OMAKI COLLOQUIUM
We are pleased to announce that Akira Omaki (University of Washington) will be speaking at our second colloquium of the quarter on Friday, Oct. 7, at 2:40 pm in HUM 2, room 259.
Category: Talks
PHRENDLY NEWS
On Saturday Sept. 24, the Department hosted the first meeting of PHREND (Phonology/Phonetics Research Weekend), an informal phonology/phonetics workshop of the three departments in the Bay Area (Berkeley, Santa Cruz, and Stanford). PHREND 1 was very well attended, with 12 participants from Berkeley, 3 from Stanford, 20 Santa Cruzers, and alum Eric Bakovic from UC San Diego as a surprise visitor. The meeting was an all-around success thanks to a series of fascinating papers, including ones by our own Grant McGuire and grad students Jeff Adler and Nick Kalivoda. Thanks to Nick for the superb organization as well. Stay tuned for Berkeley’s PHREND 2 in Spring 2017!
STANFORD WORKSHOP ON HEAD MOVEMENT
Just before the new academic year opened (September 16th and 17th), our neighbors in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University hosted a Workshop on the Status of Head Movement in Linguistic Theory. The workshop, which was organized by alums Vera Gribanova and Boris Harizanov, engaged some of the difficult questions surrounding head movement and the phenomena it describes in the contemporary theoretical landscape. Among the presenters were Vera and Boris, Jim McCloskey, and MA alumnus Nick LaCara. Nick had just successfully defended his dissertation Inversion, Focus, and Ellipsis at Amherst and now holds a teaching position there.
AMHERST WORKSHOP ON SYNTAX-PROSODY INTERACTIONS
At the end of July 2016, a workshop on interactions between syntax and prosody took place at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Organized principally by Lisa Selkirk and Emily Elfner, the workshop (The Effects of Constituency on Sentence Prosody) grew out of (and was funded by) the NSF project ‘The effects of constituency on the phonology and phonetics of tone’ of which Selkirk is the PI, with collaborators Gorka Elordieta, Seunghun Lee, and Elfner.
Several Santa Cruzers spoke, converging on Northampton from around the globe. Junko Ito and Armin Mester, arriving from Tokyo, gave a presentation on the implications of certain interactions between syntax and prosody in English; Nick Kalivoda, coming from Sweden, presented a poster on his ongoing research developing a command-based alternative to Match Theory. Jim McCloskey (on his way back from Ireland to California) succeeded in driving a rented car from Logan airport into the depths of rural Massachusetts in order to participate in the event. Also attending was alum Ryan Bennett. The program (along with other information about the event) is available here.
NELS SLUGVASION 2016
The 47th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 47) will take place at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on October 14th – 16th, and Santa Cruzers will have a strong presence at the meeting:
New faculty member Ivy Sichel will present a paper on Extraction from Relative Clauses; and visiting professor Brian Smith will give a joint paper (with Claire Moore-Cantwell) on Emergent Idiosyncracy in English Comparatives.
Among the grad student presenters are Deniz Rudin and Margaret Kroll, who will present a paper growing out of their participation in Pranav Anand and Jim McCloskey’s ellipsis project: Licensing and Interpretation: A Comprehensive Theory of Sluicing, and Jeff Adler, who will present a joint paper with Jesse Zymet of UCLA on Irreducible Parallelism in Process Interactions.
Graduate alums Matt Tucker, of Oakland University and Erik Potsdam, of the University of Florida, along with undergrad alum Shayne Sloggett of UMass Amherst are also in the lineup.
The entire NELS program is available here.
ANAND@SVC.UCSC.EDU
UC Santa Cruz celebrated the grand opening of its Silicon Valley campus at 3175 Bowers Ave. in Santa Clara on Wednesday, September 28th with a reception, rover ribbon cutting, and research talk series. Pranav Anand spoke along with Lyn Walker about their joint work on detecting high-level pragmatic categories such as sarcasm in social media, and about the importance of linguistic reasoning in natural language processing systems.
DEVRIES TO DEFEND DISSERTATION
Karl DeVries will defend his dissertation entitled “Independence Friendly Dynamic Semantics: Integrating Exceptional Scope, Anaphora and their Interactions” on Thursday, September 29 at 5pm in HUM 1 – Room 210.
Abstract:
The goal of this dissertation is to provide a semantic account for exceptional scope indefinites in terms of independence friendly reasoning. I take the view that an indefinite takes exceptional scope when its witness is required not to vary with the value of a variable introduced by a syntactically higher quantifier. This dissertation shows that a straightforward implementation of this view in a static logic results in a system that assigns truth conditions to sentences containing wide scope indefinites that are too strong. I show, surprisingly, that a better implementation of this intuition requires dynamic logic. While using a dynamic logic is a necessary ingredient in the analysis of wide scope indefinites in terms of independence, it is not a sufficient one. I survey a number of recent dynamic systems, examine possible definitions of maximization, and show that only some of these permit the proposed analysis of wide scope indefinites. I show that a system of dynamic plural logic (DPlL) with unselective maximization can be modified to fully account for wide scope indefinites in terms of independent witness choice.