Category: Student News

ANOTHER SUCCESSFUL LASC

The department hosted another successful Linguistics at Santa Cruz (LASC) on Saturday (March 5). This year’s conference, which showcases the research of second- and third-year graduate students, featured talks and posters from every subdiscipline of linguistics with evidence from diverse languages of the world. After UCSC alumnus Ryan Bennett’s (Yale University) fascinating talk, “Stop contrasts in Kaqchikel: Production, perception, and the lexicon,” current and prospective graduate students and faculty convened at the home of Bill Ladusaw for a fun and lively dinner.

LASC 2016 presenters
LASC 2016 Presenters: Ryan Bennett, Kelsey Kraus, Maho Morimoto, Nate Clair, Steven Foley, Jeff Adler, Deniz Rudin, Ben Mericli (back row); Jason Ostrove, Jennifer Bellik, Margaret Kroll, Hitomi Hirayama (front row)

MILLER AND PIZARRO-GUEVARA AT CUNY 2016

Graduate students Chelsea Miller and Jed Pizarro-Guevara traveled to the 29th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing (CUNY) at the University of Florida this past weekend (March 3-5). Both presented posters that were co-authored with Matt Wagers.

Chelsea and Matt’s poster was entitled “Limited reactivation of syntactic structure in noun phrase ellipsis.” After returning home, she reported that:

This was the first conference I’ve presented at, and it was a really fun experience. I absorbed a lot of knowledge and also met a lot of great people, including some of our extended family of UCSC alums. I saw some great posters relevant to my work with Matt, on ellipsis, content-addressability, and attraction. There was even a poster exploring attraction and NPE like mine, though, interestingly, with different results. The authors and I talked and are looking forward to collaborating in the future. The only negative, which Jed and I kept telling ourselves was a “WHASC-worthy moment,” was that our return trip involved a crazy itinerary of two delays, one cancellation, a two hour cab ride, and then finally a two-layover flight back to California. We made it, finally, and I look happily back at our CUNY experience (travel aside).

Jed and Matt’s poster was called “The role of Tagalog verbal agreement in processing wh-dependencies” (available here), and he had this to report:

CUNY was a fabulous experience (modulo the flight to get there, and the sleep-deprivation, the delays and cancellation, and the two-hour cab ride just to get back to California)! I got to talk to Austronesianists like Maria Polinsky and former banana slug Eric Potsdam (PhD, 1996), and psycholinguists interested in “field psycholinguistics.” I also got to hang out with former banana slugs Ekaterina Kravtchenko (MA, 2013), Shayne Sloggett (BA, 2010) and Caroline Andrews (BA, 2011), Aaron White (BA, 2009), and other graduate students from UCSD, Rochester, Harvard, and UMD. Looking forward to CUNY 2017 (at MIT)!

KALIVODA AT BERKELEY

Last Tuesday (March 1), graduate student Nick Kalivoda gave a talk at Berkeley’s Fieldwork Forum (FForum) on “Agreement and anti-agreement in Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec.” After returning to Santa Cruz, Nick reported that he had many interesting discussions with Berkeley students and faculty, including with Amy Rose Deal and Line Mikkelsen, both former members of the UCSC department. Several researchers on Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec from SF State were in attendance as well.

LINDAHL IN S-CIRCLE

Former LRC Visitor Filippa Lindahl (University of Gothenburg) will present this Friday (March 11) in S-Circle on “Swedish relative clauses: Very weak islands”:

The mainland Scandinavian languages allow movement out of relative clauses, a phenomenon known as Relative Clause Extraction (RCE). In this talk, I present results from my ongoing dissertation project. Based on a collection of examples from conversation and radio, I give an overview of the environments in which RCE occurs, and which types of phrases are typically allowed to move out of RCs in Swedish. Most extraction in spontaneous usage consists of topicalization or relativization, but interrogative wh-movement and it-clefting out of RCs are also possible. Adjuncts are usually not extracted, but this is only a tendency; it is possible to extract adjuncts that are contrastive or deictic (denoting a specific point in time, for instance). On the other hand, it is impossible to form why-questions that question an RC-internal reason.

This suggests that Swedish RCs are a type of weak island (cf. Cresti 1995, Szabolcsi 2006, Ruys 2015). But Swedish RCs are even more transparent than well-known weak islands, in that they do not block functional readings of questions. Since Swedish RCs are opaque for certain types of phrases, namely why and certain other adjuncts, we cannot simply say that they are non-islands; but semantic approaches like Cresti 1995 and Ruys 2015 are too restrictive for Swedish, since these are specifically designed to explain why functional readings are blocked. Swedish relative clauses thus show that islands aren’t just strong or weak, but that they can be very weak.

As usual, S-Circle will meet at 2 pm in the Linguistics Common Room.

HIRAYAMA AT FAJL

A couple weeks ago, graduate student Hitomi Hirayama traveled to Japan to attend Formal Approaches to Japanese Linguistics (FAJL) 8, which took place on February 18-20 at Mie University. She had the following to report:

I gave a poster presentation entitled “A null pronominal account for apparent parasitic gaps in Japanese,” which is based on my first QP project. During the poster session and throughout the conference, I had very interesting conversations with many Japanese linguists. Among the attendees, there were two former visitors to our department: Shigeto Kawahara (Keio University) and Takashi Morita (MIT). To my pleasant surprise, I also ran into one of our alumni Kazutaka Kurisu (Kobe College) at the reception, and we had a great time talking about how people are doing in Santa Cruz. He asked me to say hello to all!

RUDIN AT STANFORD

Last Tuesday (February 23), graduate student Deniz Rudin gave a talk in the SemPrag group at Stanford called “How to disagree with a might-claim: Assessor-sensitivity and the pragmatics of assertion.” After returning over the hill, Deniz filed this report:

In attendance were a mixed group of linguists and philosophers, who asked very good questions of very different kinds. Some grads took me out to lunch afterwards. Special shout-out to Dan Lassiter, who gave me a ride, and grilled me (good-naturedly) about modal logic the whole way back. Always a sincere pleasure.

LASC 2016

This year’s Linguistics at Santa Cruz (LASC) promises to be a fun and stimulating event. The all-day conference on Saturday (March 5) showcases the recent research of second- and third-year graduate students. There will be six talks and seven posters on a variety of topics in phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and psycholinguistics in languages as diverse as Georgian, Japanese, Persian, San Martin Peraz Mixtec, Tagalog, and Turkish. The Distinguished Alumnus Lecture will be given by Ryan Bennett (Yale University). He will speak on “Stop contrasts in Kaqchikel: Production, perception, and the lexicon.” The full program can be found here.

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