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.

Bennett colloquium on Friday

This Friday, our own Ryan Bennett will give the first colloquium talk of fall quarter/school year, titled “Vowel deletion as grammatically-controlled gestural overlap in Uspanteko”.  The talk will take place on Friday, 10/13, at 1:20 pm in HUM 1 – 210.

His abstract is as follows:

Uspanteko (Mayan) is spoken by ~5000 people in the central highlands of Guatemala. Unstressed vowels in Uspanteko often delete, though deletion is variable within and across speakers. Deletion appears to be phonological, being sensitive to phonotactics, foot structure, vowel quality, and morphology; and being largely insensitive to speech rate and style. But deletion also appears to be phonetic in character, reflecting extreme vowel reduction rather than symbolic deletion: it is variable, gradient, insensitive to certain phonotactics, and opaque with respect to accent placement. Electroglottography data suggests that even apparently ‘deleted’ vowels may contribute voicing to [C(V)C] intervals, albeit inaudibly. We thus analyze deletion as grammatically-controlled gestural overlap, which masks vowels in [CVC] contexts, either in the phonology proper (e.g. Gafos 2002) or as part of a grammar of phonetic interpretation (e.g. Kingston & Diehl 1994).

Upcoming Centennial LSA Annual Meeting

First-year Ph.D. student Ruoqing Yao‘s honors thesis research, completed at William & Mary under the supervision of Ph.D. alum (2006) Anya Hogoboom, has been accepted for a talk at the Centennial LSA Annual Meeting in New York, to be held in January 2024. Her talk is titled, “Resumptive pronouns in islands show confusability advantage effect.”

Fifth-year Ph.D. candidate Yaqing Cao will present a poster on “Modals and negations LF-PF (mis)matches in English and Mandarin” and second-year Ph.D. student Richard Wang will present a poster on “Rhotic lenition and neutral tone in Beijing Mandarin”. First-year Ph.D. student Aidan Katson‘s work “Vowel nasalization does not cue ambisyllabicity in American English nasal consonants: evidence from nasometry” in collaboration with Jose Alvarez Retamales, Sarah Rose Bellavance, Lisa Davidson, Amanda Eads, Alden McCollum, and Auromita (Disha) Mitra, will also be presented.

Cao at SS-Circle at UC Berkeley

Fifth-year Ph.D. candidate Yaqing Cao gave an invited talk at UC Berkeley’s Syntax & Semantics Circle last Friday, Oct 6. Her talk is titled “Modals and negations LF-PF (mis)matches in English and Mandarin”, and her abstract is attached below:

Studies on modal auxiliaries and negation revealed cross-linguistic differences in (mis)matches between their surface linear orders (PF representation) and scopal interpretations (LF representation): while modals like can in English demonstrate LF-PF mismatch properties w.r.t. negation, modals in Mandarin show strict isomorphism w.r.t. the negation bu. There are three potential accounts to such a cross-linguistic difference: scope economy approach, head movement/reconstruction, rich base-generation approach. In this paper, I argue that rich base-generation approach made the right prediction because there does not exist head movement of modals in Mandarin, contrary to the prediction made by the scope economy and head movement approach.

Ito and Mester’s Spring and Summer 2023 updates in Japan

Besides cherry blossom viewing on their bikes at ICU (Picture 1), Research Professor Emerita and Emeritus Junko and Armin worked on finalizing “Syntax-Prosody in Optimality Theory–Theory and Analysis”, a book co-edited with Nick Kalivoda (Ph.D. 2018) and Jennifer Bellik (Ph.D. 2019). This involved final proofreading, editorial corrections, correspondence with individual authors, and providing the index — bringing it to final publication in the summer.

The volume (Picture 2) contains the results of an NSF-funded project in the form of various singly and co-authored papers by the editors as well as UCSC linguistics undergrads, grads, and postdocs, including Richard Bibbs (7th-year Ph.D. candidate), Dan Brodkin (5th-year Ph.D. candidate), Yaqing Cao (5th-year Ph.D. candidate), Ben Eischens (Ph.D. 2022, now Assistant Professor at UCLA), Ed Shingler (B.A. 2021), Max Tarlov (B.A. 2021) and Nicholas Van Handel (Ph.D. 2022).

During their Spring sojourn in Japan, Junko and Armin had two UCSC-related get-togethers. First, at an Italian trattoria in Tokyo appropriately called “La Mora” (Picture 3), they dined with Haruo Kubozono (visiting scholar at the Linguistics Research Center 1993-94, now at National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, or NINJAL), Maho Morimoto (Ph.D. 2020, now a postdoc at Sophia University in Tokyo), and Motoko Katayama (PhD 1998, now a medical doctor heading her own Obstetrics & Gynecology clinic in Kunitachi, Tokyo).

Second, travels in Japan with Bill Ladusaw (Retired Professor Emeritus) and his partner Ken Christopher landed the four of them at an onsen (hot spring spa) near Nikko, Japan (Picture 4).

  • Cherry blossoms at International Christian University
    Cherry blossoms at International Christian University

AmLaP23 Update

AMLaP23 took place from August 31st to September 2, with many current and former Banana Slugs in attendance. It was hosted by the Basque Center for Brain and Language in San Sebastián-Donostia, whose mountain-hemmed, fog-suffused shores were eerily reminiscent of [Matt’s] home. There were six presentations from current students and faculty:

All of their abstracts can be found here.

We also ran into many former slugs, like Kelsey Sasaki (Ph.D. 2021, now Junior Research Fellow at Oxford; presenting joint work with Matt Husband, Daniel Altshuler and Runyi Yao) and Jakub Dotlačil (Assitant Professor at Utrecht). And Professor Liv Hoversten from Psychology, who completed a postdoc at BCBL, was also present.

From left to right: Kogan, Arvindam, Wagers, Dotlačil, Duff, Kaplan, Rich, Sasaki, Hoversten; not pictured: Balachandran

From left to right: Kogan, Arvindam, Wagers, Dotlačil, Duff, Kaplan, Rich, Sasaki, Hoversten; not pictured: Balachandran

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