Category: Uncategorized

Jonathan Pesetsky (UMass) will continue the discussion of Charlow’s (2018) paper on “The scope of alternatives: Indefiniteness and islands” on Wednesday, October 21st at 1 pm in this Zoom link (979 2662 4935, pw: monads).

The UCSC Linguistics Department is excited to welcome four graduate students as they embark on their first year of the program:

Taijing Xiao (Ph.D.) finished his B.A at Wuhan University and M.A at National Tsing Hua University. He has put most efforts into semantics. He has been working in Mandarin and Bunun (Austronesian). He highly recommends Chinese traditional stand-up comedy for learning Mandarin. Fun fact: Taijing used to perform stand-up comedy. If anyone is interested, he is more than welcome to give suggestions.

Nikolas Webster (Ph.D.) completed his undergraduate degree in Linguistics at NYU. He is most interested in phonology and morphology right now, but he is also interested in venturing into syntax. Right now, he is most interested in Korean and other similarly agglutinative languages. Fun fact: Niko is ambidextrous, which usually just results in him getting very confused about directions.

Edward Shingler (MA) started at UCSC in Fall 2017 and he will have completed his requirements for a bachelor’s degree next quarter. Syntax is his major interest and he also has been studying Mandarin for a year. He would like to work with Vietnamese and Austronesian languages. Fun fact: Edward relies on spinach and mediation to focus on work.

Claire Miller Willahan (MA) will get her undergraduate degree at the end of winter 2021 and this is her first year as a BA/MA student. She is currently most interested in linguistic fieldwork and psycholinguistics. She is also interested in continuing to work with Mesoamerican languages and beginning to look at Italian and the regional languages of Italy, particularly Sicilian. When she is not thinking about linguistics, she can usually be found ranting about the importance of cats, coffee, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Fun fact: Claire traveled across Japan with her high school choir for a concert tour.

Welcome, linguists!

For the second meeting of Phlunch, Max Kaplan led a discussion of Bailey & Hahn (2005) “Phoneme similarity and confusability” on Thursday, October 8^th. This week, Amanda Rysling and John Kingston(UMass) will present on the different ways to conceptualize the phonetics-phonology interface, and the consequences of those for laboratory research in phonology, at 1 pm Thursday, October 15^th in this Zoom room(230 326 093, pw: 655218).

Jonathan Pesetsky (UMass) will lead a discussion of Charlow’s (2018) paper on “The scope of alternatives: Indefiniteness and islands” on Wednesday, October 14^th at 1 pm in this Zoom link (979 2662 4935, pw: monads).

Dan Brodkin will lead a discussion of Aissen (2017) “Correlates of ergativity in Mayan” on Tuesday, October 13^th from 12 pm in this Zoom room (791 731 8021, pw: laclave). A full schedule can be found here.

Jack Duff will lead a discussion of Karimi, Diaz, & F. Ferreira (2019), “A cruel king” is not the same as “a king who is cruel”: Modifier position affects how words are encoded and retrieved from memory On Tuesday, October 13^th at 10 am in this Zoom link. A full schedule of S/LAB can be found here.

Dan Brodkin will present “Mouse movement in Mandar” on Friday, October 16th from 1:30-3:00 pm in this Zoom room (982 3942 8413, pw: interface). Dan’s term MOUSE stands for “Movement of Objects Under Subject Extraction”.