UNDERGRADUATES WIN RESEARCH AWARDS

It was announced late last week that four undergraduate majors in Linguistics have been honored with HUGRA Awards for 2014-2015. These awards are given by the Humanities Division at UCSC to support and recognize excellence in research by undergraduate students. The awards are made on the basis of a research proposal submitted to the Institute for Humanities Research and adjudicated by a panel of faculty members from across the division. Francisco Delgado won an award for his project on Chamorro Loanword Morphology (advised by Sandy Chung); Eileen O’Neill was recognized for her project on Phonetic and Phonological Change and the Influence of English on Modern Irish (advised by Jaye Padgett); Valery Vanegas was recognized for her project A Study in Voice Quality Using Accelerometers (advised by Grant McGuire) and Jake Vincent for his project on Chamorro Head-Internal Relative Clauses and the Linker (also advised by Sandy Chung). In addition, Jake Vincent’s project was selected to receive the Bertha N. Melkonian Prize, which goes to the most highly rated research proposal in the HUGRA competition each year. Warm congratulations to all.

DISTINGUISHED PHONOLOGY VISITORS

Arrived last week in sunny Santa Cruz from the University of Tromsø, Norway, the university closest to the North Pole, is Professor Martin Krämer, who will be an LRC research visitor this quarter. Also here for just this week is Professor Alan Prince (of Rutgers University), who will be presenting some of his recent work in Armin Mester‘s phonology seminar (MW1-3pm in the Cave). If you have things phonology-related on your mind, they will both be happy to talk to you.

LSA WINTER MEETING

Meanwhile, much of the department decamped to Portland, Oregon for the 2015 Winter meeting of the Linguistic Society of America between Thursday January 8th and Sunday January 11th. There, Sandy Chung and Matt Wagers gave a joint presentation (with their collaborator Manuel F. Borja of Saipan) on Filler-gap order and online licensing of grammatical relations: evidence from Chamorro. Maziar Toosarvandani gave a presentation to the the annual meeting of SSILA (the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas), a sister society of the LSA whose meeting coincides with the Winter Meeting. Maziar’s talk was on The semantics of durative gemination in Northern Paiute. Bern Samko presented on The emphatic implicature of English verb-phrase preposing, Nate Arnett presented a poster on Interference Effects in Subject-Verb Attachment, while Anna Greenwood had the honor of presenting one of the final papers of the meeting; Anna’s talk was on Substance bias in stress pattern learning. There were in addition many Santa Cruz alumni at the Meeting, and 15 of the presentations in Portland reported on research carried out by graduate or undergraduate alums of the UCSC program.

BRASOVEANU AND DOTLAČIL IN SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS

The first issue of the journal Semantics and Pragmatics for 2015 has just been published. In it appears a paper by Adrian Brasoveanu and former LRC visitor Jakub Dotlačil. The paper presents an experimental investigation of the processing of sentence-internal same and it argues on the basis of the results that emerged that the processing cost of inverse scope is to be attributed to model structure reanalysis rather than to covert scope operations.

Toosarvandani and AnderBois in Language

The final issue of Volume 90 of Language (journal of the Linguistic Society of America) landed in our mailboxes just before the end of the year. In it we find a paper by Maziar Toosarvandani and a paper by recent alumnus Scott AnderBois. Maziar’s paper is on Two types of deverbal nominalization in Northern Paiute and grows out of his long-term commitment to work on the Mono Lake variety of that language. The paper deals with the syntax and semantics of two nominalizing suffixes and with what there is to learn from them more generally about the process of nominalization, focusing especially on the surprising semantic variability shown by the Northern Paiute nominalizers (they can express both individual and event nominalizations). Scott’s paper (The semantics of sluicing: Beyond truth conditions) grows out of his 2011 dissertation research; it develops a theory of the licensing of sluicing in which both truth-conditional semantics and issues (in the sense of inquisitive semantics) play a crucial role. Scott is now Assistant Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences at Brown University.

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