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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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Whole-hearted congratulations to Vera Lee-Schoenfeld who successfully defended her doctoral dissertation on Thursday, May 19:

Vera's committee consisted of Judith and Jim  (co-chairs), Sandy and Jorge.  Jorge came all the way from Buenos Aires for the defense.

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Congratulations to Ruth Kramer for successfully passing her phonology
qualifying paper on Monday, May 23. The paper is entitled "Root and Pattern

Morphology in Coptic", and the committee consisted of Junko, Jaye, and Armin

(chair).

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Congratulations to Stuart LaRosa, who successfully passed his phonology
MA paper entitled "Cluster Simplification and Sonorant Alternations in

Catalan."

The committee consisted of Jaye and Junko (chair).

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Bravo to last weekend's talented young Thespians who performed in International Playhouse V, a unique and entertaining presentation of theater pieces in five languages.  The Linguistics Department was proud to be one of the co-sponsors of this wonderful event, along with Cowell and Stevenson Colleges and the Language Program.  Well done!

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Eduardo Gil (BA in Linguistics, 2002) has been accepted to the linguistics graduate program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  He begins work towards his MA this fall.

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English Language International is hiring for Student Activities Leaders for their summer programs.  Student Activity Leaders help ELI show international students around the Santa Cruz area and let them practice their English.  If you are a current UCSC student, you can apply on the student employment section of the UCSC Career Center website under job ER# 0768.

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Cambridge University & UCSC Linguistics Research Fellow

speaking on

'True optionality' as a window on syntactic structure:  insights from free variation in Afrikaans

Friday, May 27, 2005

5:00 p.m.

Cowell College Conference Room

This talk starts off with an empirical question, namely that of
where Afrikaans --- and particularly, modern spoken Afrikaans ---

fits into the well established typology of V2 languages (cf. Vikner
1995). The results of a corpus-based investigation reveal two striking
respects in which Afrikaans departs from what would be expected of a
descendent of Dutch: (a) embedded wh-interrogatives are most commonly
realized as V2 structures rather than in the prescriptively correct
V-final form; and (b) the dat ("that")-complements of all verbs ---
not just the "bridge" variety --- also permit "verb-early" structures
to alternate with the prescriptively correct V-final structure. For
(a), I show that we are indeed dealing with true V-in-C V2 and that
the relevant structures should furthermore be viewed as embedded V2
clauses as they alternate with the corresponding obviously embedded
V-final clauses without interpretive consequences. I also show how
these structures appear to differ from those discussed in McCloskey
(2004).  This, then, is the first instance of 'true optionality' with
which the paper is concerned. The second is (b) which I contend does
not involve genuine V-in-C V2, but instead an alternation between two
different modes of (T-related) EPP-satisfaction, namely the vP-raising
I argue to be characteristic of SOV Germanic languages on the one hand
and English-style DP-raising on the other. Various pieces of evidence

are offered in support of this proposal. Among these is the fact that

Afrikaans's lexicalized negative auxiliaries kannie ("can't") and
moenie ("mustn't") --- elements which do not appear to be available in
any other SOV Germanic language --- exhibit various behaviours which
parallel those of their English counterparts, suggesting that they
instantiate 'T-elements'. These auxiliaries systematically feature
in the second position of the dat-clauses under consideration.

         Having given an initial description and outline analysis of the
Afrikaans facts, I turn my attention to the theoretical question
foregrounded by the data: how systematic 'true optionality' can be
accommodated in a rigidly deterministic theory such as contemporary
Minimalism (Chomsky 1998/2000 et seq.). I argue that the Afrikaans facts
suggest a very specific type of circumstance under which the grammar does

not "mind" which of two alternative operations takes place at a given

point in the syntactic derivation, with either of the two being possible

without consequences for either the convergence of the derivation or the
semantic interpretation it is assigned. This proposal is based on joint
work with Marc Richards (Biberauer & Richards 2004/2005).

         With the theoretical proposal in place, I give a more systematic
analysis of the Afrikaans facts, and then consider the wider implications
of the analysis of "true optionality" initially suggested by the Afrikaans
variation facts. I discuss the typology of (T-related) EPP-satisfaction in
Germanic proposed in Biberauer & Richards (2003) and Richards & Biberauer
(2004/2005), and show how this offers a new perspective on long-standing
puzzles relating to the position and interpretation of subjects in Germanic
and also to expletive realization in these languages. I also briefly
consider the implications of the proposal for the analysis of both the
synchronic variation and change aspects of syntactic change (cf. Biberauer
& Roberts 2005), and conclude by pointing to 'true optionality' phenomena
in non-Germanic languages which also appear to be amenable to the type

of analysis proposed here.

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Report on Maryland Mayfest  [thank you to Theresa Biberauer for this report!]

This year's Maryland Mayfest was specifically advertised as a "WH-fest", and it certainly lived up to its billing: between 9.30 am on Friday 13 May and lunchtime on Sunday 15 May, the approximately 60-member audience was treated to 12 mostly excellent hour-long talks on every conceivable aspect of the nature of wh-structures. Aside from talks concerned with the various syntactic and semantic aspects of wh-phenomena, we were also given an insight into a psycholinguist's perspective on these structures and challenged to consider the role of processing in determining the structure of wh-interrogatives in at least some languages. Speakers at the conference included Norvin Richards (MIT), Zeljko Boskovic (UConn), Grant Goodall (UCSD), Audrey Li (USC), Arthur Stepanov (Postdam), Ivano Caponigro (UMD), Paul Hagstrom (BU) and Marcel den Dikken (CUNY) and, between them, they saw to it that the research of quite a few UCSC faculty and former students (including Judith Aissen, Sandy Chung, Bill Ladusaw, Jim McCloskey, Jason Merchant and Line Mikkelsen) was frequently at the heart of discussion. The seminar format suggested by the student organisers proved highly effective in ensuring that conference attendees came away from the Fest with a strong sense of the diversity of work currently being done on wh-structures. And, despite Marcel den Dikken's best attempts to take everyone "back to hell" with his conference-concluding talk (Back to hell:  Further thoughts on wh-the-hell and its repercussions for the syntax of wh-questions), I rather got the impression that everyone had thoroughly enjoyed themselves, and that the University of Maryland grads had organized such a smooth-running, high-quality conference that future Mayfests may remain their sole responsibility!

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Stevenson College, Silverman Conference Room

Wednesday, June 1, 2005

2:00 - 5:30 p.m.

Invited speaker:  Gina Taranto (B.A. UCSC, 1994; PhD UCSD, 2003)

A Reception will begin at 5:00 p.m.

A program will be available soon.

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Department of Philosophy, UCSC

"The Semantics of Racism"

Tuesday, May 31, 2005 4:00 p.m.

Please check the SCLL web site later this week to confirm the colloquium location:

http://fortytwo.ucsc.edu/~chom/SCLL.html

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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)