WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ

Junko Ito and Armin Mester recently had an article published in the Journal of Japanese Linguistics. The article, entitled “Tonal alignment and preaccentuation,” examines pitch accent in Japanese. It can be found here, and the abstract is given below:

This paper develops a new analysis of the antepenultimate accent principle that determines the default location of the pitch accent in Japanese words (namely, on the syllable containing the antepenultimate mora). The chief innovation is that this analysis also applies to compounds, where it predicts the location of accent in compounds with “short” N2 (one or two moras) – so-called “preaccentuation” at the end of N1, which often does not coincide with the penultimate mora. In addition, the paper sketches an extension of the analysis subsuming the N2-initial accent characteristic of compounds with “long” N2 (three or four moras).

Congratulations, Junko and Armin!

Due to the temporally skewed distribution of our reading groups, the majority will be taking an off-week instead of interrupting the Thanksgiving festivities for academic discussions. However, s/lab met on Monday from 3:30-4:40 PM in the LCR. Jenny Bellik and Tom Roberts presented recent joint work in a talk titled “Verbatim memory for surface features: The case of stress shift.”

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

Tzutu Kan, a hip-hop artist from Guatemala who raps in Spanish and several Mayan languages, will be performing on UCSC’s campus this week. The event will take place at Kresge Town hall from 4:00 PM to about 6:00 PM this Thursday, November 15th. A flyer with more details can be found here.

On October 27, UCSC hosted a workshop on “Topics at the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface,” organized by Adrian Brasoveanu and former LRC visitor Floris Roelofsen. The workshop featured talks by collaborators and former students of Donka Farkas, and much like Donka’s own work, dove into a broad range of topics, including Mayan quotatives, free choice inferences, and the interaction between priority modals and conditionals. The workshop was capped off by a plenary talk by Donka on the special conventional discourse effects of non-intrusive oare-questions in Romanian. True to UCSC form, the workshop tackled tricky questions at the semantics-pragmatics interface and subsequently spirited but friendly debate about which member of the projected set to adopt as the common ground.

LaLoCo: Tuesday, 11:00-12:00 PM, Room 217: the group will discuss chapters four and five of Lee and Wagenmakers (2014), “Bayesian cognitive modeling: a practical course.”

SPLAP: Wednesday, 3:00-4:00 PM, LCR: the group will discuss Davidson (2015), “Quotation, demonstration, and iconicity.”

MRG: Friday, 9:00-10:00 AM, LCR: the group will discuss Zanon (2014), “On the status of TP in Turkish.”

Phlunch: Friday, 12:00-1:00 PM, LCR: Junko Ito and Armin Mester will give a practice WECOL talk on syntax-prosody faithfulness.

S-Circle: Friday, 1:20-2:50 PM, LCR: Steven Foley will give a presentation on recent work entitled “Economy, Minimal Compliance, and cross-derivational competition in Georgian agreement.”

WLMA: Friday, 3:00 – 4:00 PM, LCR: the zlab psycholinguistic group will present on a recent experiment.

LIP and s/lab will not be meeting this week.

Current PhD student Hitomi Hirayama’s first Qualifying Paper appeared in the most recent issue of Glossa. The article, entitled “Revisiting a null pronominal account for parasitic gaps in Japanese,” can be found along with an abstract here.  Congratulations, Hitomi!

The LSA’s latest newsletter congratulates members of the panel “New Directions in LGBTQ+ Linguistics: Commemorating the LSA Special Interest Group on LGBTQ+ Issues in Linguistics,” which will be held at the LSA’s 2019 Annual Meeting in New York. The panel has received an Interdisciplinary Public Engagement Award from the Society for Linguistic Anthropology. On the panel is alum Kirby Conrod (BA in Linguistics and Literature, 2011), who is now a fourth-year graduate student in Linguistics at the University of Washington. They will deliver a paper entitled “Trans(itive) Gendering.”