WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Two undergraduate Linguistics majors Cal Boye-Lynn and Josh Lieberstein were recently admitted to the department’s BA-MA program. This program puts Cal and Josh on a pathway that can obtain an M.A. in Linguistics possibly one year after graduating.
Congrats and welcome, Cal and Josh!
Third-year undergraduate Andrew Kato recently received Koret Undergraduate Research Scholarship for the 2023-24 academic year to work on his project titled “Structural and scopal asymmetries in the syntax of relative measurements” with Visiting Assistant Professor Haoze Li as his mentor. He will be conducting a theoretical and experimental study on the distributions of relative-measurement readings in English.
Three Ph.D. students presented their works at the 2023 Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP) hosted virtually on Oct 20-22. Fifth-year Ph.D. candidate Maya Wax Cavallaro gave a talk titled “The syllable in domain generalization: Evidence from artificial language learning” (see slides here). First Ph.D. student Hanyoung Byun presented a poster on “Aggressive Reduplication in Japanese high vowel devoicing” (see poster here) in addition to his joint work with Jaehyun Yim (Seoul National University) on “Extension of phonotactic constraints across morphological subdomains: Evidence from Korean” (see slides here). Second-year student Richard Wang presented a poster on “Distribution of neutral tone and retroflex lenition in Beijing Mandarin” (see poster here).
Two banana slugs presented their work at WAFL17, which took place Sep 27-29 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Assistant Professor Mia Gong gave an invited talk titled “On the Nature of Reflexive Binding in Mongolian: From Nominals to Clauses“, and third-year Ph.D. student Jun Tamura presented a talk on “Compounding Words in the Syntax can Produce Phrasal Phonology: Evidence from Aoyagi Morphemes“.
Professor Mia Gong (right) and Jun Tamura (left)
First-year Ph.D. student Ruoqing Yao‘s honors thesis research, completed at William & Mary under the supervision of Ph.D. alum (2006) Anya Hogoboom, has been accepted for a talk at the Centennial LSA Annual Meeting in New York, to be held in January 2024. Her talk is titled, “Resumptive pronouns in islands show confusability advantage effect.”
Fifth-year Ph.D. candidate Yaqing Cao will present a poster on “Modals and negations LF-PF (mis)matches in English and Mandarin” and second-year Ph.D. student Richard Wang will present a poster on “Rhotic lenition and neutral tone in Beijing Mandarin”. First-year Ph.D. student Aidan Katson‘s work “Vowel nasalization does not cue ambisyllabicity in American English nasal consonants: evidence from nasometry” in collaboration with Jose Alvarez Retamales, Sarah Rose Bellavance, Lisa Davidson, Amanda Eads, Alden McCollum, and Auromita (Disha) Mitra, will also be presented.
Fifth-year Ph.D. candidate Yaqing Cao gave an invited talk at UC Berkeley’s Syntax & Semantics Circle last Friday, Oct 6. Her talk is titled “Modals and negations LF-PF (mis)matches in English and Mandarin”, and her abstract is attached below:
Studies on modal auxiliaries and negation revealed cross-linguistic differences in (mis)matches between their surface linear orders (PF representation) and scopal interpretations (LF representation): while modals like can in English demonstrate LF-PF mismatch properties w.r.t. negation, modals in Mandarin show strict isomorphism w.r.t. the negation bu. There are three potential accounts to such a cross-linguistic difference: scope economy approach, head movement/reconstruction, rich base-generation approach. In this paper, I argue that rich base-generation approach made the right prediction because there does not exist head movement of modals in Mandarin, contrary to the prediction made by the scope economy and head movement approach.
Besides cherry blossom viewing on their bikes at ICU (Picture 1), Research Professor Emerita and Emeritus Junko and Armin worked on finalizing “Syntax-Prosody in Optimality Theory–Theory and Analysis”, a book co-edited with Nick Kalivoda (Ph.D. 2018) and Jennifer Bellik (Ph.D. 2019). This involved final proofreading, editorial corrections, correspondence with individual authors, and providing the index — bringing it to final publication in the summer.
The volume (Picture 2) contains the results of an NSF-funded project in the form of various singly and co-authored papers by the editors as well as UCSC linguistics undergrads, grads, and postdocs, including Richard Bibbs (7th-year Ph.D. candidate), Dan Brodkin (5th-year Ph.D. candidate), Yaqing Cao (5th-year Ph.D. candidate), Ben Eischens (Ph.D. 2022, now Assistant Professor at UCLA), Ed Shingler (B.A. 2021), Max Tarlov (B.A. 2021) and Nicholas Van Handel (Ph.D. 2022).
During their Spring sojourn in Japan, Junko and Armin had two UCSC-related get-togethers. First, at an Italian trattoria in Tokyo appropriately called “La Mora” (Picture 3), they dined with Haruo Kubozono (visiting scholar at the Linguistics Research Center 1993-94, now at National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, or NINJAL), Maho Morimoto (Ph.D. 2020, now a postdoc at Sophia University in Tokyo), and Motoko Katayama (PhD 1998, now a medical doctor heading her own Obstetrics & Gynecology clinic in Kunitachi, Tokyo).
Second, travels in Japan with Bill Ladusaw (Retired Professor Emeritus) and his partner Ken Christopher landed the four of them at an onsen (hot spring spa) near Nikko, Japan (Picture 4).
