Category: Talks

CUSP 10 @ UC IRVINE

On the weekend of 20-21 October, the 10th annual California Universities Semantics and Pragmatics (CUSP) conference was held at UC Irvine. In tribute to the pan-Californian spirit of CUSP, five graduate students from three California universities carpooled from the bay to SoCal — Deniz Rudin of UCSC, Maura O’Leary of UCLA (a former UCSC undergrad and current visitor to the department), and Lelia Glass, Ciyang Qing and Brandon Waldon of Stanford. Rudin spoke on rising imperatives, O’Leary on tense in cleft constructions, Glass on the correlation between causativity and distributivity, Qing on Mandarin dou, and Waldon on the strength and weakness of might and must. Also in attendance was Santa Crucian Hitomi Hirayama, who presented a QUD-based analysis of Japanese contrastive wa, and replaced Glass on the return trip to the North.

The conference was rich with presentations on other topics from students at other California universities, and on display throughout was an atmosphere of discussion that maintained a pleasant balance between trenchant, searching engagement and warm, welcoming collegiality — as always, CUSP serves as an annual reminder that we’re all very lucky to be studying meaning in the Golden State.

HOW OUR READINGS ARE GROUPING THIS WEEK

SPLAP: Wednesday, 1:20 – 2:20 pm, LCR There will be a discussion of Chapter 6 of Benjamin George’s dissertation

s/lab: Wednesday, 3:00 – 4:00 pm, LCR Jed Pizarro-Guevara will be presenting his work on filler-gap dependencies in Tagalog

WLMA: Friday, 10:00 – 11:30 am, Stevenson 217 Jason Ostrove will be talking about deriving “clitic doubling” in San Martín Peras Mixtec

Phlunch: Friday, 12:00 – 1:00 pm, LCR Nick Kalivoda will present his work on “Transparency and Opacity in Hiatus Resolution”

LIP: Friday, 3:00 – 3:45 pm, Stevenson 217 Maho Morimoto will be presenting a recent experiment on geminated liquids in Japanese

S-Circle: Friday, 4:00 – 5:30 pm, LCR Anissa Zaitsu will present her work on the subject of tenseless clauses in Why-questions

ITO, MESTER, KALIVODA, AND HIRAYAMA AT JAPANESE/KOREAN LINGUISTICS CONFERENCE

Several UCSC linguists flew into Hawaii for the 25th Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference. The Accent Research Group — Junko Ito, Armin Mester, Nick Kalivoda and Jeff Adler (in absentia) — presented their work (with a talk and poster) on the endangered Japanese dialects of Kagoshima at the satellite workshop on prosody and prosodic interfaces. They met up with familiar Santa Cruz-related folks — Haruo Kubozono (NINJAL), former LRC visitor and workshop organizer, and Larry Hyman (UCB), the workshop commentator. Kohei Nishimura, former LRC visiting graduate student also gave a talk based on the NINJAL corpus of Spoken Japanese. At the main conference, they were joined by Hitomi Hirayama, who gave both a poster on “Discourse effects of biased questions in Japanese” at the main session and a talk (joint with Adrian Brasoveanu) at an East Asian Psycholinguistics satellite workshop on “Expressing ignorance in Japanese: contrastive wa vs. sukunakutomo.”

Pictured above: Hitomi Hirayama, Nick Kalivoda

Pictured above: Haruo Kubozono, Nick Kalivoda, Larry Hyman, Armin Mester, Junko Ito

SaveSave

SaveSave

SaveSave

ANAND AT UNIVERSITY OF SIENA

Last week Pranav Anand attended the first workshop at the University of Siena on Evaluatives in Deliberative Contexts. He reports:

“I spent Thursday and Friday at a workshop on Evaluatives in Deliberative Contexts organized by Valentina Bianchi at University of Siena. The workshop’s goal was to create a forum for formal semanticists, formal syntacticians, corpus linguists, political scientists, and economists to come together to talk about how to model the devices people use to express opinion in political discussions. I spoke about my joint work with Jeannie Fox Tree, Lyn Walker, and Steve Whittaker on modeling political argumentation and, more recently, narrator mood. It was great to be on the ground as an interdisciplinary collaboration is just getting started and to talk with formal linguists about these tricky pragmatic issues.”

AISSEN COLLOQUIUM

This Friday, October 20th, at 4:00 pm in Humanities 1, Room 210, there will be a colloquium talk by Judith Aissen (UCSC). Her talk is entitled “Right-edge topics in Tsotsil (Mayan).” The abstract is given below:

Recent work on word order in Mayan has suggested the existence of a topic position at the right edge of the clause (Clemens and Coon, to appear). Under this analysis what has traditionally been analyzed as basic V-O-S order in some Mayan languages actually reflects V-O-Topic order, with the subject in a transitive clause being the canonical topic. This talk consider evidence for a right-edge topic in Tsotsil, focusing not on subject topics but on possessor topics. We conclude by discussing the relation of this right-edge position to the larger typology of topic positions in Mayan.

HOW OUR READINGS ARE GROUPING THIS WEEK

Phlunch: Tuesday, 9:50 – 11:25 pm, Cave classroom John Alderete (Simon Fraser University) will be giving a guest lecture in Phlunch entitled “Phonological regularity, perceptual biases, and the role of phonological grammar in speech error analysis” (Note: this is not phlunch’s standard meeting time or place)

SPLAP: Wednesday, 1:20 – 2:20 pm, LCR Discussion of a short handout/squib by Barbara Partee as background on semantics of embedded questions (QUD for Fall 2017)

s/lab: Wednesday, 3:00 – 4:00 pm, LCR Matt Wagers will present ongoing work on the integration of complex subjects

LaLoCo: Thursday, 2:00 – 3:00 pm, LCR Discussion of chapters 2 – 3 of the textbook “Introduction to Connectionist Modelling of Cognitive Processes”

WLMA: Friday, 10:00 – 11:30 am, Stevenson 217 Discussion of Caponigro, Torrence, and Cisneros (2013), which talks about free relatives in two varieties of Mixtec

LIP: Friday, 3:00 – 3:45 pm, Stevenson 217 Nick Van Handel, Netta Ben-Meir, and Grant McGuire will be presenting on an ongoing perceptual learning study

S-Circle: Friday, 4:00 – 5:30 pm, LCR Mansi Desai will be talking about negation in Gujarati

DEO COLLOQUIUM

This Friday, October 6th, at 4:00 pm in Humanities 1, Room 210, there will be a colloquium by Ashwini Deo (Ohio State University). Her talk is entitled “Alternative circumstances of evaluation and the ser/estar distinction in Spanish,” and the abstract is given below:

The Spanish copulas ser and estar have distributional and interpretational patterns that have resisted an adequate analysis. In this talk, I work towards a unified analysis that treats the two copulas as being presuppositional variants that are differentially sensitive to properties of the circumstances at which the truth of the copular sentence is evaluated. On the proposed analysis, estar presupposes that the prejacent is boundedly true at the evaluation circumstance. The prejacent’s bounded truth at a circumstance i at a given context of use c depends on two conditions:

(a) there are no-weaker alternative circumstances i′ accessible at c where the prejacent is false, and

(b) i is a maximal verifying circumstance at c.

Central to the analysis is the notion of a strength ordering over alternative circumstances of evaluation — a circumstantial counterpart to the more familiar ordering over alternative propositions. Assuming that this content is conventionally associated with estar allows for an account of its distinct flavors and readings with a range of predicates. ser is shown to be associated with its own inferences that derive from its status as the presuppositionally weaker, neutral member of the pair.

1 … 8 9 10 11 12 … 46