A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
The Linguistics Department’s December 2018 newsletter highlighted second-year PhD student Jérémie Beauchamp’s fieldwork on Jê languages in Brazil, supported by funding from outside donations to the department. To learn more, click here.
Visiting professor Gorka Elordieta will be giving a colloquium Friday, December 7, from 1:20-2:50 PM in Humanities 210. The title of his talk is, “Unaccented words, headedness, and prosodic phrasing in Northern Bizkaian Basque.” The abstract is given below:
Northern Bizkaian Basque (NBB) has accented and unaccented lexical words, like
in Tokyo Japanese. Unaccented words that are also syntactic phrases never
constitute independent phonological phrases and have to group with the following
word, unlike accented words (cf. Elordieta 1997, 1998, 2007a, 2007b). Assuming
the correspondence between syntactic phrases and phonological phrases as in
Match Theory (Selkirk 2009, 2011, Elfner 2012, 2015; Elordieta 2015; Bennett,
Elfner and McCloskey 2016, among others), this is an issue to attend to. We
propose a formal explanation for the deficiency of unaccented words under five
assumptions: (i) the presence of a constraint that calls for every phonological
phrase to be headed, i.e. to have a prosodic word that is the head; (ii) NBB
unaccented words lack a prosodic head; (iii) a prosodic word that does not have a
head cannot be a head of the phonological phrase (prosodic constituents must be
headed all the way down, cf. Selkirk 2007); (iv) the above mentioned constraints
dominate the constraint that rules out any deletion of phonological phrases (or
lack of correspondence between syntactic phrases and phonological phrases).
Jim McCloskey traveled to the University of Maryland to give a talk in their colloquium series on Friday November 30th. The title of the talk was Understanding Ellipsis: Corpus, Annotation, Theory and it presented an overview of the work of the Santa Cruz Ellipsis Project along with some of the preliminary results gradually emerging from the annotation work of the past three years. Being in College Park, Jim was able to re-connect with one of the veterans of that project— alumna Anissa Zaitsu, now a Baggett Fellow at Maryland— and also with former LRC visitor Annemarie van Dooren, who is now a fourth year student in the doctoral program at Maryland, working principally on the acquisition of modality.
Over the weekend, a number of UCSC graduate students presented original work at the second annual California Meeting on Psycholinguistics (CAMP). The event was a great success, drawing psycholinguists from across the state. A chronological list of UCSC presentations is given below:
Kelsey Sasaki, Steven Foley, Jed Pizarro-Guevara, Maziar Toosarvandani, and Matt Wagers: “Pronouns over gaps in parsing? Relative clause processing in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec.”
Netta Ben-Meir, Nick Van Handel, and Matt Wagers: “Clauses don’t generate interference in subject retrieval: Preliminary evidence.”
Kelsey Sasaki: “Temporal interpretation in discourse, backwards and forwards.”
Jennifer Bellik and Tom Roberts: “Verbatim memory for surface features: Evidence from stress shift.”
Jack Duff: “Individual differences and the relationship between attitude predicates and perspective.”
Margaret Kroll and Amanda Rysling: “Evaluating truth: Experimental evidence from appositives and conjunctions.”
Steven Foley and Matt Wagers: “Detecting agreement errors in Georgian: Implications for predictive parsing.”
Stephanie Rich and Jesse Harris (UCLA): “Lexical and structural predictions during online processing: The case of partitive ‘both.'”
Pictured, from left to right: Matt Wagers, Tom Roberts, Stephanie Rich, Kelsey Sasaki, Jack Duff, Amanda Rysling, Netta Ben-Meir, Steven Foley, Nick Van Handel, Deniz Rudin (UCSC PhD alum), Jed Pizarro-Guevara, and Adam Morgan (UCSC MA alum). Not pictured are Margaret Kroll and Maziar Toosarvandani.
While the CAMPers trekked south, Junko Ito and Armin Mester drove eastward to serve as keynote speakers at the Western Conference on Linguistics (WECOL) at CSU, Fresno (located near the geographical center of California), presenting their recent work on “Syntax-Prosody Faithfulness.” A copy of their handout can be found here.
LIP: Wednesday, 12:00-1:00 PM, LCR: Nick Van Handel will lead a discussion of Assgari and Stilp (2015): “Talker information influences spectral contrast effects in speech categorization.”
MRG: Friday, 9:00-10:00 AM, LCR: the group will discuss chapters 6, 7, and 8 of Siddiqi’s (2009) “Syntax Within the World.”
SPLAP, s/lab, Phlunch, WLMA, and S-Circle will not be meeting this week.
On November 9, our very own Donka Farkas gave a colloquium talk entitled “Non-intrusive questions” for the Department of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut (handout). She greatly enjoyed the lively question period after the talk as well as her meetings with colleagues and graduate students. She reports that, among the many friendly faces she saw, a familiar one was Chantale Yunt, who completed her BA in Linguistics at UCSC in 2015. Among her many projects, she continues work on tu marked questions in Québécois French.