Category: Talks

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.

WLMA SYMPOSIUM ON OAXACAN LINGUISTICS

Capping off the inaugural year of the Workshop on the Languages of Meso-America is the Symposium on Oaxacan Linguistics on Monday, June 12 from 9am-5pm in Hum 1, Room 210. The symposium will feature talks on a variety of languages by invited speakers Christian DiCanio (SUNY Buffalo) Emiliana Cruz (UMass Amherst), and Eric Campbell (UCSB), as well as UCSCers Jason Ostrove, Steven Foley, Nick Kalivoda, and Kelsey Sasaki. For more information, see the full program here.

ANOTHER SUCCESSFUL LURC!

One of the standout features of our department is the special way in which undergraduate research is encouraged and acknowledged. LURC this year represented a diversity of interests, with excellent talks delivered by Richard Bibbs, Brianda Caldera, Justin Talbott, Anny Huang, and our Distinguished Alumna speaker Maura O’Leary (UCLA), on topics in syntax, diachronic linguistics, morphophonology, sociolinguistics and semantics, in a variety of languages from Chamorro and Polynesian languages, to Spanish-English border slang, to Mandarin Chinese and English.
LURC presenters
Front Row: Ivy Sichel, Maura O’Leary
Back Row: Anny Huang, Brianda Caldera, Richard Bibbs, Justin Talbott
(Photo by Kelsey Sasaki)

FOLEY, OSTROVE, AND ROBERTS AT CLS

Continuing the recent departmental trend of espousing our beliefs at UChicago were a trio of graduate student talks at the latest instantiation of the Chicago Linguistics Society, May 25-27. Jason Ostrove discussed the morphology-prosody interface in San Martín Peras Mixtec clitic doubling, Steven Foley rhapsodized on the Gender Case Constraint in Zapotec (joint work with Nick and Maziar ), and Tom Roberts contemplated the semantic nature of responsive predicates in Estonian. Under the omniscient eye of Ida Noyes, the conference was a great success, bringing together linguists of many different stripes for fruitful discussion, vigorous debate, and heartbreaking renditions of such karaoke klassics as Txoria Txori.

MCCLOSKEY AT UCHICAGO

Jim McCloskey was one of the many Santa Cruz linguists traveling to the University of Chicago in recent times. In Jim’s case it was for a talk (on May 18th) in the department’s colloquium series. The title of the talk was Microparameters in a Tiny Space — Stranding at the Edge and it returned to the topic of Wh quantifier stranding in a
range of local forms of English. Besides meeting with many graduate students, Jim had the chance to spend some quality time with alums Chris Kennedy and Jason Merchant.

LIN COLLOQUIUM

This Friday, May 26th, at 2:40pm in Humanities 2, Room 259, there will be a colloquium by Susan Lin (Berkeley). Her talk is entitled “Gradience from variation in articulatory magnitude and timing,” and the abstract is given below:

Gradient synchronic variation in speech has long been proposed to be at the root of most sound change, whether through the generation of phonemically ambiguous speech or the creation of phonological innovations available to language learners. However, there exists a disconnect between this form of gradient variation and its typically discrete resulting phonological form. In this talk, I examine two articulatory factors thought to contribute to gradient variation: the magnitude and relative timing of articulations. Using ultrasound data, I focus on the relationship between articulatory magnitude and timing in post-vocalic laterals in English, while exploring some of the factors, including lexical frequency and speech speed, which contribute to that relationship.

ALTSHULER AT S-CIRCLE/LALOCO

In a special joint meeting of S-Circle and LaLoCo, we have this week a talk by Daniel Altshuler (Hampshire College/UMass Amherst) at 11:45am on Tuesday, May 23rd, in Stevenson 217. He’ll be presenting on “Temporal cataphora and revision,” details of which can be found in the abstract below:

Inferring a rhetorical relation between two discourse units (DUs) is non-monotonic: given a discourse context C and two DUs π1, π2 to be related by a relation R, it may be that C makes R(π1, π1) the most plausible inference, but an extension of C may make it more plausible that a distinct R'(π1, π1) is preferred (Asher and Lascarides 2003). Since rhetorical relations often entail temporal constraints, anaphoric connections between eventualities often undergo revision. This is especially apparent in the French novella, Sylvie, where, famously, the reader chooses a resolution strategy that she later finds to be incoherent and is thus forced to revise. The goal of this talk is to derive the incoherence and model the revision that the reader is forced to make. To do so, we extend Haug’s (2014) PCDRT to the temporal domain and to temporal cataphora in particular, taking important strides to synthesizing this framework with Asher and Lascarides’s (2003) SDRT, something that we think is necessary to model (in)coherence and the provisional nature of phoric expressions

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