WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
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.
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: 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)
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)!
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.
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.