Linguistics Undergrad won top prize for THI fellowship

Linguistics major Cal Boye-Lynn was selected to receive a 2023-24 Undergraduate Research Fellowship from The Humanities Institute, for his research project titled “Investigating visual information as a constraint on sound change”. Only a handful of students across all Humanities majors receive fellowships every year. Even more impressive, Cal’s project won the top award for THI fellowships, the Bertha N. Melkonian Prize. Congratulations, Cal!

New admits to BA-MA program

Two undergraduate Linguistics majors Cal Boye-Lynn and Josh Lieberstein were recently admitted to the department’s BA-MA program. This program puts Cal and Josh on a pathway that can obtain an M.A. in Linguistics possibly one year after graduating.

Congrats and welcome, Cal and Josh!

Toosarvandani published in Language

Associate Professor Maziar Toosarvandani published a journal article titled “The interpretation and grammatical representation of animacy” in the December issue of Language. Here is the abstract:

We are used to thinking about person, number, and gender as features to which the grammar is sensitive. But the place of animacy is less familiar, despite its robust syntactic activity in many languages. I investigate the pronominal system of Southeastern Sierra Zapotec, identifying an interpretive parallel between animacy and person. Third-person plural pronouns, which encode a four-way animacy distinction in the language, exhibit associativity, a cluster of interpretive properties that have been argued also to characterize first-and second-person plural pronouns. Building on Kratzer’s (2009) and Harbour’s (2016) theories of person, I propose a plurality-based semantics for animacy that captures their shared properties. The compositional mechanism underlying this semantics ties person and animacy features to a single syntactic position inside the noun phrase. This enables an understanding of these features’ shared relevance to syntactic operations, including those underlying pronoun cliticization. In these Zapotec varieties, it is constrained both by person (in the well-known person-case constraint) and by animacy.

Three slugs at AMP 2023

Three Ph.D. students presented their works at the 2023 Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP) hosted virtually on Oct 20-22. Fifth-year Ph.D. candidate Maya Wax Cavallaro gave a talk titled “The syllable in domain generalization: Evidence from artificial language learning” (see slides here). First Ph.D. student Hanyoung Byun presented a poster on “Aggressive Reduplication in Japanese high vowel devoicing” (see poster here) in addition to his joint work with Jaehyun Yim (Seoul National University) on “Extension of phonotactic constraints across morphological subdomains: Evidence from Korean” (see slides here). Second-year student Richard Wang presented a poster on “Distribution of neutral tone and retroflex lenition in Beijing Mandarin” (see poster here).

Gong and Tamura at WAFL17

Two banana slugs presented their work at WAFL17, which took place Sep 27-29 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Assistant Professor Mia Gong gave an invited talk titled “On the Nature of Reflexive Binding in Mongolian: From Nominals to Clauses“, and third-year Ph.D. student Jun Tamura presented a talk on “Compounding Words in the Syntax can Produce Phrasal Phonology: Evidence from Aoyagi Morphemes“.

Professor Mia Gong (right) and Jun Tamura (left)

Professor Mia Gong (right) and Jun Tamura (left)

Sharvit Colloquium on Friday

This Friday, Yael Sharivit from UCLA will give the second colloquium talk of the fall quarter, titled “Assessing two theories of clausal complementation”. The talk will take place on Friday, 10/27, at 1:20 pm in HUM 1 – 210.

Her abstract is as follows:

Some clause-taking verbs can also take DPs (e.g., ‘believe’), some cannot (e.g., ‘think’), and some can appear without a complement (e.g., ‘groan’). The standard theory of complementation has to resort to lexical ambiguity to explain this. An alternative (due to Kratzer and others) says that “complements” of clause-taking predicates are not arguments, thereby offering a way to explain this variation without resorting to lexical ambiguity. I argue that this alternative fails to deliver the right truth conditions of certain attitude reports.

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