Syntax and Semantics

Linguistics in action

October 11, 2018

Calques has received some great photos from last weekend's NELS/AMP double-header!

Berkeley linguists at NELS

At NELS: Schuyler Laparle, Emily Clem, Nico Baier (PhD '18), Tessa Scott

Tessa Scott

Tessa Scott with her NELS poster

Schuyler Laparle

Schuyler Laparle with her NELS poster

Nik Rolle

Nicholas Rolle (PhD '18) presenting his poster (joint work with Larry Hyman)

AMP 2018

Berkeley phonologists at AMP: Gabriela Caballero (PhD '08), Alan Yu (PhD '03), Andrew Shibata (BA '17), Hannah Sande (PhD '17), Nicholas Rolle (PhD '18), Jesse Zymet

Alrenga visits

October 11, 2018

Welcome to Pete Alrenga, who has just joined us as a visitor! Pete sends the following words about himself:

Hi! I'll be visiting from UMass Amherst until mid-November, and I'll be working with Line Mikkelsen while I'm here. Line and I are developing a project around a long-standing mutual interest of ours, namely the structure and interpretation of identity, similative, and equative constructions. In English, these notions are canonically expressed by same, different, like, such, so, etc., and our own previous work has explored the intriguing double lives that these items lead as comparative operators and anaphoric devices. One of the major goals of our project is to extend our understanding of such items/constructions to lesser-studied languages, and to assess the extent to which this range of uses is attested cross-linguistically.

Most of my past work has explored issues in the semantics and pragmatics of scalarity: degree comparatives, numerals and their modifiers, and more recently, scalar implicatures and Grice's nondetachability doctrine. I'm looking forward to my stay here at UC Berkeley...stop by some time and say hello!

Cheng, Clem recognized by the LSA

October 4, 2018

Fifth-year grad students Andrew Cheng and Emily Clem were each recognized by the LSA this week in connection with the upcoming annual meeting in New York City. Andrew was named a finalist for the Five-minute Linguist event, which features short, informative, engaging, and accessible talks about linguistics research on a variety of topics. Andrew's presentation is entitled Style-shifting, Bilingualism, and the Koreatown Accent. Emily has been named as the third place winner of this year's Student Abstract Award, recognizing "the three best abstracts submitted by a student for a paper or poster presentation at Annual Meeting". Emily's prize-winning abstract is entitledThe cyclic nature of Agree: Maximal projections as probes.

Congrats, Andrew and Emily!

Berkeley linguists @ LSA 2019

October 3, 2018

The program for this year's LSA annual meeting has been released, and Berkeley linguistics will be represented in 14 talks and posters (plus an organized session) by students, faculty, and very recent alumni:

Kenneth Baclawski Jr.: Optional wh-movement is discourse-connected movement in Eastern Cham Amalia Skilton and David Peeters (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics): Speaker and addressee in spatial deixis: new experimental evidence Zachary O'Hagan: Two Sorts of Contrastive Topic in Caquinte Emily Clem and Virginia Dawson: Feature sharing and functional heads in concord Noga Zaslavsky (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Karee Garvin, Charles Kemp (University of Melbourne), Naftali Tishby (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), and Terry Regier: Color-naming evolution and efficiency: The case of Nafaanra Susan Lin and Myriam Lapierre: Articulatory patterns in contrasting nasal-stop sequences in Panará John Merrill (PhD '18): Polarity rules in Kobiana consonant mutation Jesse Zymet: Learning lexical trends together with idiosyncrasy: MaxEnt versus the mixed logit Andrew Cheng: Style-shifting, Bilingualism, and the Koreatown Accent Emily Clem: The cyclic nature of Agree: Maximal projections as probes Nicholas Rolle (PhD '18): A cyclic account of a trigger-target asymmetry in concatenative vs. replacive tone Virginia Dawson: Disjunction scope can be lexically encoded: Evidence from Tiwa Tessa Scott: Cyclic linearization and the conjoint/disjoint alternation in Ndengeleko Martha Schwarz, Myriam Lapierre, Karee Garvin, and Sharon Inkelas: Representing Segment Strength: New Applications of Q Theory [in the special session on Inside Segments, organized by Myriam Lapierre, Karee Garvin, Martha Schwarz, Ryan Bennett, and Sharon Inkelas!]

Congrats all!

Berkeley semantics in Sinn und Bedeutung 21 proceedings

October 3, 2018

The Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 21 have just been published, containing four papers by faculty, students, and/or alumni:

Pranav Anand & Maziar Toosarvandani (Ph.D. 2010)
Unifying the canonical, historical, and play-by-play present. pdf Amy Rose Deal & Julia Nee
Bare nouns, number, and definiteness in Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec. pdf Peter Jenks, Andrew Koontz-Garboden, & Emmanuel-Moselly Makasso
On the lexical semantics of property concept nouns in Basaá. pdf Peter Sutton & Hana Filip (Ph.D 1993)
Restrictions on subkind coercion in object mass nouns. pdf

Congrats all!

Hyman festscrift published

October 3, 2018

Newly published with CSLI is the long-awaited volume Revealing Structure: Papers in Honor of Larry M. Hyman (eds. Eugene Buckley, Thera Crane and Jeff Good)! The book features numerous contributions by alumni, faculty, emeriti, and former visiting scholars, including:

Jeff Good (Ph.D. 2003), Eugene Buckley (Ph.D. 1992) & Thera Crane (Ph.D. 2011): Revealing Structure in Languages and Grammar Jean-Marie Hombert (PhD 1975) and Rebecca Grollemund: Phylogenetic Classification of Grassfields Languages Sharon Inkelas: Overexponence and Underexponence in Morphology Joyce T. Mathangwane (Ph.D. 1996): On Tones in Chisubiya (Chiikuhane) Johanna Nichols: A Direct/Inverse Subsystem in Ingush Deictic Prefixes John J. Ohala: The Aerodynamic Voicing Constraint and its Phonological Implications Imelda I. Udoh (former visiting scholar): Compounding in Leggbó Alan C. L. Yu (Ph.D. 2003): Laryngeal Schizophrenia in Washo Resonants

Congrats, Larry, on the celebratory volume, and congrats to the editors and authors!

Conference double-header!

October 3, 2018

This weekend features two conferences at which Berkeley Linguistics will have a major presence, one each in the east and the west:

The Annual Meeting on Phonology, at UC San Diego, features work by faculty Larry Hyman and Jesse Zymet, along with alumni Nik Rolle (PhD 2018, now at Princeton), Hannah Sande (PhD 2017, now at Georgetown), Gabriela Caballero (PhD 2008, now at UCSD), Alan Yu (PhD 2003, now at Chicago), and Eugene Buckley (PhD 1992, now at Penn). NELS 49, at Cornell, features presentations by graduate students Emily Clem, Schuyler Laparle, and Tessa Scott, along with alum Maziar Toosarvandani (PhD 2010, now at UC Santa Cruz).

Congrats all!

A new kind of epistemic indefinite

Virginia Dawson
2018

Tiwa (Tibeto-Burman; India) has two series of epistemic indefinites: one whose epistemic effects arise via an anti-singleton constraint similar to Spanish algúun (Alonso-Ovalle and Menéndez-Benito, 2010), and another, wide-scope indefinite whose epistemic effects must be derived differently. I propose that for these latter indefinites, ignorance arises not through domain constraints, but as a result of their choice functional nature through competition with other indefinites. Tiwa’s wide scope indefinites then constitute a new kind of epistemic indefinite, showing that ignorance...

Dawson publishes in Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung

October 3, 2018

Congrats to fifth-year grad student Virginia Dawson, whose paper A new kind of epistemic indefinite was recently published in the Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 22!

Articulated Definiteness without Articles

Peter Jenks
2018

While it lacks a definite article, Mandarin makes a principled distinction between unique and anaphoric definites: unique definites are realized with a bare noun, and anaphoric definites are realized with a demonstrative, except in subject position. The following proposals account for these facts: (a) bare nouns achieve definite interpretations via a last-resort type-shifting operator ι, which has a unique definite meaning; (b) demonstratives can occur as anaphoric definites because they have a semantic argument beyond their nominal restriction that can be filled by an...