WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Congratulations to undergrads Dhyana Buckley, Lydia Werthen, and Anissa Zaitsu, who have been admitted to the Department’s BA/MA program! The BA/MA program is a selective program that allows well-prepared, well-motivated students to complete the requirements for the B.A. in Linguistics and the M.A. in Linguistics in a total of five years rather than the usual six. Read more about the program here.
UC Santa Cruz Linguistics was well represented last weekend at the 8th annual California Universities Semantics and Pragmatics workshop (CUSP), hosted this year by Stanford University. Friday’s sessions kicked off with a presentation by Kelsey Kraus on her recent work on German modal particles. This was followed, after the break, by a presentation by Deniz Rudin on scalar and non-scalar implicatures of might and some. Tom Roberts opened the final session of the day with a talk on propositional attitudes in Estonian.
On Saturday, the Department’s CUSP presence was impressive: a visually impenetrable block of seats in the room was filled by UCSC linguists. The morning included a talk by Hitomi Hirayama, whose work on ignorance inferences of wa in Japanese left us anything but ignorant about what this contrastive marker denotes. The day was rounded out in style by a presentation from the LaLoCo group–Deniz Rudin, Karl DeVries, Karen Duek, Kelsey Kraus and Adrian Braseoveanu–on the semantics of correction. The presentation sparked lively debate, uh sorry, conversation which extended well past the official end of the workshop.
Jenny Bellik and Nick Kalivoda presented a poster on their recent work on theories of syntax-phonology mapping at the 2015 Annual Meeting on Phonology, which was held October 9-11 in Vancouver, co-hosted by the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University. Posters and talks were also presented by many others with connections to UCSC, including B.A. alums Sara Finley (Assistant Professor of Psychology, Pacific Lutheran University) and Eric Baković (Professor of Linguistics, UC San Diego), Ph.D. alums Andrew Wedel (Associate Professor of Linguistics, University of Arizona), Ryan Bennett (Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Yale), Rachel Walker (Professor of Linguistics, USC), and Aaron Kaplan (Assistant Professor of Linguistics, University of Utah), and former visiting faculty Adam Albright, Lev Blumenfeld, and Wendell Kimper. Santa Cruz B.A. and M.A. alum John Alderete (Associate Professor of Linguistics, Simon Fraser University) served as a session chair.
Work continues on An Ultrasound Investigation of Irish Palatalization, a project funded by the National Science Foundation, whose PI’s are alum Ryan Bennett, Grant McGuire, Máire Ní Chiosáin (Head of Linguistics, University College Dublin), and Jaye Padgett. In May, Ryan collected new data from 5 speakers of Ulster Irish. Two UCSC Linguistics majors who had been working on the project doing sound file labeling, Abigail Katz and Eileen O’Neill, have graduated and will be missed. Meanwhile, grad student Jenny Bellik joined the project last Spring. In addition to her work doing data analysis, Jenny created this wonderful web site, a public face for the project.
The reading and discussion group SPLAP (Semantics, Pragmatics and LAnguage Philosophy) has been handed the baton for the second leg of a three-quarter relay. The relay began in Spring 2015 in Adrian Brasoveanu‘s semantics seminar, which dealt with the incremental interpretation of formal semantics, unifying work in dynamic logic, psycholinguistics, and cognitive modeling. The theme has been passed on to SPLAP for the second leg of the relay; this quarter we’re reading and discussing work on the intersection between semantics & pragmatics and cognition. Our readings so far have dealt with the way that discourse coherence and syntactic structure interact probabilistically to resolve pronoun reference, and with how domain-general Bayesian reasoning can be applied to the interpretation of semantic ambiguities and the generation of pragmatic inferences. The relay will end in spectacular fashion next quarter, with a one-day workshop on February 6. The workshop will feature two external speakers (Andrew Kehler from UCSD and Noah Goodman from Stanford) and two internal speakers (TBA, stay tuned).
Matt Wagers, who is on sabbatical, filed this report:
I went to UMass for the 3rd American International Morphology Meeting. There I gave a tutorial workshop with Kie Zuraw on building digital resources on under-resourced languages. Essentially, we used Kie’s workflow for building her Tagalog corpus from web text to put together a Chamorro corpus; and then we attempted to cross-validate it with the behavioral data that Sandy Chung, Manny Borja, and I have been collecting in the Marianas — subjective frequency ratings, listening times, etc. In attendance were alumni Ryan Bennett (Yale) and Abby Kaplan (Utah). The notes from the workshop are available here. The next day, current Ph.D. student Jason Ostrove opened the conference with his paper “Allomorphy and Locality in the Irish Verbal Complex”. Abby gave a poster on “Paradigm (Non-)Uniformity of Continuously-Valued Features in an Exemplar Framework.” Former Foundation Fellow Scott Seyfarth talked about acoustic cues in morphologically-distinct homophones. Other Santa Cruzans spotted at the conference include undergraduate alumni Caroline Andrews and Shayne Sloggett, who are both now Ph.D. students at UMass. Shayne was one of the central student organizers of the conference.
I stuck around to plan some experiments on ambiguity resolution with Brian Dillon. I also gave a talk in their Psycholinguistics Workshop on the insertion of null pronouns in incremental structure building, using Chamorro data as the test case. Spotted roaming around the halls of the department’s new digs were Nick LeCara (M.A. 2010) and Wendell Kimper (Visiting Assistant Professor 2011-12).
The research group on ellipsis SCEC has now swung into high gear with the aid of an infusion of funding that arrived in early summer from the National Science Foundation via Project 1451819, the Implicit Content of Sluicing. The group’s initial annotation effort continues to focus on sluicing, and a group of graduate students, including Kelsey Kraus, Karen Duek, Margaret Kroll, and Deniz Rudin worked with Pranav Anand and Jim McCloskey during the summer, both on the intellectual issues raised by sluicing and on some of the hard operational problems encountered in the annotation effort. Meanwhile, a second group of undergraduate research assistants (Brooks Blair, Mansi Desai, Zach Lebowski, Lyndsey Olsen, Reuben Raff, Lydia Werthen, and Anissa Zaitsu) joined the project to train as the second-generation annotation team. Training took place during the summer, and the group began work in earnest at the beginning of Fall Quarter. M.A. student Chelsea Miller and B.A. alum Rachelle Boyson act as lead annotators and coordinators of the annotation effort. Co-PI Dan Hardt joined the group for an intense week of collaboration in early August. Later in the Fall, Ph.D. alum Jason Merchant, who wrote the book on sluicing, will be visiting for several days as a consultant and advisor on the project.