Walker published in Italian Journal of Linguistics

Faculty Rachel Walker and collaborator Yifan Yang have a recent article titled “Consonant Phonotactics in the Moenat Variety of Ladin” appearing in the Italian Journal of Linguistics.

Here is the paper abstract:

This paper provides a study of consonant phonotactics in the present-day Moenat variety of Ladin. This research focuses on the speech of the current generation of younger adults, based on an investigation with a primary consultant and acoustic recordings of multiple speakers. This work systematically investigates singleton consonants and consonant clusters in each position in the word (initial, medial, final) with accompanying illustrations in example words. An accompanying archive of sound files exemplifies the production of each word by two native speakers, one male and one female. Several phonological patterns involving consonants are discussed, including voicing agreement and place neutralization in preconsonantal sibilants, final obstruent devoicing, and nasal place assimilation. In addition, variation in the realization of sibilants is identified.

Another successful LASC in the book

On March 11, the Department hosted its annual Linguistics at Santa Cruz (LASC) conference, attended by prospective graduate students, current students, faculty, and alumni. The program included presentations by three graduate students and alumnus Eric Potsdam (PhD, 1996), now Professor at University of Florida.

The student presentations showcased recent research going on in the department, featuring:

  • Eli Sharf (3rd-year): “Restrictive Modifiers in Parenthetical Positions”
  • Elifnur Ulusoy (3rd-year): “Effects of Hierarchical Structure in Agreement Attraction: Evidence from Turkish”
  • Maya Wax Cavallaro (5th-year): “The Syllable in Domain Generalization: Evidence from Artificial Language Learning”

The Distinguished Alumnus Lecture given by Eric is on “Exceptives, Ellipsis, and Negation“.

Thank you to all of the students, staff, and faculty who contributed to making this event a success!

  • LASC presenters (left-right): Elifnur Ulusoy, Maya Wax Cavallaro, Eli Sharf, Eric Potsdam

Pi(e) day celebration

The Department continued its newly inaugurated tradition from last year and hosted the second annual pi(e) party in the Cave on March 14. This year, we saw a mixed line-up of pies from sweet (Matcha, key lime, tangerine, to name a few) and savory (empanadas, veggie pizza, quiche, etc.), brought and made by faculty and staff. Everyone had a great time tasting and celebrating the success of this year’s open house and LASC events.

 

A big thank-you to all the pie-bringers and everyone for their service at the department events!

McCloskey gave a podcast on Irish

Professor Emeritus Jim McCloskey recently participated in a podcast about the Irish Language Renaissance, which is also featured on the LSA website. Here is a summary of the podcast:

Irish is among Europe’s oldest languages. It’s a near miracle that anyone speaks it today. Patrick talks with online Irish teacher Mollie Guidera whose students include a Kentucky farmer who speaks Irish to his horses; also with Irish scholar Jim McCloskey who developed a love of the language when he spent a summer living with Irish speakers. Irish is changing fast, with far more of its speakers learning it as a second language, while the native-speaker population declines.

Slugs at UIUC

Undergraduate student Andrew Kato recently gave a talk at ILLS 16 (the Annual Meeting of the Illinois Language & Linguistics Society) titled “The scope-taking of relative measurements” hosted at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (March 1-2). Among the keynote speakers was alum Ruth Kramer (Ph.D. 2009), whose plenary talk was titled “The case against phonological gender assignment: Crosslinguistic evidence from Hausa, Guébie and beyond”.

Slugs in CDMX for FAMLi

UCSC linguists Ryan Bennett and Maya Wax Cavallaro presented at Form and Analysis in Mayan Linguistics (FAMLi) VII in Mexico City Feb 22-23. Maya presented ongoing work on the development of final devoicing processes (“Domain generalization in right-edge phonological phenomena in Mayan“), and Ryan presented an invited conference plenary on the phonology of laryngeal features and segments (Spanish title: Segmentos y rasgos laríngeos en la familia maya: Evidencia que la fonología es abstracta, y distinta de la fonética; English translation: Laryngeal segments and features in the Mayan family: Evidence that phonology is abstract, and different from phonetics).

Also present were Robert Henderson (PhD 2012), Jaime Pérez González (Chancellor’s Postdoc 2021-2023), Sadie Lewis (BA 2023), and Professor Emerita Judith Aissen. Like Ryan, Jaime presented an invited conference plenary, dealing with preferred argument structure in Mocho’, titled “Preferred plot structure in Mocho’“.

You can find the streaming of the conference here (Feb 22, with Ryan and Maya’s presentations) and here (Feb 23, with Jaime’s presentation).

  • Slugs in attendance (left to right): Ryan, Robert, Jaime, Judith (photoshop credit to Maya), Sadie and Maya

Pancheva published in JSL

Faculty Roumyana Pancheva recently published a journal article titled “Morphosyntactic variation in numerically-quantified noun phrases in Bulgarian” in the Journal of Slavic Linguistics.

See a short abstract attached:

Bulgarian masculine nouns have a special form – a ‘count’ form – different from singular and plural, which is used in numerically-quantified nominal phrases. The count form is analyzed here as accusative singular. Several empirical arguments are offered in support of this un usual account, and potential challenges are addressed. The account places Bulgarian among an understudied group of languages, where singular vs. plural marking on nouns in numerically-quantified nominal phrases varies by noun class.

Congrats, Roumi!

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