WHASC Newsletter May 4, 2005
("What's Happening at Santa Cruz")
WHASC is the weekly electronic newsletter of the UCSC Linguistics Department and the Linguistics Research Center. We welcome your news items, comments and feedback. Please submit news items by noon on Tuesdays.
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ACCOLADES
Congratulations to the phonology caucus (Armin, Jaye, Junko) for the Special
Research Grant awarded by the UCSC Committee on Research. Besides the
upgrading of the current phonetics lab equipment, the department will
acquire a new soundproof booth in the Stevenson phonetics lab. Hurray!
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Congratulations to Rachel Walker (UCSC Ph.D. 1998). She has received tenure at the Department of Linguistics at USC.
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Congratulations to the following students who will be entering the UCSC Linguistics Graduate Program in the fall:
Abby Shoun (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), and Paul Willis (University of Arizona) will join the PhD program. The new MA students will be: Tristan Davenport, Jessamy Norton-Ford, Paul Jensen, Dan Roth, and Nick Reynolds (all current or former UCSC students).
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COLLOQUIUM THIS FRIDAY
We will welcome Paula Menéndez-Benito (UMass, Amherst) to the department Thursday and Friday. On Friday, May 6 at 5 p.m. Paula is giving a colloquium entitled "Universal Free Choice Items and Exhaustivity" at the Cowell College Conference Room. There will be a potluck following her talk at the home of Jaye Padgett. Paula will be a visiting assistant professor of semantics at UCSC starting in September.
ABSTRACT
Much current linguistic research is devoted to the semantics of Free Choice
(FC) items of the 'any'-type (e.g., Dayal 1998, Giannakidou 2001, Saebø 2001,
Chierchia 2004, Farkas 2004, among others). My dissertation contributes to this
enterprise by investigating the behavior of Spanish 'cualquiera'. In this talk,
I will focus on cualquiera in episodic and modal contexts.
Like FC 'any', Spanish 'cualquiera' is ruled out in episodic (perfective)
sentences and necessity statements, and licensed in possibility sentences:
1) Juan puede comer cualquiera de estas manzanas
Juan can eat any of these apples
2) * Juan tiene que comer cualquiera de estas manzanas
Juan must eat any of these apples
3) *Juan comió cualquiera de estas manzanas
Juan ate-pfv. any of these apples
I first explore a compositional analysis in the spirit of Dayal (1998),
according to which 'cualquiera' would be a universal quantifier that ranges
over possible individuals. To handle the problems that this account faces, I
will further propose that 'cualquiera' contributes an exhaustivity requirement.
In the final analysis, sentences like 2) and
3) are ruled out because the interaction of 'cualquiera' with necessity modals
and episodic aspect yields unusable truth conditions.
REFERENCES
Dayal, V. (1998) Any as inherently modal. Linguistics & Philosophy 21: 433-76.
Chierchia, G. (2004) Broadening Your Views. Implicature of Domain Widening, ms.
Farkas, D. (2004) Free Choice in Romanian, ms.
Giannakidou, A. (2001) The Meaning of Free Choice. Linguistics and Philosophy
24: 659-735.
Saebø, K. J. (2001) The Semantics of Scandinavian Free Choice Items.
Linguistics and Philosophy 24: 737-787.
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LING T SHIRTS
A message from Jocelyn Laney (jalaney@ucsc.edu):
The winner of the t shirt contest is design #11 (Linguistics WHAT/Chomsky) by
Brian and Dan. Available sizes are Youth M-XL and Adult SM-XL. Colors and the back of the
shirt are all up to them. All that will be confirmed sometime this week. However, I can tell you that they will be 2-sided, and the final cost is going to be $10. I'm going to be collecting money THIS WEEK in 116, 140 and 151, so everyone start breaking $20s and cutting checks payable to Jocelyn Laney. I will also
post order forms in the offices for people who need to slip a check into Jaye Padgetts's mailbox. Available sizes are Youth M-XL and Adult SM-XL.
Underlings, Grad Students, professors, staff, visitors, and friends are all invited to order
a shirt. The winning design can be see at http://people.ucsc.edu/~jalaney/lx
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COLLOQUIUM MAY 13
Gregory Ward, Professor of Linguistics at Northwestern University, is a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford for the 2004-2005 school year. He will present a colloquium at UCSC on Friday, May 13, 2005 at 5:00 p.m. in the Cowell Conference Room. His talk is entitled: Noncanonical Equatives.
ABSTRACT
In this talk, I compare two noncanonical English equative constructions: deferred equatives (Nunberg 1979, 1995; Ward 2004) and epistemic would equatives (Coates 1983; Nuyts 2001; Ward, Birner & Kaplan 2003), as illustrated in (1)-(2), respectively:
(1) A: Who ordered what?
B:  I'm the Pad Thai.
OP=X corresponds to Y
(2) A: What did Chris order?
B: That would be the Pad Thai.
OP=Chris ordered X
Using corpus data, I show that the two types of equatives are focus-presupposition constructions in that they each require that an OPEN PROPOSITION (in the sense of Prince 1986) be contextually salient (i.e., evoked or inferrable) at the time of utterance. They differ, however, in the number of variables being instantiated as foci within that open proposition (OP). The deferred equative in (1) instantiates the two variables in the OP 'X corresponds to Y', while the epistemic would equative in (2) instantiates the single variable in the OP 'Chris ordered X', with the demonstrative subject taking this variable as its antecedent (Ward, Birner, & Kaplan 2003; cf. Mikkelsen 2004). Unlike marked syntactic constructions that employ non-canonical word order to signal the OP requirement (e.g, clefts, gappings, preposings, inversions), noncanonical equatives perform this discourse function by other means, through, e.g., a non-literal equative (as in (1)) or the presence of epistemic would (as in (2)).
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TREND REPORT  (Thank you Junko and Jim!)
The two TREND meetings (S-TREND and P-TREND) took place at Stanford on the weekend of Saturday April 16th and Sunday April 17th.
TREND (the Trilateral Phonology Weekend) is a well-established yearly event, but for the first time this year was expanded to become a two-day event and to also include research in syntax and semantics. The initiative for the expansion came from Line Mikkelsen who, once established at Berkeley, realized that there was new scope for interaction among the three departments (Santa Cruz, Stanford, and Berkeley).
UCSC was represented at S-TREND on Saturday the 16th by Pete Alrenga and by Ascander Dost. [http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/sssg/strend/]
Pete's talk was based on his ongoing work on the syntax and semantics of expressions such as `same, different,' and `like,' which share many properties with comparative constructions but which also clearly differ from comparatives in their denotations.
Ascander's talk dealt with second position clitics in Pashto, arguing against a purely syntactic account of their placement and proposing instead that prosodic factors play a central role. The analysis is developed within the framework of HPSG.
Line Mikkelsen was among the co-authors of the final presentation of the day---a cross-linguistic study of the factors influencing subject choice and indefiniteness of the pivot in existential constructions.
Also presenting at S-TREND was Jenny Lederer, who graduated with a BA in Language Studies from UCSC in the spring of 1999 and who is now a graduate student in Linguistics at Berkeley. Jenny's presentation used a large scale corpus study to argue that the distribution of reflexives in prepositional phrases is best understood in terms of the concepts Figure and Ground, rather than in purely structural terms.
P-TREND speakers from UCSC on Sunday the 17th were Ruth Kramer, David Teeple, and Dan Kaufman (LRC visitor this year from Cornell University). [http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/pinterest/P-TREND.htm]
Ruth's talk investigated the root and pattern morphology in Coptic (an Egyptian language, spoken from the third to the eleventh century), and developed an OT analysis of Coptic verbal morphology that crucially includes the consonantal root as part of the input.
Dave presented stress and gemination evidence from Orani Arabic, which bore out the OT prediction of a language with solely monosyllabic, bimoraic feet, as the only binary foot type that satisfies both the constraint "trochee" and the constraint "iamb", an analysis that has no counterpart in pre-OT parametric metrical theory.
Reviewing the merger evidence from a variety of Malayo-Polynesian languages, Dan argued that languages can have a set threshold on the number of contrast mergers, which can be formalized as self-conjunction of a constraint on contrast neutralization.
Next year's TREND meetings will take place in Berkeley.
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LASSO CALL FOR PAPERS
34th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest
October 7-9, 2005 in Lubbock, Texas
Plenary Address by Lyle Campbell, University of Utah
Deadline for Abstracts: June 1, 2005
E- mail 250-500 word abstracts to: lasso2005@yahoo.com
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NOMINATION DEADLINE SOON
Nominations for the UCSC Alumni Association's 2005-06 Distinguished Teaching, Outstanding Staff, and Alumni Achievement awards are open for one more week. Take a moment to nominate a faculty member, a staff member, and/or UCSC graduate who exemplifies campus excellence. The nomination deadline is Friday, May 6.
Information about award criteria and past winners can be found on the web at:
http://alumni.ucsc.edu/programs/awards/awardsindex.html
Nominations (200 word minimum) can be submitted on the web at:
http://alumni.ucsc.edu/programs/awards/award_nomination.html
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NEW IN THE LRC LIBRARY
Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at Kobe Shoin (TALKS), No. 8, March, 2005, Kobe Shoin Women's University
GG@G (Generative Grammar in Geneva) Volume 4, 2005, Edited by Genoveva Puskas & Eric Haeberli

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