ago, graduate student Jeff Adler returned from attending the Southern California April Meeting on Phonology (SCAMP) at UCSD (April 8-9). He had this to report:
I gave a talk on “Parallelism and conspiracy,” which was a more developed version of my talk from LASC this year. It was a really fun conference that included speakers from across California. I represented UCSC, but Jaye Padgett was also in the audience, and the conference was organized by UCSC undergrad alum Eric Bakovic and included a talk by UCSC grad alum Rachel Walker!
Lydia Werthen, who has just entered the department’s BA-MA program, travelled to Los Angeles a couple weeks ago to present a paper at the Southern California Undergraduate Linguistics Conference (SCULC), which took place at UCLA on Friday, April 2. Lydia presented on her ongoing work on what she calls wh-continuations (true in-situ wh-questions). She sent in this report on her travels:
The SCULC conference was a great experience overall, with many very interesting presentations! We had speakers from many parts of the world, including Canada and even Russia. Our faculty/keynote speaker was Robert Daland, who spoke about speech perception and loanwords — quite fascinating indeed. My presentation went smoothly and I just barely finished in the 12 minutes I was allotted, though I had to rush a bit towards the end. Although I think that the portion of my presentation on ellipsis and the Minimalist Program went over some heads, I really enjoyed the conference, and it was exciting to have this opportunity to present my research!
Last week, it was announced that graduate student Lauren McGarry received an honorable mention for the highly competitive National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program. Congratulations, Lauren!
Over the weekend (April 2), graduate student Erik Zyman attended the NonFinite Subjects conference at the University of Nantes, France, where he presented a poster on “Finite raising to object and the mechanics of Agree.” On his return, he reported that “the conference featured a wide variety of talks and posters on the syntax, semantics, and morphology of subjects of nonfinite clauses, as well as a highly convivial atmosphere and a generous supply of Nantais food.”
This Friday (April 8), fifth-year graduate student Karl DeVries will present his research on “Cumulative readings of bare cardinal partitives” in S-Circle:
Sentences like (1) have played a modest role in the literature on partitives, appearing in lists of sentences counter-exemplifying the partitive constraint (roughly, that the inner DP must be definite).
(1) That book could belong to one of three people (Ladusaw 1982).
There are two strategies for reconciling bare cardinal partitives with the partitive constraint. Ladusaw (1982) argues that the inner cardinal is a specific indefinite and Barker (1998) suggests that bare cardinal partitives can also be used when the inner cardinal exhausts the restrictor set; (2) has such an interpretation.
(2) Sybil is one of three people Otis admires.
Sentences like (3) suggest that matters are more complex. When a bare cardinal partitive appears in the scope of a universal quantifier it can give rise to a cumulative reading.
(3) Every student read one of three papers. (i.e. every student read one paper and three papers were read overall)
Sentence (3) does not require that the inner cardinal be specific nor does it require that there be only three (contextually salient) papers. I develop a compositional account of cumulative readings using an extension of First Order Logic with Choice (Brasoveanu and Farkas 2011) and discuss how cumulative readings fit into larger debates about the status of the partitive constraint.
As usual, S-Circle will start at 2 pm in the LCR.
Graduate student Steven Foley will be giving a talk, entitled “Morphological conspiracies and the nature of vocabulary insertion,” at this year’s meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS). The conference will take place on April 21-23, and the full program can be found here.