WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ

Phlunch: Monday, 10:30-11:30 AM, STEV 102: the group will discuss Myrberg and Riad (2015), “The prosodic hierarchy of Swedish.”

s/lab: Monday, 12:00-1:00 PM, LCR: Kelsey Sasaki will lead discussion of Staub et al. (2009, 2011) and Farmer et al. (2011), all discussing phonological typicality in reading.

S-Circle: Thursday, 12:00-1:00 PM, LCR: Ben Eischens will give a practice talk of his WSCLA presentation, “Tonal negation and negative elements in San Martín Peras Mixtec.”

MRG: Thursday, 1:00-2:00 PM, LCR: the group will discuss Reintges, LeSourd, and Chung (2006) “Movement, Wh-Agreement, and Apparent Wh-in-Situ.”

SPLAP: Thursday, 2:00-3:00 PM, STEV 217: the group will discuss Silk (2018), “Commitment and states of mind in mood and modality.”

WLMA: Friday, 1:20-3:00 PM, STEV 217: Tessa Scott (UC Berkeley) will give a presentation of her own work entitled, “Case and Agreement in Mam: PCC and Syntactic Ergativity Effects.”

LIP is not meeting this week.

On May 4, the Department of Linguistics at UCSC will host its second SPOT Research Cluster Workshop, a day-long workshop highlighting the Syntax-Prosody interface and Optimality Theory. The event will take place in Humanities 1, Room 210 and will feature a number of exciting presentations from invited speakers. More information about the event can be found on THI’s website.

Sluicing@50 was held at the University of Chicago from April 12-13. The conference marked and celebrated the 50th anniversary of the presentation of Guess Who by Haj Ross at the CLS meeting held in Chicago in April of 1969. Guess Who was the paper that first identified and named the ellipsis process now known as sluicing and its presentation and publication made possible a half century of investigation across many languages and language-types, one which has exposed for examination a host of issues in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, psycholinguistics and prosody.

Organized by alumnus Jason Merchant, whose 1999 UCSC dissertation and the 2001 book that emerged from it defined the landscape for the investigation of ellipsis in this millennium, the conference was a very large and very lively affair at which the UCSC community was unsurprisingly well represented. Apart from Merchant’s own presentation (Focus-marking inside Ellipsis Sites), grad student Margaret Kroll was an active participant. Jim McCloskey gave an invited talk on preliminary results emerging from the work of the Santa Cruz Ellipsis Project; Research Associate Dan Hardt presented a joint poster with alumnus Deniz Rudin (now at USC) on modal force in sluicing, and MA alumnus Matt Barros (now at Washington University in St. Louis) gave a paper (joint with Hadas Kotek of Yale) on the semantic conditioning of sluicing. Alumna Vera Gribanova of Stanford was also an invited speaker; her presentation was on the typology of V-stranding VP ellipsis. The workshop ended on Saturday with a talk by Ross himself—an emotional, humorous, and deeply felt meditation on language, linguistics, and life.