Category: Talks

FOLEY AT SSILA

Earlier this month at SSILA, Steven Foley presented a paper titled “The derivation of verb-initiality in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec”. This was on behalf of his fellow budding Zapotecanists (including Jeff, Jed, & Kelsey S, under Maziar‘s aegis), who have been investigating SLZ since first working on the language in last spring’s Field Methods course. He reports warm reception from scholars of Zapotec and other Native American languages, who pointed out some promising avenues for future research.

ACOUSTICIANS ON OAHU

Late last quarter Jenny, Grant, Maho, and Jaye attended the Acoustical Society of America Conference, which took place in Honolulu, Hawai’i. Jenny, Grant, and Jaye presented a poster on “Tongue body shape during the production of Irish palatalization and velarization” (work in collaboration with UCSC alum Ryan Bennett of Yale and Máire Ní Chiosáin of University College Dublin). Maho was there to present two posters, “Acoustic characteristics of liquid geminates in Japanese”, and “Acoustics of phonation types and tones in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec” (work in collaboration with Jeff Adler).

BURNETT TALKIN’ ‘BOUT STYLE TODAY AT 11:30

Heather Burnett (CNRS/Paris 7) will be talking in S-Circle TODAY at 11:30 in the CAVE (special date, time, and location!). An abbreviated abstract of her talk, “Signaling Games, Sociolinguistic Variation and the Construction of Style”, is below:

In this presentation, I introduce social meaning games (SMGs), which are developed for the analysis of the strategic aspect of sociolinguistic variation (in the sense of Labov 1963, Labov 1966, et seq.), such as the use of the English (ING) suffix. SMGs unify the Third Wave approach to the meaning of sociolinguistic variation (see Eckert 2000, 2008, 2012) with signalling games (Lewis 1969) and a Bayesian approach to speaker/listener reasoning (see Oaksford & Chater 2007 for a review). I define the games and then show the predictions of this framework for both linguistic production and interpretation, as exemplified by the modeling of six empirical studies.

MERIÇLI RETURNS TO INDIANA

Ben Meriçli returned to Indiana last week to speak at the 2nd Workshop on Turkish, Turkic, and the Languages of Turkey. He reports as follows:

I gave a talk based on bits of my MA thesis, entitled “Indirect Evidence in Denotation and Discourse: At Best Second-Best.” It was a top-notch time, with engaging speakers and interesting work. It was also wonderful to catch up with good friends who’d come all the way from Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University, where I spent much of my summer.

With so much data on puzzling syntactic topics in Turkish, the conference was perhaps most valuable to me for pointing out all the ways my own non-native grammar misses the mark. Who knew the subject of an objectless object relative clause in the locative is nominative, not genitive?!

(If you click through the link, you’ll note that Ben was supposed to have seen a talk by our own Jorge Hankamer, and invited speaker of the conference, but Jorge had to cancel last minute.)

NICE TALK, THAT

On November 15th, Kelsey Sasaki spoke at UCB’s F(ieldword)Forum. Below is her report:

A very welcoming group of Berkelians gathered for a lively and productive discussion of my QP work, “Predicate Initiality in Hawai’i Creole.” The opportunity to get FForum’s input on various aspects of my project, from data collection to educational material development, was well worth the harrowing experience of driving the 880.

To hear more about this project, visit S̅-Circle this week, at a special time (11.23 @11am)

RE: …

Pranav Anand and LRC visitor Dan Hardt traveled to Austin last week to deliver a paper on automatically detecting the antecedents of sluices at Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 2016. The conference was replete with UCSC alums: Chis Potts (PhD, 2003) delivered a keynote address on his ongoing work on pragmatic reasoning at scale and Aaron White (BA, 2009) and Kyle Rawlins (PhD, 2008) presented work from their group at JHU on building a large-scale dataset of protorole judgments in a dependency-bank.

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