Nido de Lenguas in April

Nido de Lenguas, the collaboration between linguists at UC Santa Cruz and local Oaxacan cultural organization Senderos, continued this April with two Pop-Up events at a film screening (Historias de Culturas: Oaxaca in Santa Cruz) in downtown Santa Cruz on April 8 and the annual Guelaguetza festival at the Branciforte Small Schools on April 16. The latter event was attended by over 2,400 people, where UCSC linguists had the opportunity to share the Indigenous languages of Oaxaca with many festival goers.

The Guelaguetza was covered by the Santa Cruz Sentinel and local TV station KSBW.

Nido De Lenguas

Senderos Co-Founder Fe Silva Robles (left) and UC Santa Cruz graduate students (from left to right), Delaney Gomez-Jackson, Jack Duff, Matthew Kogan, and Eli Sharf, at Historias de Culturas: Oaxaca in Santa Cruz

Banana Slugs at UC Berkeley

Andrew Kato and Sadie Lewis, both undergraduate students in the linguistics major, recently returned from UC Berkeley where they presented at the 7th Annual Berkeley Undergraduate Linguistics Symposium, on April 15. They filed the following report with the WHASC Editor:

“With an international group of presenters, topics ranged from American Sign Language phonology to Polynesian thematic suffixes. Sadie’s talk was on eventive ambiguities with noun-adjective pairings, and Andrew’s talk was on discourse-sensitive semantic gender in the DP domain via definite specific singular they. The keynote speaker, Professor Darya Kavitskaya, spoke in detail about her extensive fieldwork on the history of Crimean Tatar.”

Fascinating work, Andrew and Sadie! 

Andrew Kato and Sadie Lewis

Sadie Lewis (left) and Andrew Kato (right) at UC Berkeley

2023 Graduate Research Symposium

Symposium Presenters

Symposium presenters (from left to right): Matthew Kogan, Jun Tamura, Eli Sharf (not present: Jonathan Paramore and Elifnur Ulusoy)

Our annual graduate student research and professionalization seminar (a.k.a. LING 290) culminated this year in a series of presentations by seminar participants on Saturday, April 15. The program included:

  • Eli Sharf “Identificational Appositives in English”
  • Jun Tamura “Compounding Words in the Syntax can Produce Phrasal Phonology: Evidence from Aoyagi Morphemes”
  • Matthew Kogan “The Role of Specifiers in a Content-Addressable Retrieval Mechanism”

Two other participants in LING 290 were unfortunately unable to present at this year’s symposium due to illness. Their planned talks were titled:

  • Jonathan Paramore “Codas are Universally Moraic”
  • Elifnur Ulusoy “The Role of Syntactic Connectivity in Agreement Attraction: Evidence from Turkish”

Congratulations to all the participants in LING 290 for the wonderful progress they’ve made on their research this year!

research symposium

Audience members attentively listening.

Aaron White receives NSF CAREER award

 

Aaron White

Professor Aaron White

Aaron White (BA, 2009), who is currently Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Rochester, just received an NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award. This prestigious award, which is jointly supported by the Linguistics program and the Robust Intelligence program, will support his work on logical form induction:

This project develops a framework for integrating complex logical reasoning capabilities into the components of AI systems that make their ability to reason by analogy possible. To support the development of this framework, the project builds a large dataset capturing the logical relationships among sentences in three languages by using AI systems to determine which kinds of logical relationships are most useful for improving that system’s own logical reasoning capabilities. Through integration with graduate and undergraduate curricula, the project serves as a vehicle to enhance programming and statistical literacy as well as data collection and data management skills through training with hands-on applications.

The framework integrates logical representations into AI systems by imposing constraints on the sorts of numeric representations that those systems use to make inferences on the basis of some natural language input. These constraints are defined in terms of a mapping from the system’s numeric representations of natural language to logical representations. This mapping is learned from scratch and itself constrained (a) to correctly predict inferences that actual speakers of a language make — as captured by the large-scale datasets collected under the project — and (b) to be compositional: the meaning of some piece of language must be predictable from the meanings of its parts.

Congratulations, Aaron!

Pi(e) party

The Department recently inaugurated a new tradition, with its first annual Pi(e) Party, which was held not on 3/14, due to inclement rain, but on March 16. The event saw a serious lineup of pies, including some more expected fare — several berry and apple pies — as well as a somewhat more exotic buttermilk pie, and both sweet and savory empanadas.

The WHASC Editor didn’t get a chance to taste every flavor this year, but looks forward to trying next year.

pie 3    pie 2

pie 1

Pi(e) party attendees (behind the camera and not pictured: Roumi Pancheva).

Toosarvandani at UCLA

This past Friday, Professor Maziar Toosarvandani gave a colloquium in the Department of Linguistics at UCLA. His talk on “Representing animacy in the grammar”, reported some recent results relating to the ongoing NSF funded project on animacy and resumption. The abstract for his talk is below:

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 a cluster of interpretive properties I call “associativity”; these 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.

While down south, Maziar had the opportunity to catch up with fellow Oto-Mangueanist Ben Eischens (PhD, 2022), who is now on the linguistics faculty at UCLA.

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