Category: Talks

LINDAHL IN S-CIRCLE

Former LRC Visitor Filippa Lindahl (University of Gothenburg) will present this Friday (March 11) in S-Circle on “Swedish relative clauses: Very weak islands”:

The mainland Scandinavian languages allow movement out of relative clauses, a phenomenon known as Relative Clause Extraction (RCE). In this talk, I present results from my ongoing dissertation project. Based on a collection of examples from conversation and radio, I give an overview of the environments in which RCE occurs, and which types of phrases are typically allowed to move out of RCs in Swedish. Most extraction in spontaneous usage consists of topicalization or relativization, but interrogative wh-movement and it-clefting out of RCs are also possible. Adjuncts are usually not extracted, but this is only a tendency; it is possible to extract adjuncts that are contrastive or deictic (denoting a specific point in time, for instance). On the other hand, it is impossible to form why-questions that question an RC-internal reason.

This suggests that Swedish RCs are a type of weak island (cf. Cresti 1995, Szabolcsi 2006, Ruys 2015). But Swedish RCs are even more transparent than well-known weak islands, in that they do not block functional readings of questions. Since Swedish RCs are opaque for certain types of phrases, namely why and certain other adjuncts, we cannot simply say that they are non-islands; but semantic approaches like Cresti 1995 and Ruys 2015 are too restrictive for Swedish, since these are specifically designed to explain why functional readings are blocked. Swedish relative clauses thus show that islands aren’t just strong or weak, but that they can be very weak.

As usual, S-Circle will meet at 2 pm in the Linguistics Common Room.

HIRAYAMA AT FAJL

A couple weeks ago, graduate student Hitomi Hirayama traveled to Japan to attend Formal Approaches to Japanese Linguistics (FAJL) 8, which took place on February 18-20 at Mie University. She had the following to report:

I gave a poster presentation entitled “A null pronominal account for apparent parasitic gaps in Japanese,” which is based on my first QP project. During the poster session and throughout the conference, I had very interesting conversations with many Japanese linguists. Among the attendees, there were two former visitors to our department: Shigeto Kawahara (Keio University) and Takashi Morita (MIT). To my pleasant surprise, I also ran into one of our alumni Kazutaka Kurisu (Kobe College) at the reception, and we had a great time talking about how people are doing in Santa Cruz. He asked me to say hello to all!

RUDIN AT STANFORD

Last Tuesday (February 23), graduate student Deniz Rudin gave a talk in the SemPrag group at Stanford called “How to disagree with a might-claim: Assessor-sensitivity and the pragmatics of assertion.” After returning over the hill, Deniz filed this report:

In attendance were a mixed group of linguists and philosophers, who asked very good questions of very different kinds. Some grads took me out to lunch afterwards. Special shout-out to Dan Lassiter, who gave me a ride, and grilled me (good-naturedly) about modal logic the whole way back. Always a sincere pleasure.

LASC 2016

This year’s Linguistics at Santa Cruz (LASC) promises to be a fun and stimulating event. The all-day conference on Saturday (March 5) showcases the recent research of second- and third-year graduate students. There will be six talks and seven posters on a variety of topics in phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and psycholinguistics in languages as diverse as Georgian, Japanese, Persian, San Martin Peraz Mixtec, Tagalog, and Turkish. The Distinguished Alumnus Lecture will be given by Ryan Bennett (Yale University). He will speak on “Stop contrasts in Kaqchikel: Production, perception, and the lexicon.” The full program can be found here.

PHLUNCH THIS WEEK

In the department’s phonetics and phonology discussion group Phlunch this Friday (February 26), Sarah Bakst (Berkeley) will give a talk on “The role of palate shape in individual articulatory and acoustic variability in American English /r/ and /s/”:

This ultrasound and acoustics study considers the role of individual anatomy in articulatory and acoustic variation and variability in the production of American English /r/ and /s/. Individual variation in the production of these consonants is a well-documented phenomenon (Mielke et al., 2010; Lawson et al., 2011; Bladon and Nolan 1977). /r/ falls on a continuum whose two endpoints are retroflex, in which the tongue tip points up, and bunched, where the primary constriction is formed by a raised tongue body (DeLattre and Freeman 1968); /s/ lies on a similar continuum from apical (tip points up) to laminal (tip points down).

In their study of front vowels, Brunner et al. (2009) found that flatter palates require greater articulatory precision than domed palates to achieve acoustic consistency because, all else being equal, smaller changes in articulation result in greater changes in acoustics for flatter palates than for domed. In this talk, I will present data indicating that palate shape does indeed influence variability in the production of /r/ and /s/, but the effect on articulation vs. acoustics varies depending on the segment.

As usual, Phlunch will take place from 11am to 12pm in the Linguistics Common Room.

ITO AT MIT

On a snowy Friday in Boston earlier this month (February 5), Junko Ito gave a colloquium at MIT on her recent research, entitled “Doubling up or remaining single” (done in collaboration with Armin Mester and Haruo Kubozono, of NINJAL). She analyzed the intricate gemination patterns in Japanese loan words through the interaction of ranked gemination constraints, prosodic markedness constraints, and prosodic faithfulness to the source word. Despite the chilly weather, she had many stimulating discussions with the vibrant theoretical phonology community at MIT.

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