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WHASC Newsletter April 5, 2005
("What's Happening at Santa Cruz")
WHASC is the weekly electronic newsletter of the UCSC Linguistics
Department. We welcome your news items, comments and feedback.
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KUDOS
Congratulations to Aaron Kaplan, who has successfully defended his Syntax QP, "Long-distance Wh-Movement and Minimalism." Committee members were Judith Aissen, Jim McCloskey, and Sandy Chung.
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Congratulations to Florence Woo whose paper "What to do to 'do.to..'" has been accepted for publication in the Canadian Journal of Linguistics (Special Edition on Wakashan Linguistics).
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WELCOME
We warmly welcome David Beaver as a visiting researcher for spring quarter. Dr. Beaver teaches in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University. He has been awarded a Charles H. Ryskamp Research Fellowship. The main topic of his research is in the area of Focus and Existential Constructions. While at UCSC, he will be consulting with Professors Donka Farkas and Geoff Pullum.
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COLLOQUIUM THURSDAY
THE UC SANTA CRUZ PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT
PRESENTS
Michela Ippolito
Boston University Department of Linguistics
"The only implicature"
Thursday, April 7, 2005, 4:00 pm
Silverman Conference Room
Stevenson College
This lecture is part of the Santa Cruz Language and Linguistics Group Distinguished Visitors Series (http://fortytwo.ucsc.edu/~chom/SCLL.html)
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COLLOQUIUM FRIDAY
5:00 p.m. Cowell Conference Room
The role of phonetic knowledge in phonological patterning
Corpus and survey evidence from Tagalog infixation
Kie Zuraw, UCLA
Following the talk, there will be a "pizza party" at the home of Judith Aissen, 804 Western Drive.
ABSTRACT
A current controversy in phonological theory concerns the explanation of
cross-linguistic phonological tendencies. Since SPE, it has generally
been assumed that such tendencies are to be explained by mental bias on
the part of learners and/or speakers: a pattern is common because it is
favored by learners/speakers. But work by Blevins and colleagues in
Evolutionary Phonology has argued that many cross-linguistic tendencies
can be explained without positing such bias. This means that
cross-linguistic tendencies can't be unproblematically used as evidence
about the mental machinery that humans bring to the task of learning and
using language.
In response, many researchers have begun looking at different types of
data, such as processing, learnability of artificial languages, and
literary invention. This talk will present another type of data:
extension of native-language phonology to words with novel phonological
structure, in this case infixation in Tagalog into loanwords with novel
initial consonant clusters. The data come from a new written corpus of
Tagalog, and from a survey. I will argue that Tagalog speakers' treatment
of these clusters parallels cross-linguistic findings of cluster
splittability by Fleischhacker, and that explaining the survey data,
especially, requires attributing to Tagalog speakers phonetic knowledge
and a bias about how to apply it.
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SYNTAX FORUM
The Syntax Forum will meet every other Tuesday, 2-4, in
the LCR, beginning on Apr 12, when Judith Aissen will speak. Subsequent
meetings are: 4/26 [when Sandy Chung will speak], 5/10, and 5/24. Our
first meeting (4/12) will begin with a brief discussion of possible speakers for the 5/10
and 5/24 slots.
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CAREER WORKSHOP THIS FRIDAY
Linguistics/Language Studies Career Workshop
Friday, April 8, 2005
1:00-3:00 pm
Cowell Conference Room
This is now a biennial event, so if you are a Senior OR a Junior please make sure to attend since the next Career Workshop will not be until Spring of 2007. The meeting has always been very casual, so don't be afraid to ask questions! Usually each panelist gives a 15-20 minute presentation on what they are currently employed doing, and how they got to that point. After each presentation we try to have approximately 10 minutes Q&A for you to ask your questions.
This is the line-up:
Sarah Caplener: employed by TellMe. Linguistics B.A. 2002
Adrienne Weir: employed at UCSC as EAP Coordinator, Language Studies B.A. 2002
Terese Tishakov: works for Monterey Institute of International Studies. BA Humanities,
(Russian language & literature), Yaroslavl State Pedagogical University, Yaroslavl, Russia.
MA Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), Monterey
Institute of International Studies, Monterey, USA
Liz Wiig: Language Studies senior. Setting up website for alums to communicate and network for job opportunities.
Thanks to Ashley Hardisty for organizing this workshop!!
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SPRING CALENDAR OF EVENTS
Friday linguistics colloquia are from 5 pm, Thursday philosophy colloquia are
from 4 pm.
*=scheduled postcolloq party*
Th 4/7 Michela Ippolito (Phil)
*F 4/8 Kie Zuraw *post-colloq party at home of Judith Aissen
F 4/15
Sa 4/16 Stanford S-TREND
Su 4/17 Stanford P-TREND
F 4/22
W 4/27 <UG comps handed out>
F 4/29 Michael Devitt
M 5/2 <UG comps returned>
*F 5/6 Paula Menendez-Benito *post-colloq party, location TBA
M 5/9- <Graduate language exam during this week>
F 5/13 Gregory Ward
Th 5/19 Vera Lee-Schoenfeld dissertation defense
Th 5/19 Scott Soames (Phil.)
F 5/20 <Senate Meeting>
Th 5/26 Jason Stanley (Phil.)
F 5/27
W 6/1 Undergrad Research Conf. (Silverman)
*F 6/3 Veerle Van Geenhoven *post-colloq party at home of Sandy Chung & Jim McCloskey
Still to be scheduled: Theresa Biberauer
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Psychology Spring Colloquia
Social Sciences 2 #121
3:30-5 pm
Wednesday, April 6th
Cognitive Program presents:
ROBERT POST
UC Davis, Psychology Department
"Inverted Vision/Action Dissociation With Induced Motion"
For special arrangements to accommodate a disability, please call Virginia Lee at 459-4194.
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NEWS FROM INGO PLAG
While I was at Santa Cruz I, among other things, wrote a grant
proposal for the German Science Foundation ('Compound stress in
English: Modelling the prosody of NN constructions'). Meanwhile, the
proposal has been accepted and I will soon start the project, with
two research assistants over a period of at least two years. I
include the abstract below (in case anyone is interested).
I would like to take the opportunity to thank again the department,
the LRC, and everyone at the department for their hospitality and
support and and the opportunity to do some serious work while I was
there. It helped a great deal to get this project started.
All the best,
Ingo
Abstract:
Compound stress in English:
Modelling the prosody of NN constructions
Principal investigator: Ingo Plag
Funding: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
It is generally assumed that compounds in English are stressed on the
left-hand member (e.g. bl·ckboard, w·tchmaker), However, there is a
considerable amount of variation in stress assignment (e.g. silk tÌe,
Madison ¡venue, singer-sÛngwriter) that is unaccounted for in the
literature. Three hypotheses will be tested in this project.
The semantic hypothesis states that it is the semantic relationship
between the constituents that is responsible for the particular
stress pattern of a given construction. Certain relationships trigger
right-hand stress, others left-hand stress.
The structural hypothesis states that morphological constructions,
i.e. real compounds, trigger left-hand stress, while syntactic
phrases trigger right-hand stress. Lexicalization is responsible for
the many aberrant cases.
The analogical hypothesis states that stress follows analogical
patterns. New compounds are assigned stress on the basis of their
similarity to existing compounds, i.e. those already present in the
speaker's mental lexicon.
The aim of the project is to provide an explanation for the variable
stress behavior of English compounds. To overcome the shortcomings of
earlier studies, three different types of data will be used: large
amounts of naturally occurring data from speech corpora, experiments
with native speakers, and computational modelling. Dealing with the
interface of phonology, morphology, semantics and syntax, the project
will also shed new light on the question of how linguistic knowledge
is to be represented in a descriptively and explanatorily adequate
model of grammar and lexicon.
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Connie M. Creel
Linguistics Research Center
University of California Santa Cruz
(831) 459-2386 (afternoons)
(831) 459-1380 (FAX)
(831) 459-5836 (mornings)