A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
This Saturday, October 27, the UCSC Linguistics Department will host a conference entitled “Semantics-Pragmatics Interface,” featuring a wide variety of invited speakers and exciting topics. A program including the event schedule and location can be found here.
Amanda Rysling gave a colloquium talk at UCLA on October 19. The topic touched on her dissertation work, along with some newer developments of those and related ideas. The abstract is below:
Regressive spectral assimilation is a default in speech perception
The vast majority of work on segmental perception focuses on how listeners differentiate adjacent speech sounds from each other, or compensate for coarticulation. Much of this work assumes that listeners are so successful at differentiating successive speech sounds that their failures, cases when adjacent speech sounds are heard as similar, are vanishingly rare (e.g., Ohala, 1981, 1993, i.a.). The first part of the talk demonstrates that such failures are not as rare as they have been assumed to be: listeners in clear listening conditions productively hear the first of two sounds as similar to the second, effectively failing to use available context information to compensate for coarticulation. Four claims are then advanced: (1) that segmental perception is better understood as a process of incremental evidence accumulation and evaluation, which is neutral as to whether acoustics are attributed to their source segments or gestures, (2) that the auditory system defaults to treating different types of acoustic properties (e.g. spectral weight, duration, intensity) differently, (3) that perceptual spectral assimilation on clear speech, which previous accounts of compensation for coarticulation have predicted should not occur, has a domain-general basis, and (4) that this tendency represents a default in speech perception that is responsible for the overwhelming typological prevalence of regressive major place assimilation in the phonologies of the world’s languages.
Jorge Hankamer and Line Mikkelsen (UC Berkeley, UCSC PhD alumna) presented work on “CP complements to D” (an investigation into nominal structure) at Stanford’s SM-circle on October 19. They will present the same work at UC Berkeley’s S-Circle on November 19. You can access their handout here.
s/lab: Monday, 3:30-4:30 PM, LCR: Margaret Kroll will present recent work in a talk titled “The Search for Truth: Semantic or Pragmatic Judgments?”
SPLAP: Wednesday, 3:00-4:00 PM, LCR: the group will discuss Deal (2017): “Shifty asymmetries: universals and variation in shifty indexicality.”
MRG: Friday, 9:00-10:00 AM, LCR: the group will discuss Haugen and Siddiqi’s 2013 work entitled “Roots and the Derivation.”
Phlunch: Friday, 12:00-1:00 PM, LCR: Maho Morimoto will present a poster detailing her recent work on Japanese.
S-Circle: Friday, 1:20-2:50 PM, LCR: Pranav Anand and Maziar Toosarvandani will present recent work entitled “Now and then: perspectives on positional variance in temporal demonstratives.”
WLMA: Friday, 3:00-4:00 PM, LCR: Ben Eischens will discuss work in progress on the morphosyntax of negation in San Martín Peras Mixtec.
LIP will not be meeting this week.
From Oct. 5-7, UCSC phonologists gathered at our minimal pair neighbor UCSD for the 2018 Annual Meeting on Phonology. Presentations given by current faculty and students included:
The event was co-organized by UCSC undergraduate alum Eric Baković.
UCSC PhD student Tom Roberts spent part of a productive summer overseas. he writes,
“In addition to working on various linguisticky projects here and there in Santa Cruz, I spent the month of August in Estonia chowing down on buckwheat and following up on prior experimental work on the discourse effects of biased questions in Estonian. At the beginning of September, Margaret and I presented joint work on the semantics and pragmatics of “of course” at Sinn und Bedeutung in Barcelona. We also drove with recent PhD grad and fellow SuB-attendee Kelsey Kraus to the tiny but beautiful principality of Andorra, where it turns out it is very unusual to order coffee with your lunch.”