New Publications from Chacón

Professor Dustin Chacón recently published two articles. The first, “Disentangling semantic prediction and association in processing filler-gap dependencies: An MEG study in English,” co-authored with Liina Pylkkänen (NYU), appeared in Language, Cognition and Neuroscience.

In this study, we examine plausible filler-gap dependencies (‘which counters did the maids clean?’) with sentences that have an unexpected thematic role (‘which mops did the maids clean __ fastidiously?’). We find that neural activity distinguishes these kinds of sentences ~800ms in right inferior frontal cortex. This is longer and in a different location than other plausible/implausible argument-verb relations (‘Do you think maids/mops clean fastidiously?’), which are distinguished ~400ms in left inferior frontal cortex.

The second article, “Evaluating the time courses of morpho-orthographic, lexical, and grammatical processing following rapid parallel visual presentation: An EEG investigation in English,” co-authored with Donnie Dunagan (UGA), Tyson Jordan (UGA), John Hale (UGA/JHU), and Liina Pylkkänen (NYU), appeared in Cognition.

In this paper, we examine how the brain responds to short sentences displayed for 200ms. We found that the brain distinguishes grammatical sentences (the dogs chase a ball) from scrambled alternatives (ball a chase dogs the) around ~300ms. We show that this brain response is different from brain responses sensitive to (il)legal letter strings, morphological form, and word frequency, suggesting a distinct stage of processing grammatical structure in short sentences read quickly.

John Rickford’s Autobiographical Essay Published in Annual Review of Linguistics

Professor John Rickford

The Annual Review of Linguistics has published an autobiographical article by Professor John Rickford, tracing his decades-long career in linguistics. The essay begins with a brief account of Professor Rickford’s time as an undergraduate student at UC Santa Cruz, and delves into his research and professional journey across multiple institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Guyana, and Stanford University. The essay also discusses “Activist Sociolinguistics,” with reflections on the development of sociolinguistics and the role of linguistic research in social justice.

Abstract: My autobiographical essay begins with a brief section on my high school experience, then goes into more substantive detail about my research and publications over the past 55 years at the universities I attended (University of California, Santa Cruz; University of Pennsylvania) or at which I worked (University of Guyana, Stanford University) and since I retired in 2019. I mention my key mentors and influencers, including Roger Keesing, J. Herman Blake, Robert Le Page, and William Labov. And I identify some of the foci of my research over the years, including vowel laxing in Guyanese personal pronouns, prior creolization in the history of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), the Ebonics controversy, stylistic variation in sociolinguistics, quotative , and racial disparities in automated speech recognition. Finally, I focus on “Activist Sociolinguistics,” including fighting for increased success for AAVE and other vernacular speakers in schools and for increased justice for them in the courtroom.

Read the full-length article here: [link]

Paramore in Phonology

Fourth-year PhD student Jonathan Paramore had a journal article appear in Phonology in its latest issue: “Codas are universally moraic.”

Mismatches in weight criteria across weight-sensitive processes within individual languages present difficulties for theories of moraic structure, particularly regarding coda weight. Previous accounts, which stipulate that codas are variably moraic to account for the typological variation in the weight status of CVC for primary stress, make incorrect predictions for the status of CVC in other weight-sensitive phenomena, including tone, word minimality and secondary stress, among others. This article proposes a theory of Uniform Moraic Quantity coupled with a new syllable weight metric as a solution, which captures CVC’s flexible weight status while maintaining the cross-linguistic moraicity of codas and avoiding the incorrect predictions that frustrate the standard variable-weight approach.

Gong in Linguistic Inquiry

The winter issue of Linguistic Inquiry included a new journal article by Professor Mia Gong: “Case in wholesale late merger: Evidence from Mongolian scrambling“.

Takahashi and Hulsey (2009) suggest that wholesale late merger is controlled by case. This article presents novel evidence for this idea from Condition C reconstruction effects in Mongolian local and long-distance scrambling. Departing from previous accounts, I argue that the complexity of the phenomenon reveals that Condition C connectivity is related neither to the position of underlying binders nor to A/Ā-properties—scrambling bleeds Condition C, so long as the case requirement of the late-merged NP can be satisfied. Crucially, I motivate a hybrid case system for Mongolian in which accusative case is assigned as a dependent case. I show that this is both necessary and independently motivated, thereby introducing a fine-grained view of case into the wholesale-late-merger mechanism.

Sichel in the Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies

Professor Ivy Sichel saw a journal article appear in a recent issue of the Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies on “The double standard in Modern Hebrew,” co-authored with recent visitor to the department Professor Uri Mor (Ben Gurion University).

In this paper we analyze the social meanings associated with the new native vernacular (NNV) variety of Modern Hebrew as a complex positive stance, constructed via differentiation from its alternatives. NNV is reflexive, and it speaks for itself: for the authority of experience, as opposed to the traditional authority of the text. A speaker of NNV is necessarily an active agent in the propagation of the new collective and its values. We also explore the consolidation and dissemination of these values by cultural agents, focusing on a 1950s column by Dahn Ben Amotz, which presents snapshots of “everyday life” in multiple sites in Israel, as part of the modernist project of constructing a hegemonic folk identity. We show how variation in the use of spoken Hebrew, together with other tropes such as location and ethnic descent, are implicated in the construction of the new folk identity.

Alum interview: Morwenna Hoeks

Morwenna Hoeks

Morwenna Hoeks

Morwenna Hoeks received her PhD in 2023, with a dissertation entitled “Comprehending focus / representing contrast”, co-advised by Professors Amanda Rysling and Maziar Toosarvandani. Since then, she has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrück. Morwenna was also the recipient in 2024 of a prestigious Humboldt Research Fellowship.

The WHASC Editors recently asked Morwenna a couple questions about how postdoc life in Germany has been going:

Can you share a bit about your journey from UCSC to your current position at the University of Osnabrück? 

My journey to the University of Osnabruck started quite a while ago, in summer 2022, when a postdoc position in Prof. Dr. Nicole Gotzner’s lab was advertised. I was still working on my dissertation then, on the processing of focus and alternative sets, and I wasn’t really ready to move on just yet. But the research at this lab was very much related to my own, and would be a natural extension of the work I was doing back then, so I decided to apply anyway. Unfortunately I did not get that first position, but Nicole Gotzner decided to support me in applying for a fellowship that could still fund a position for me at the University of Osnabrück through third-party funding. This was a perfect opportunity for me, as it gave me a bit more time to wrap up my work at UCSC, and also gave me valuable experience writing grant applications like these. In summer 2023, almost exactly a year later, I therefore ended up applying to one of the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowships. The grant application ended up being successful and I will start this fellowship this summer. In the meantime,  the University of Osnabrück has already been able to fund my stay since February 2024.

So you recently received a prestigious Humboldt Fellowship—congratulations! What will that fellowship support, and how do you envision it shaping your research moving forward?

The grant allows me to stay at the Institute of Cognitive Science, at the University of Osnabrück, to work with Prof. Dr. Nicole Gotzner on the connection between focus and scalar implicature. In a nutshell, the project will basically be an extension of the line of work I started at UCSC on focus and alternative set processing, but here I will widening up the empirical terrain by comparing the alternatives involved in focus with those involved in scalar implicature. Theoretically, there are many open questions about potential differences and commonalities between the alternatives involved in the interpretation of focus and the generation of scalar implicatures, and how scales of various kinds play a role in each of them. Here, I will try to get at these questions by running a series of offline and on-line experiments that compare the processing profile of focus and scalar implicature, with the larger goal of uncovering these potential commonalities (or asymmetries) between the two phenomena. Specifically, the project will use information about the time-course of comprehenders’ reasoning about focus and SI alternatives as a window into both the semantic representations, as well as the underlying cognitive mechanisms that comprehenders use to reason about the relevant alternatives. This was exactly the kind of work I always wanted to be doing: using experimental methods to bridge the gap between semantic theory and psycholinguistics. 

Reflecting on your transition from graduate student to a postdoc, what were some of the challenges you faced, and how did you navigate them?

The transition from graduate student to postdoc has been a gradual process for me, with some notable challenges along the way. One of the initial hurdles was fully embracing the reality that I had earned my PhD—it took a little time for that accomplishment to truly resonate, and I still have a lot of imposter syndrome. Then there are inherent challenges that come with doing a postdoc: it’s another temporary stay in another country, speaking yet another language, but this time without the support of a graduate community. For me, this meant adapting to a new academic culture with an entirely new set of written and unwritten rules, which has been quite a learning experience. Navigating this has involved a bit of relying (and extending) my existing network, but mostly just asking stupid questions.

Based on your experiences, do you have any advice for current students as they prepare for the next steps in their careers?

I don’t think I have any advice that is not incredibly cheesy and current students will actually want to hear. But in the above, I think that there are two pieces of advice that are most obvious: The first one is that it has worked out well for me to start applying to things earlier rather than later—probably a bit earlier than I truly felt comfortable to. Although there were many struggles along the way and there wasn’t always necessarily a clear path forward, the fact that I bought myself so much time by starting early did really pay off in the end. The second one is the realization of how important it is to invest in the community, at UCSC and beyond. Postdoc life (and I’m sure, faculty life, too, in some cases) can be quite isolating from time to time, and as may be clear from the above, I have really missed having the UCSC Linguistics community around quite a bit. I don’t think we fully realize this as graduate students until we actually leave (at least I didn’t), but it’s quite exceptional to have so many people around to talk to on a daily basis. As a student, the amount of activities and commitments can be quite overwhelming, but right now it has been really great to have a network of UCSC alumni to draw from. So see it as an investment, and enjoy it while it lasts 🙂

 

UCSC Alums and Linguists contribute to festschrift honoring Maria Polinsky

This month (January 2025) marked the publication of a rich and varied collection of research papers in linguistics in a festschrift honoring Maria Polinsky (Professor emerita at the University of Maryland). The volume, entitled Syntax in Uncharted Territories: Essays in Honor of Maria Polinsky, was published on the University of California’s open access eScholarship research repository. All papers in the collection are now available for download from the eScholarship platform. The collection was edited by Lauren Clemens (University at Albany, State University of New York), by Santa Cruz PhD alumna Vera Gribanova (Stanford University) and by Gregory Scontras (UC Irvine).

Among the papers in the volume is one co-authored by PhD alumna Ruth Kramer (Georgetown University) with Luke James Adamson (Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft). Their paper deals with the theoretical challenges posed by a passive-like construction in Jarawara (a language of Brazil), whose properties they link with recent research on Algonquian inverse systems. Also in the volume is a paper by professor emerita Sandy Chung. Sandy’s paper, titled “Antipassive in a Minimalist Universal Grammar” argues — drawing primarily on evidence from Austronesian languages — that antipassive should be deconstructed into two characteristic and independently varying properties: demotion of the internal argument, and voice marking.

Link to the full volume: [link]

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