Category: Student News

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.

SPLAP! WORKSHOP REPORT

The SPLAP! (Semantics, Pragmatics and LAnguage Philosophy) reading group sponsored an all-day workshop this past Saturday (February 6). Graduate students Karen Duek, Margaret Kroll, and Deniz Rudin, who organized the workshop, had this gripping recap:

Speakers were Noah Goodman, who drove down from Stanford to present his work on “Uncertainty about language,” in which a number of dramatic results were shown to follow from a deceptively simple Bayesian model of how speakers and listeners reason about each other’s information and utterances; our very own MA student Chelsea Miller, who presented on “Diagnosing representations at ellipsis sites” (joint work with Matt Wagers), in which sophisticated psycholinguistic techniques applied to a clever design exploiting agreement attraction shed light on what exactly is going on inside ellipsis sites; UCSC semanticist extraordinaire Adrian Brasoveanu, who talked about the “Semantics of corrections” (joint work with Deniz Rudin, Karl DeVries, Karen Duek, and Kelsey Kraus), in which a careful empirical investigation of the grammar of self-correction is paired with a formal analysis that brings the full brunt of semantic theory to bear on the problem; and Andy Kehler, who flew up from UC San Diego (on Super Bowl weekend, no less!) so that he could present his work on “Conversational eliciture” (joint work with Jonathan Cohen and Hannah Rohde), in a talk that combines an elegant and convincing empirical delineation of the space of pragmatic inferences with an elegant and convincing Bayesian model of the differences between speaker and listener preferences for the resolution of pronoun reference. All talks were, in the opinion of these recappers, of the highest imaginable quality, and discussion periods were substantive, collegial, warm, and useful for all involved. A startlingly high number of people from our community elected to sit in a room from 9 to 5 on a sunny pleasant Saturday just to hear about linguistics, for which the organizers expressed gratefulness. The UCSC faculty in attendance reportedly found the workshop to be a smashing success, with particular emphasis on the timeliness and quality of the catering.

The SPLAP! workshop was made possible by a Tanya Honig Graduate Research Initiative Grant awarded to Karen Duek, Margaret Kroll, and Deniz Rudin, in collaboration with Karl DeVries, Hitomi Hirayama, Kelsey Kraus and Ben Mericli.

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