BENNETT, ELFNER, & MCCLOSKEY IN LANGUAGE

Ryan BennettEmily Elfner (York University), and Jim McCloskey recently published an article in Language, entitled “Prosody, focus, and ellipsis in Irish.” The article focuses on the interaction of the phonological requirements of focus and ellipsis in Irish, and it can be found along with an abstract here. Congratulations, Ryan, Emily, and Jim!

UCSC alum Robert Henderson (PhD 2012) also has an article in the same issue, and UCSC alum Chris Potts (PhD 2003) has an invited commentary on another article as well.

BEAUCHAMP AT SAL3

Last weekend, the third Symposium on Amazonian Languages (SAL) took place at the University of California, Berkeley. In a talk titled, “Aspects of a revised phonological description of Kajkwakhrattxi (Jê),” Jérémie Beauchamp presented a descriptive account of some phonological patterns found in Kajkwakhrattxi and discussed phonological differences between Kajkwakhrattxi and closely related languages, as revealed through documentation work with older speakers of the language.

CHUNG IN SAIPAN

Last week Sandy Chung made a quick trip to Saipan, which is still recovering from the effects of Typhoon Yutu. While there, she spent several days doing fieldwork, gave a presentation on Chamorro orthographies and dictionaries to the Public School System’s language teachers, and did some work with the editors of the community-based revision of the Chamorro-English dictionary. She and Matt Wagers will be back in the CNMI in June for their next experiment.

LASC 2019

Over the last weekend, the Linguistics Department at UCSC hosted its annual Linguistics at Santa Cruz (LASC) conference, where prospective and current students, faculty, and alumni saw presentations from second- and third-year graduate students and alumna Louise McNally. The student presentations showcased in-progress research and drew insightful comments and questions from the audience.

Jérémie Beauchamp kicked off the event with “Alternations in epenthetic vowel quality in Kĩsêdjê,” a thorough analysis of factors conditioning default and echo epenthesis in Kĩsêdjê.

Ben Eischens presented “A puzzle of ko-occurrence: negative licensing in San Martín Peras Mixtec,” an investigation of the licensing conditions on various negative words in San Martín Peras Mixtec.

Lisa Hofmann discussed “Sentential negativity and polarity-sensitive anaphora,” a hyperintensional semantic analysis that accounts for the anaphoric character of sentential negation.

Andrew Hedding walked through “New information and the grammar of focus: evidence from San Martín Peras Mixtec,” a study of the tonal marking of focus in San Martín Peras Mixtec and its implications for theories of focus.

The poster session that followed sparked lively dialogue concerning the active research of the presenters:

Andrew Angeles’ project, “The road to initial accent in Kyoto
Japanese trimoraic nouns,” analyzed changes in pitch-accent patterns from older varieties of Japanese to currently spoken varieties.

Netta Ben-Meir presented on “Epenthesis in Lebanese Arabic: a case of opacity revisited.” Her project contrasted two similar processes of vowel epenthesis in Lebanese Arabic, proposing that they occur at different levels of the grammar.

Richard Bibbs’ work, “Perceptual factors license phonological contrasts in Chamorro,” examined the surprisingly common occurrence of mid vowels before laryngeal consonants in Chamorro.

Nick Van Handel discussed “The Italian syntax-prosody interface in Match Theory,” a unification of two previously unconnected prosodic processes in Italian through Match Theory.

The final speaker of the day was invited alumna Louise McNally, whose presentation “Multi-level semantics for categorization and reference” proposed different levels of representation for various semantic processes. The reception following the presentations was marked by joviality, rainbows on Monterey Bay, and many smiling faces. Thank you to all of the faculty, staff, and students who helped to make this year’s LASC a success!

Pictured from left to right: Andrew Angeles, Andrew Hedding, Nick Van Handel, Netta Ben-Meir, Grant McGuire, Lisa Hofmann, Richard Bibbs, Louise McNally, Ben Eischens, and Jérémie Beauchamp.

HOW OUR READINGS ARE GROUPING THIS WEEK

MRGThursday, 11:40 AM-12:40 PM, LCR: the group will discuss Bruening (2019), “Verbal Morphology: Not Head Movement, Not Mirror Theory, Just External Merge.”

PhlunchFriday, 9:00-10:00 AM, LCR: check your emails mid-week for a Phlunch announcement!

s/lab: Friday, 3:00 – 4:00 PM, STEV 102: Jack Duff will lead a discussion of Langsford (2018), “Quantifying sentence acceptability measures: Reliability, bias, and variability.”

SPLAP,  S-Circle, LaLoCo, LIP, and WLMA will not be meeting this week.

LAW JOINS LINGUISTICS FACULTY

Jess H.-K. Law, doctoral student in Linguistics at Rutgers University, will be joining the Department of Linguistics at UCSC as Assistant Professor in the coming academic year! Jess works in theoretical and experimental linguistics, with a focus on semantics and pragmatics. Specifically, she enjoys puzzling over distributivity, plurality, dynamic semantics, speech acts, bare noun phrases. She writes,

There is no better home for my research and teaching than Linguistics at UC Santa Cruz, and there is no better home for my family than the beautiful city of Santa Cruz. I eagerly look forward to working alongside all the brilliant linguists at the department to push the boundary of linguistics.

Congratulations, Jess!

HIRAYAMA DEFENDS DISSERTATION

Hitomi Hirayama successfully defended her dissertation on February 27. The presentation investigated the interrogative use of the discourse particles wa and no(da) in Japanese, and it comprised a subset of her dissertation, entitled “Asking and Answering Questions: Discourse Strategies in Japanese.” Her committee consisted of Donka Farkas (co-chair), Adrian Brasoveanu (co-chair), and Ivy Sichel. The defense was followed by a lively celebration hosted by Donka, where members of the linguistic community came together to cheer on Hitomi’s achievements. Congratulations, Hitomi!

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