WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ

Uriel Cohen Priva (Brown University, phonetics and phonology) is currently accepting applications for a Research Assistant position in the Cohen Priva lab. More information and eligibility requirements can be found here.

Our very own Donka Farkas was busy this summer traveling across the Atlantic to various linguistic events. Farkas writes:

At the beginning of June I attended the workshop on Meaning in non canonical questions at the University of Konstanz.  It was an excellent event — great posters and talks, including from the other invited speakers, Malte Zimmermann, Benjamin Spector, and Venneta Dayal. A particular pleasure for me was to talk to my academic grandsons (through Chris Kennedy), Ryan Bochnak and Andrea Beltrama.  The title of my talk, in the form of a canonical question, was “What is special in non-canonical questions?”

At the end of September I traveled to Bucharest, Romania, to give a talk at my alma mater, the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, on oare questions in Romanian.  The best part of the visit, for me, was the opportunity to talk withmy first Linguistics teacher, Professor Alexandra Cornilescu (who also taught our own Adrian Brasoveanu), and with the current crop of young linguistics students there. I also had the chance to see a play — Bucharest has always had fantastic theater.

s/lab: Monday, 3:30-4:30 PM, LCR: Stephanie Rich will lead a discussion of Forster et al. (2009): “The maze task: Measuring forced incremental sentence processing time.”

LaLoCo: Tuesday, 11:00 AM-12:00 PM, Room 217: the group will discuss chapter four of Lee and Wagenmaker’s (2014) “Bayesian Cognitive Modeling: A Practical Course.”

SPLAP: Wednesday, 3:00-4:00 PM, LCR: the group will discuss Speas (1999) and Anand and Nevins (2004) on shifty indexicality.

Phlunch: Friday, 12:00-1:00 PM, LCR: the QUD is still TBD, but attendance is nonetheless encouraged.

MRG: Friday, 9:00-10:00 AM, LCR: the group will discuss Embick (2000): “Features, Syntax, and Categories in the Latin Perfect.”

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

This Friday, October 12, at 1:20 PM in Humanities 1, Room 210, there will be a colloquium by Ur Shlonsky, Université de Genève. His talk is entitled “Subjects of copular constructions.” The abstract is given belowː

“Hebrew copular sentences look like root small clauses: “Daniela balshanit” (Daniela is a linguist’). I argue that they are not or rather, that they contain a (perhaps surprisingly) rich functional structure. The subject, Daniela, although initial in the string, can occupy distinct subject positions. I try to identify and characterize these positions and propose a cartography of subject positions in copular sentences.”

Matt Wagers and Sandra Chung traveled to Saipan to perform an experiment and received wonderful news from Cognition. Wagers writes:

In July Sandy and I went to Saipan to prepare a new experiment on binding of null possessive pronouns in Chamorro. This area of Chamorro grammar provides a clean set of contrasts between c-command, precedence and anaphora/cataphora. We worked together with our coauthor Manny Borja to design and record the stimuli (336 unique sentences!) We will go back next June to collect data on when/how these null pronouns receive their bound interpretation. Here’s a photo of celebrating finishing the recordings at our favorite lagoon-side restaurant, Oleai Beach Bar.

Around the same time we received some good news, which is that our paper on relative clause processing would come out in Cognition this September, and it has!

The UCSC Linguistics Department is excited to welcome six PhD students as they embark on their first year of the program:

Jack Duff completed his undergraduate degree in the Linguistics, Psychology, and Classics departments at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is interested primarily in the responsibilities of semantics, pragmatics, and general cognition in linguistic performance. He currently works on English and has a growing involvement in Udi, a Northeastern Caucasian language spoken in Azerbaijan, as well as its medieval ancestor, Caucasian Albanian (Alvan). Fun fact: Jack spent a year in high school learning how to roughly deliver sound from bagpipes (though he promises not to demonstrate near the department). He more regularly plays the bass guitar.

Morwenna Hoeks earned a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and Linguistics from Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and a Master’s degree in Logic from the University of Amsterdam. She is mostly involved in formal semantics, with secondary interests in the syntax-semantics interface and psycholinguistics. Fun fact: Morwenna recently discovered “The Hot Chocolate Effect,” a process that begins with pouring hot milk into a mug, stirring and adding chocolate powder, and then tapping the bottom of the mug with a spoon. The pitch of the taps slowly rises. Stirring again causes further pitch contours. “Please do try this at home,” she writes.

Hyein Jeong earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Kyungpook National University in South Korea. She is mostly interested in syntax and has enjoyed working on both Icelandic and English, though she is also interested in beginning work on Mesoamerican languages and Korean, her native language. Fun fact: Hyein loves yoga and practices it regularly.

Max Kaplan earned his Bachelor’s degree in German Studies from Wesleyan University and his Master’s degree in Applied Linguistics from Boston University, where he also worked as a Research Assistant in the Child Language Lab. He then worked in the Trueswell-Gleitman Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. He is interested in phonetics, experimental phonology, and psycholinguistics, and he has a soft spot for German and Germanic languages. Fun fact: Max is a militant Philadelphian, a Wikipedia enthusiast, and a house music snob.

Anelia Kudin earned her Bachelor’s degree in Linguistics from Northwestern University. Her interests include syntax, sentence processing, and semantics. She is also interested in phonology, with a particular focus on the influence of prosody, intonation, and accent on sentence structures and interpretation. She plans to continue working on Slavic languages and would also like to investigate Romance languages. Fun fact: Anelia is quadrilingual! She speaks Ukrainian, Russian, English, and Spanish.

Stephanie Rich completed her Bachelor’s degree in Linguistics and Psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst with minors in Latin and Russian. She then worked for two years as the lab manager for the UCLA Language Processing Lab. She is primarily interested in psycholinguistics, with a focus on how structure and meaning are composed during sentence comprehension. She also has interests in semantics, pragmatics, and prosody. Fun fact: outside of linguistics, Stephanie enjoys dancing, including tango, salsa, bachata, swing, and others.

Adrian Brasoveanu traveled to Madison, WI in the second half of July to present joint work with Jakub Dotlacil on an extensible framework for mechanistic processing models at the joint annual Meeting of the Society for Mathematical Psychology and the International Conference on Cognitive Modelling (paper and slides available). He then traveled to Bulgaria at the beginning of August to co-teach a course on computing dynamic meanings (more info here). He returned to Europe in mid-September to give a talk on the semantics and processing of correlatives at the “Multiple wh-constructions and their kin” workshop in Nantes. Finally, upon his return to Santa Cruz, he gave a talk on cognitively realistic computational models for natural language understanding at the first fall quarter meeting of the Santa Cruz Machine Learning group.